{"id":48982,"date":"2026-07-02T13:09:03","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T20:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=48982"},"modified":"2026-07-02T13:09:04","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T20:09:04","slug":"what-the-popes-encyclical-on-ai-means-for-the-city-building-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2026\/07\/02\/what-the-popes-encyclical-on-ai-means-for-the-city-building-it\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Pope&#8217;s encyclical on AI means for the city building it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sfexaminer.com\/users\/profile\/Ali%20Wunderman\">By Ali Wunderman | Special to The Examiner<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Jul 1, 2026 (SFExaminer.com)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com\/sfexaminer.com\/content\/tncms\/assets\/v3\/editorial\/9\/6b\/96b5bb52-da6d-45d2-bb3f-4a152e62b146\/6a4490842cc95.image.jpg?resize=400%2C267\" alt=\"Vatican Pope Encyclical\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Pope Leo XIV, center, speaks with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah, right, and theologian Anna Rowlands on May 25 during the presentation of his first encyclical.Alessandra Tarantino\/Associated Press<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>On the morning of May 25, Pope Leo XIV released \u201cMagnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,\u201d his sweeping first encyclical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By 5 a.m., Dr. Mark Shiffman, a professor of philosophy at Saint Patrick\u2019s Seminary in Menlo Park and the founding director of the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics, was already awake and reading it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In San Francisco, he wasn\u2019t alone. I\u2019ve spent the last month in conversation about this document and the questions swirling around it \u2014 most notably, what AI means for our humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What I\u2019ve found is a faith community that was already deep in this discussion before the encyclical landed \u2014 and a city with a particular reason to take it seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>San Francisco has always been a city of believers. It was built around missions, shaped by parishes, its hills dotted with steeples. It attracted the optimistic toting nothing more than gold pans and hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Eventually, tech became the dominant faith, with its own missionaries and orthodoxies \u2014 and its own conviction that this time, we\u2019ve found the thing that will save us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now the actual Catholic Church has something to say about that \u2014 and people here are listening differently than they might anywhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Eleven of the country\u2019s top 20 AI companies are headquartered in The City. The people building this technology drop their kids off at our preschools, drive our streets, fill our pews. When the Pope speaks about AI, San Francisco is the room where it\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThis is a unifying issue where we have this responsibility to speak out because we are talking about the nature of humanity,\u201d said Michael Pappas, the executive director of the San Francisco Interfaith Council.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What\u2019s striking, when talking to faith leaders across traditions, is how long they\u2019ve already been having this conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rabbi Sarah Parris of Congregation Emanu-El preached about AI at High Holidays three years ago. Her commute to temple along Stanyan, regularly snarled by Cruise vehicles navigating their training routes, had become its own philosophical provocation. What does it mean to share a road with something that drives \u201cperfectly,\u201d yet somehow wrong?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now she\u2019s planning a full conference at Emanu-El in January: sessions on AI and Jewish ethics, AI and medicine, and AI and online antisemitism, with space built in for congregants who work in tech to actually talk to each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cNo single person can answer these ethical questions,\u201d Parris told me. \u201cIt is only by being in conversation and in community, with the right ethical text in front of you, that progress can be made.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That\u2019s what the encyclical clarified, even for those already engaged. Shiffman described it as giving people a map. Before \u201cMagnifica Humanitas,\u201d graduate students wanting to explore the implications of AI on warfare couldn\u2019t find their footing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cNow people know: Of I want to address this question, I\u2019m either agreeing with this or disagreeing with this, or pushing it forward,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Ex \/\/ Top Stories<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sfexaminer.com\/news\/public-health\/sf-health-clinics-count-down-the-days-until-the-doors-close\/article_0ff5cc0d-de87-477e-ace7-aaeb6b292cd2.html#tncms-source=top-stories-article\">Trio of SF health clinics facing closure due to city\u2019s budget cuts<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Three facilities that serve youths and seniors are slated for closure if the proposed budget is finalized<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sfexaminer.com\/news\/community\/fourth-of-july-2026-sf-fireworks-show-festivals-parties\/article_85404b13-3aa6-447c-a889-355177458159.html#tncms-source=top-stories-article\">Eight events to commemorate American independence for the Fourth of July<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>In honor of the country\u2019s 250th anniversary, The City will launch fireworks from the Golden Gate Bridge, host block parties and stage a two-day jazz festival<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sfexaminer.com\/culture\/visual-arts\/sfmoma-and-moad-host-film-series-to-honor-african-diaspora\/article_a2813855-03a1-4389-b424-08813673e5b4.html#tncms-source=top-stories-article\">Monthlong SF film series is a showcase of African diaspora<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Taking place across two art museums, &#8220;Limitless&#8221; will bring guest speakers to The City for engaging conversations<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That guidance from the Vatican is welcomed by teachers having to adapt quickly to how AI is shaping young minds. Sharon McCarthy Allen, the principal at St. Stephen School, described AI as a blessing and a curse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe have to be sure that we are upholding the dignity of each human being, specifically when it comes to our children and educating them,\u201d she said. \u201cAI is not going to help them with critical-thinking skills. We don\u2019t want AI to take away their creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not everyone in the pews is on board with that framing. At a tech industry party in the weeks after the encyclical\u2019s release, I found myself in conversation with a practicing Catholic who works in AI, someone whose faith and professional life sit in direct proximity to everything the Pope was writing about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>His read: Leo got it wrong. AI, he told me emphatically, is going to solve everything. Suffering itself would become optional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I asked whether he\u2019d read Aldous Huxley\u2019s \u201cBrave New World.\u201d He had not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It felt like a parable of the moment \u2014 the gap between the people building this technology and the centuries of moral philosophy that exist specifically to ask what we lose when we eliminate struggle, imperfection and the friction of being human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That question is exactly what Shiffman and his colleagues are trained for, and what Parris explored in her 2023 sermon, drawing on Jewish tradition\u2019s insight that imperfection isn\u2019t a bug in the human design, it\u2019s a feature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThere is value in the learning, growing, and changing that we all do each day,\u201d she said during the sermon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the Vatican ceremony, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah made a striking admission: that AI labs, including his own, operate inside incentives that sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cNo matter how sincerely any of us intend to do the right thing \u2014 and I believe many of us do \u2014 we will always be influenced by those incentives,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He invited external moral pressure \u2014 voices the market can\u2019t bend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>San Francisco\u2019s faith communities are volunteering for exactly that. Sometimes this city ships things before they\u2019re fully baked. The implications of AI, however, might be too consequential to accommodate that startup worldview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe question isn\u2019t about what AI takes away from humanity by doing it better than we do,\u201d Parris said in 2023. \u201cThe question is about how we can continue to be who we are alongside AI.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Fourth-generation San Franciscan Ali Wunderman is an award-winning travel, food and culture writer. She lives in Nob Hill with her two rescue dogs and can often be found at John\u2019s Grill enjoying a dirty martini.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On the morning of May 25, Pope Leo XIV released \u201cMagnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,\u201d his sweeping first encyclical. By 5 a.m., Dr. Mark Shiffman, a professor of philosophy at Saint Patrick\u2019s Seminary in Menlo Park and the founding director of the&#8230; <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2026\/07\/02\/what-the-popes-encyclical-on-ai-means-for-the-city-building-it\/\"> Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr; <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2030],"tags":[490,2140],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48982"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48982"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48986,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48982\/revisions\/48986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}