Pope Leo XIV invokes Tolkien to warn tech billionaires against AI-driven authoritarianism

Pope Leo XIV cited J.R.R. Tolkien and a quote from the wizard Gandalf in his encyclical 'Magnifica humanitas,' released Monday, which addresses 'safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.'

Leo warned of 'the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm' capable of 'reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency,' and compared the rise of AI to the Industrial Revolution spanning the mid-18th century to the beginning of the 20th.

The encyclical appears to critique tech billionaires including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, whose interpretations of Tolkien's mythology—Thiel naming his data analytics firm Palantir after a spying device and Musk reading the narrative as anti-immigration—contradict Tolkien's own critique of militarization and industrialization.