Magnifica Humanitas or human vulnerability in the age of AI

The big question of our time may no longer be whether machines will come to think like us. The real question is another: whether we will continue to understand what it means to be human.

The recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas of Leo XIV has been rightly presented as the great document of the Magisterium on artificial intelligence. However, a closer reading reveals something even more profound: the true center of the text is not technology, but the anthropological question that lies behind it.

The decisive question of the encyclical is not only what artificial intelligence can do, but what idea of humanity we are beginning to assume in a culture dominated by technological logic.

And precisely there emerges one of the most original and provocative intuitions of the document: the philosophical and spiritual rehabilitation of human vulnerability.

Because the problem of our time is perhaps not only that technology can dehumanize us. The deeper problem is that we are beginning to regard humanity itself - at least in its vulnerable dimension - as something that should be overcome.

The dream of a humanity without limits

Much of contemporary culture interprets the limit as a failure. Illness, suffering, old age, dependence or fragility easily appear as negative realities that must be corrected as soon as possible.

It is no coincidence that today we live surrounded by languages obsessed with permanent optimization: improving performance, maximizing efficiency, eliminating vulnerability, controlling one's own body, avoiding any form of dependence. Even daily fatigue seems to have become almost morally suspect.

In this context, technology is presented as a promise of liberation: more control over one's own life and destiny, more efficiency for our work, more autonomy for our desires, less need for others. The dominant cultural horizon seems to push us towards an increasingly less vulnerable humanity.

This is why this statement by Magnifica Humanitas:

“Everything that represents a ‘limit’ - disability, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability - tends to be read primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a space in which the human being matures and opens up to relationship. Instead, we must remember that the human being does not flourish in spite of the limit, but often through the limit” (Magnifica Humanitas, n. 118).

These words contain an authentic anthropological critique of late modernity.

For the encyclical does not simply call for care for the vulnerable. Nor does it present frailty only as a moral problem that demands compassion. It goes much further: it affirms that the limit can be a place of truth about the human being. And this completely changes our view of vulnerability.

Vulnerability is no accident

For centuries, much of modern thought has identified human fulfillment with self-sufficiency. The dominant ideal has been the autonomous individual, capable of building himself without radical dependence on others.

Artificial intelligence and the transhumanist imaginary seem to radicalize this logic. The body appears as something that can be optimized, dependence is shown as a deficiency, and fragility is seen as a limitation that technology will eventually neutralize.

However, Magnifica Humanitas proposes a different anthropology. Human beings are not fully human when they cease to need others, but precisely when they recognize that their lives are woven of relationships, care and mutual dependence.

In one of the most important passages of the document, Leo XIV warns against: “the risk of dehumanization - building the future by excluding God and reducing the other to a means” (Magnifica Humanitas, n. 10).

The phrase is especially lucid because it identifies the real danger of the technocratic paradigm: not only to produce more powerful machines, but to end up interpreting the human being from purely functional criteria. And this is happening every day without us realizing it.

When efficiency becomes the dominant value, inevitably some lives begin to seem less valuable. The very place of those who are unproductive, dependent, elderly or frail, of those who do not respond to the logic of performance, is called into question. Little by little, vulnerability ceases to be a shared human experience and becomes something to be hidden, minimized or even eliminated.

The problem is no longer just technological. It is cultural and deeply spiritual. Contemporary technology not only wants to help us live better, it is also beginning to redefine, little by little, what it means to live humanly.

Babel or Jerusalem

All the encyclical is structured on a great symbolic opposition: Babel and Jerusalem.

Babel represents the pretension of self-sufficiency, the dream of a humanity that wants to reach heaven through its own power. A civilization fascinated by uniformity, domination and control: a closure in the desire for power that ends up making everything manipulable.

Jerusalem, on the other hand, symbolizes something very different: a community that rebuilds itself from cooperation, shared responsibility and recognition of its own limits, an openness to the transcendence of love that leads to God.

This is why the image of Nehemiah rebuilding the city is so significant. Leo XIV emphasizes that he does not impose solutions from above, but calls everyone together, listens, coordinates efforts and makes a common work possible.

True human reconstruction is not born of absolute power, but of recognized interdependence.

And perhaps this is where one of the most profound intuitions of the encyclical appears: the great contemporary challenge does not consist in choosing between technology and anti-technology. The real choice is another: to build a new technocratic Babel or to rebuild Jerusalem, that is, a human coexistence capable of recognizing the value of limits, mutual care and openness to a truth that transcends the human being himself.

Vulnerability as resistance

Perhaps this is where the most provocative contribution of Magnifica Humanitas.

In a culture obsessed with permanent optimization, accepting vulnerability becomes almost an act of anthropological resistance. Resistance to a logic of performance that measures the value of people according to their productivity, to the growing commodification of human life, to the illusion of absolute self-sufficiency that dominates much of the contemporary imaginary and, finally, to a culture that ends up interpreting all dependence as a form of failure.

The encyclical does not idealize suffering or glorify precariousness. What it affirms is something much more profound: that human frailty can open up spaces of humanity that a purely technical logic can never produce.

Only those who recognize that they need others can truly learn solidarity. Only those who experience limits can discover the importance of care. Only those who stop thinking of themselves as absolutely self-sufficient can open themselves to gratuitousness, friendship and mercy.

This is why Leo XIV insists: “No single hand is sufficient to bear the weight of the challenges facing the world” (Magnifica Humanitas, n. 13).

Basically, the encyclical recalls something that our culture had begun to forget: we do not flourish by eliminating all dependence, but by learning to humanely inhabit our vulnerable condition.

Remaining human

Perhaps the time has also come to stop identifying the worst in us with what we call “all too human,” an expression that still carries with it certain reductive echoes of modernity. We often use it to refer to meanness, moral weakness or banality. And yet, the deepest intuition of Magnifica Humanitas seems to point in the opposite direction: what is most fully human - the capacity to care, to love, to recognize one's own limits and to open oneself to others - does not distance us from God, but can lead us precisely to Him.

For this reason, the deepest claim of Magnifica Humanitas is probably condensed in one of the most important phrases of the current social Magisterium: “We have an urgent duty to remain profoundly human” (Magnifica Humanitas, n. 15).

The phrase is striking because it points exactly to the basic problem of our time. The real risk is not only that machines become more and more like us. The risk is that we ourselves end up accepting an idea of humanity that is more and more like a machine: efficient, calculable, optimizable, incapable of assuming the limit.

In the face of this, Leo XIV proposes to recover an elementary and radical truth, affirming that vulnerability is not a deficiency to be abolished by technology, but a constitutive dimension of human life. For, although the realization of the good is not necessarily at odds with power in this world, it can never arise solely from it, but from a deeper truth about the human being: that of a life that needs to be cared for, welcomed and loved.

And perhaps it is precisely there -in the capacity to care, to depend, to suffer with others and to love from fragility- that which is most profoundly human and which no artificial intelligence will ever be able to replace.