Critique of Magnifica Humanitas – Part 3
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 final in a three-part series, Tom explores the implications of AI on society. Read Part 1 and Part2.
Published June 16, 2026
By Tom Golway
VIII. Ecology and Interdependence
The encyclical’s brief engagement with integral ecology — connecting AI governance to care for our common home — is welcome but underdeveloped. The connection between AI and planetary stewardship isn’t incidental. It’s structural.
The same feedback dynamics that make AI transformative in economic and social systems are operative in Earth systems too — nonlinear interactions, delayed effects, cascading consequences. AI is increasingly embedded in climate modeling, precision agriculture, supply chain optimization, and resource allocation. Those applications cut both ways: they can amplify our capacity for planetary stewardship, or they can accelerate the extractive patterns driving ecological collapse, depending entirely on the value frameworks embedded in their design.
My own work on digital twins, precision medicine, and what I’ve called synthetic ecology suggests that AI’s most significant contribution here may be in enhancing our capacity to perceive and respond to complex system dynamics in real time — giving us cognitive tools adequate to the scale and speed of the problems we’ve created. But that requires a conception of AI governance that is ecologically embedded from the start, not just socially constrained after the fact.
The effects don’t unfold in isolation. They propagate across systems we didn’t expect to be connected, at timescales the encyclical’s current framework isn’t built to track.
AI can amplify our capacity for planetary stewardship, or it can accelerate the extractive patterns driving ecological collapse—depending entirely on the value frameworks embedded in its design. The effects don’t unfold in isolation. They propagate.
IX. Toward a Living Doctrine
If there’s a single shift that seems most necessary, it’s moving from thinking about AI primarily as a set of tools to thinking about it as a set of evolving systems, systems that are actively reshaping the conditions under which decisions get made.
That shift introduces a different kind of question. Not just what rules apply, but what dynamics those rules produce over time. Not just who controls the system, but how the system is changing the landscape of possible choices. It also makes clear that preserving human agency isn’t just a matter of principle. It’s a matter of architecture.
It also makes clear that preserving human agency isn’t just a matter of principle—it’s a matter of architecture. How a system is built determines what kinds of human judgment remain meaningful within it.
From the work I’ve been doing in generative dynamics and gain-of-function AI, three directions seem worth pressing:
A shift from tool-governance to systems-governance. Governing AI as a set of powerful artifacts, even value-laden ones, will consistently lag behind the phenomenon. We need frameworks designed around feedback loops, emergence, and temporal dynamics. Not just what rules apply, but what system dynamics those rules produce, and over what timescales.
A positive anthropology of AI augmentation. The encyclical’s call to “remain profoundly human” is right but incomplete. It needs a constructive counterpart, a concrete vision of how AI can amplify rather than diminish human judgment, creativity, moral imagination, and ecological wisdom. The gain-of-function framework is an attempt to supply that: AI designed to make the human more capable, not less necessary.
A generative commons doctrine. Extending the universal destination of goods to encompass not just data as a resource, but the feedback loops and learning dynamics that determine what AI systems become. This means institutional structures that give communities, educational institutions, and civil society genuine influence over what these systems internalize, not just how they’re deployed once the critical design decisions have already been made.
Leo XIV is right that AI “challenges the categories of Social Doctrine from within.” What’s needed now is the courage to follow that challenge to its conclusion — to build a living doctrine adequate to the living dynamics of complex systems.
Preserving human agency isn’t just a matter of principle. It’s a matter of architecture. How a system is built determines what kinds of human judgment remain meaningful within it.
X. Conclusion
Magnifica Humanitas is an important document. It’s serious, grounded, and trying to engage a genuinely difficult problem without retreating into either techno-optimism or reflexive resistance.
Pope Leo XIV reaches for Tolkien to counsel against fatalism — to remind us that the work of the present moment is to tend what is in front of us, to act faithfully in our own fields, to build a civilization of love through small and steadfast acts. That counsel is right, and it matters.
But it also feels like it’s standing at the edge of a deeper shift it doesn’t fully articulate — one that would require not just applying existing moral categories to new circumstances, but developing new categories adequate to the dynamics of complex, self-modifying systems.
What the Church’s social teaching has always been at its best is a living doctrine — one that develops in fidelity to its principles as the conditions of human life change. What AI demands is exactly that: not the application of existing categories to new circumstances, but the courage to develop new ones.
The question is not only how to evaluate these technologies in moral terms. It’s how to understand the processes through which they are already reshaping what those moral terms mean in practice. Leo XIV is right that AI “challenges the categories of Social Doctrine from within.” What’s needed now is the courage to follow that challenge to its conclusion.
The question is not only how to evaluate these technologies in moral terms. It’s how to understand the processes through which they are already reshaping what those moral terms mean in practice.
Read Part 1, Part 2, and 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.
Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1962.Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. University of Chicago Press. Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417–457.
