Former UK prime minister Tony Blair and Pope Leo XIV have led the world of commentary recently by publishing two grand essays on the state of AI and geopolitics.
Their collective impact has been to raise the profile of a form of argumentation that is antithetical to the social media era. The length of the masterworks – at 5,000 and 42,000 words, respectively – is designed to provide a cornerstone argument for the evolving drivers shaping our world.
Mr Blair’s work set off a flurry of responses in the UK where some ambitious political figures provided 1,000-word counterpoints. This then saw Mr Blair issue a lengthy follow-up piece in a weekend newspaper.
As for Pope Leo’s intervention, the papal encyclical has a long tradition of providing commentary on important subject matters. This gives the current pontiff a chance to refer to the works of his predecessors throughout the papal document. He steadily builds his arguments throughout his inquisition into AI and its impact by pointing to the legacy and workings of the documents from the Vatican that have gone before.
This makes Pope Leo’s work both an internal debate and a contribution to the world. He is explicit about this in the encyclical, in which he talks about the workings of the state and the church as separate considerations.
Mr Blair’s work is also internal and external in that his primary audience is the membership of the Britain’s governing Labour Party. His overall vision pertains to the consequences of technological change on the country.
Key paragraphs from both works sit alongside each other well, and it is worth quoting from both. Pope Leo writes: “The power and prevalence of emerging technologies are interwoven into the fabric of daily life, shaping decision-making processes and deeply affecting the collective imagination: Never has humanity had such power over itself.”
Meanwhile, the former British leader has an equally far-reaching summary: “Developments in artificial intelligence … will change everything. I mean everything. There is no point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or bad thing. Just know it is a ‘thing’. In fact, it is ‘the thing’. It will displace jobs, though creating new ones, but no one yet knows the full consequence. Companies and countries will rise or fall on the back of it. It will revolutionise the private sector and should in time revolutionise public services and government.”
The responses to the two men’s contributions to public attitudes have been variously to pick holes in what is judged most important in shaping the future or to find a hidden hand. Some of this finger-pointing has been specifically directed at the technology giants.
“Anthropic’s alliance with Pope on AI harms: all in good faith or ‘Vatican-washing?’,” was the headline in The Guardian. This was because the event at which Pope Leo delivered his Magnifica Humanitas encyclical was attended by Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah.
Silicon Valley stalked the landscape that both men sought to depict and then became the tool that the sceptics reached for to undermine the central arguments. Anthropic’s refusal to lift restrictions on how the US Department of Defence could use its AI model, Claude, has given the company a special cache in developing the intelligence science while maintaining an ultimate human element.
Meanwhile, Mr Blair was depicted in one cartoon with the logos of Silicon Valley sponsors. This triggered a defence of the message in his weekend rebuttal. “The reason I think we’re living through a 21st-century technological revolution led by AI is not because my institute has been bought off by tech bros, but because I am studying what is happening and it’s blowing my mind in its implications,” he said.
Keir Starmer, the current UK Prime Minister, was found wanting in Mr Blair’s intervention. He disputed the charge that he lacked the epochal drive to push the country through change. His own essay, published on Substack, reminded Mr Blair that he had won an election to stop a national spiral of decline.
“A ‘doom-loop’ so fiendish that escape was utterly inconceivable. Higher investment in public services, we were told, could not be achieved without risking the health of the public finances or throttling economic growth. Significantly reducing immigration was equally impossible without much the same effect,” Mr Starmer wrote.
The pretenders to the Prime Minister’s job did not come well out of it either.
Mr Blair said Labour is playing with fire by having a leadership contest without having worked through what its future offering to the public will be. “Trying to force the Prime Minister out before we know what policy direction we’re bringing in, is not a serious way of conducting ourselves,” Mr Blair’s missive said.
In an article published in The Times of London, Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham, who is the chief contender in the extended race to succeed Mr Starmer, said that Mr Blair failed on the single biggest issue that the governing party must address – inequality in politics.
More than any stump speech or Twitter rant or Truth Social post, it is the essays from Mr Blair and Pope Leo that will stand as reference points to understand where humanity is headed. This is because, in Pope Leo’s words, they demonstrate the power of “discernment” in a time of rapid change.
