Critique of Magnifica Humanitas – Part 1
Toward a Living Doctrine for Complex Adaptive AI Systems
Longstanding Academy member Tom Golway is an American technologist, author, and systems theorist known for his work in emerging technologies such as AI, blockchain, and distributed systems. He writes and speaks on innovation, complex systems, and the ethical and societal impacts of technology, with a strong focus on ethics in STEM and responsible, human-centered development. In this extended reflection on Pope Leo’s recent encyclical, the first in a three-part series, Tom explores the implications of AI on society.
Published June 2, 2026
By Tom Golway
I. An Honest Appreciation
Magnifica Humanitas is a serious and ambitious document. It treats artificial intelligence as a real historical force, not a passing trend, and attempts to respond at something like the right scale. That alone sets it apart from most contemporary commentary, which either overstates or underestimates what is happening.
The encyclical’s extension of subsidiarity to algorithmic systems is genuinely novel. Its recognition that data and platforms belong to the “universal destination of goods”—and its frank accounting of how private, transnational actors now exercise power that surpasses many governments—are contributions that mainstream political philosophy has been slow to absorb.
There is a sentence in paragraph 213 that is worth pausing on. Leo XIV quotes Tolkien directly — Gandalf, speaking to Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli in “The Last Debate,” counseling them against despair as they face forces larger than any individual:
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, “The Last Debate”
The Pope reaches for this as a pastoral counsel against fatalism — a reminder that the civilization of love is built through small and steadfast acts rather than spectacular gestures. It is the right instinct. What it still needs is a structural account of what those faithful acts are up against.
The Pope reaches for this as a pastoral counsel against fatalism — a reminder that the civilization of love is built through small and steadfast acts rather than spectacular gestures. It is the right instinct. What it still needs is a structural account of what those faithful acts are up against.
I should say at the outset that I’m not reading this as an outside observer. A lot of my own work has been trying to understand how complex systems behave when they begin to generate their own conditions, what I’ve sometimes described, maybe a little loosely, as generative dynamics. So, I’m approaching this document with that particular question already in mind.
And that’s where the hesitation starts to creep in. The document’s moral instincts are mostly sound. What’s missing is a sufficiently dynamic account of what these technologies are actually doing—an account thick enough to support the governance it recommends.
Not because the moral concerns are misplaced—they generally aren’t—but because the account of what is actually happening feels thinner than the problem requires.
II. The Problem with Babel
The encyclical frames the present moment through the contrast between Babel and Jerusalem. It’s a powerful image, and I understand why it carries so much weight here. But I’m not entirely convinced it captures the structure of the situation.
The framing suggests a choice, fragmentation or communion. But the systems in question don’t seem to behave like that. They tend to produce both outcomes simultaneously, often through the same mechanisms. You can see this most clearly in digital networks. They broaden connection while narrowing attention. They open participation while concentrating influence. These aren’t competing trajectories. They’re coupled effects, the signature behavior of nonlinear systems operating across multiple feedback loops at once.
That’s part of what makes the situation genuinely harder to govern than the encyclical’s framework suggests. It’s not just about choosing the right values. It’s about understanding how feedback, amplification, and scale interact in ways that don’t reduce cleanly to intention.
The Tower of Babel was not a failure of intention. It was a failure to anticipate the emergent properties of collective action at scale. The encyclical implicitly invokes this structural wisdom but doesn’t name it. Naming it matters, because without a vocabulary for emergence, feedback, and nonlinearity, even the most morally serious guidance will be outpaced by the phenomena it seeks to govern.
What I’ve called generative dynamics isn’t a formal theory so much as a way of noticing how systems produce the conditions they then operate within, and how that recursive quality changes what governance needs to be.
They expand connection while narrowing attention. They democratize participation while concentrating influence. These aren’t competing trajectories. They’re coupled effects.
III. Technology Is Never Neutral—But Also Not Still
The encyclical repeats, rightly, that technology is never neutral. But it still tends to treat technology as something relatively stable, a set of artifacts shaped by human inputs at a given moment.
What seems missing is a stronger sense of how these systems evolve. They don’t just reflect values at a single point in time. They participate in ongoing loops. You can see this most clearly when you watch how a recommendation system reshapes the very preferences it was designed to serve. Outputs become inputs. Behavior becomes data, which reshapes future behavior. The system doesn’t sit still long enough to be governed in a purely external way.
This is close to what Whitehead was pointing at, the idea that no entity is simply a static substance. Every actual occasion is a prehension of what came before, a creative synthesis that then becomes a datum for everything that follows. AI systems aren’t tools in the hammer-and-nail sense. They’re nodes in an ongoing process of world-making, each interaction subtly reshaping the epistemic and social landscape in which the next interaction occurs.
If that’s right, then governing AI primarily through after-the-fact regulation, the dominant proposal in most frameworks, including this one, will always arrive late. By the time a rule is in place, the landscape it was meant to govern has already shifted. What’s needed instead are interventions embedded in the design process itself: structural constraints on feedback loops, transparency that operates at the level of system dynamics rather than individual outputs, and architectures that distribute the power to shape emergent trajectories before they solidify.
By the time a rule is in place, the landscape has already shifted. What’s needed are interventions embedded in the design process itself—not oversight of outcomes, but governance of the dynamics that produce them.
Part 2 will be published on June 9 and Part 3 will be published on June 16. Read more from Tom Golway on his blog.
References and Further Reading
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Return of the King. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955.
Leo XIV. (2026). Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Golway, T. (2025). Epistemology in the Age of AI: Rethinking Knowledge, Polymathy, and Human Cognition. White Paper on the Epistemological Boundaries of Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Human Cognitive Augmentation.
Golway, Tom. (2025). The Pantheistic Fallacy: Why Machines Cannot Become Everything. SSRN.
Golway, Tom. (2025). The cognitive boundary of AI: Why human judgment remains irreplaceable. SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6154769
Golway, Tom. (2024). Human gain-of-function: How AI expands, rather than replaces, human capability. SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5554819
Golway, Tom. (forthcoming 2026). Generative Dynamics: The New Science of How Complex Systems Transform, Create, and Transcend.
Golway, Tom. (2026). Toward a Mathematics of Living Systems.
Golway, Tom. (2026). The One Algorithm: What Tolkien’s Ring Tells Us About AI as Moral Amplifier.
Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.
Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and reality: An essay in cosmology. Macmillan.
Searle, J.R. Minds, Brains, and Programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 1980.
Dreyfus, H.L. What Computers Cannot Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Harper & Row, 1972.
Dreyfus, H. L., & Dreyfus, S. E. (1986). “Mind over machine: The power of human intuition and expertise in the era of the computer.” Free Press.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.
Wilson, E. O. (1998). Consilience: The unity of knowledge. Knopf.
