AI industry contemplates super intelligence, the singularity… and end times

AI’s advocates talk up the technology as a force that could transform humanity. The Vatican does not see progress, but a troubling new creed.

Much has changed since the 13th century – for one thing the Inquisition, the Catholic Church’s institution responsible for identifying and rooting out heresy, has evolved into the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. In January 2025, together with the Dicastery for Culture and Education, it published a doctrinal note on the relationship between artificial and human intelligence titled ‘Antiqua et Nova’. These dicasteries are two of the 16 departments at the heart of the Roman Curia, the Church’s central administrative body. Whether or not the Vatican sees AI as a competitor in the market for salvation services, its interest has certainly been piqued.

‘Antiqua et Nova’ offers a detailed, well-informed analysis of recent developments in AI and their potential consequences for all aspects of human life: education, personal relationships, cognitive ability, representation of truth, health, warfare and even economic inequality and digital surveillance. The Vatican criticises ‘the concentration of the power over mainstream AI applications in the hands of a few powerful companies’ and worries about ‘forms of control as subtle as they are invasive’. ‘Antiqua et Nova’ is particularly critical of techno-utopianism, which ‘perceives all the world’s problems as solvable through technological means alone’; it affirms that ‘all scientific and technological achievements are, ultimately, gifts from God.’ This entails subordinating them to a ‘higher purpose’, defined by the Church, and raises the question of ‘how AI can be understood within God’s plan’.

This isn’t the first time the Church has confronted questions about new technology; there have always been progressives within its ranks. But in the modern era the Vatican has been characterised by its opposition to particular technologies for various reasons: against nuclear weapons in the name of world peace, and against contraception as a way of controlling people’s bodies. Some compare AI to (…)

Full article: 1 208 words.

Zako Sapey-Triomphe

Zako Sapey-Triomphe is an engineer.

(1) Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education, ‘Antiqua et Nova: Note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence’, 14 January 2025, www.vatican.va/.

(2) Brian Patrick Green, ‘The Catholic Church and technological progress: Past, present, and future’, Religions, MDPI, Basel, vol 8, no 6, 2017.

(3) Greg Epstein, ‘Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI looks a lot like religion’, The MIT Press Reader, 22 November 2024, thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/.

(4) Johana Bhuiyan, Dara Kerr and Nick Robins-Early, ‘Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist’, Guardian, London, 10 October 2025.

(5) Lauren Jackson, ‘Finding God in the App Store’, New York Times, 14 September 2025.

(6) Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Secker & Warburg, London, 1957.