AI is impacting all kinds of jobs, whether you’re a software engineer or the Pope.
The newly-crowned Pope has indicated that AI influenced the choice of his name. Robert Francis Prevost was chosen as the Pope and the leader of the global Catholic Church two days ago. As per Papal tradition, he chose a name different from his own after becoming Pope — Prevost said that his Papal name would be Leo XIV. But he said that the recent developments in AI played a part in choosing that particular name.
“I chose to take the name Leo XIV,” the newly-crowned Pope said. “There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour,” he added.
Prevost’s choice of Leo XIV seemed to be influenced by how the previous Pope in the Leo series — Leo XIII — had addressed the question of the industrial revolution. Leo XIII been Pope from 1878 to 1903, and had seen the massive changes resulting from the industrial revolution. Prevost says that his term — he’s just 69 — would likely come at a time of great change in the world because of the upcoming AI revolution, and his pick of the Leo XIV name was a hat-tip to the Pope who’d seen another great technical revolution two centuries ago. Some people say that AI might be getting overhyped, but when Popes start naming themselves over how AI will transform society, one gets the feeling that the hype might be justified after all.