Pope wades into the great AI vs employment debate

When Pope Leo XIV chose the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum to sign his first encyclical, he was making a deliberate and pointed historical argument. That 1891 document – written by his papal namesake, Leo XIII – had been the Church's response to the brutalising conditions of the first Industrial Revolution, demanding protections for workers against the unchecked power of industrial capital.

Magnifica Humanitas, released on Monday the 25th of May, 2026, is its 21st-century successor: 42,300 words of moral reckoning with artificial intelligence and what it is doing to workers, families and human dignity across the globe.

For Australian HR professionals, the encyclical arrives at a moment of particular institutional intensity. Australia has been urged to act now on workplace AI before rules become unworkable, according to HRD Australia, with the Albanese government's tripartite AI forum meeting in recent weeks to examine how existing workplace frameworks should respond to the technology's rapid spread.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions has called for mandatory "AI Implementation Agreements." The Productivity Commission has warned of a "'painful' transition." And Workplace Relations Minister Amanda Rishworth has convened government, business and unions to find a path through.

The Pope would recognise this moment. It is, he writes, a "change of era" – one that demands shared discernment rather than passive reception.

The economic reality

Leo describes mass unemployment caused by digital innovation as "a true social calamity." His language is deliberately calibrated to industrial-age memory: he is reaching back to the era when unregulated capitalism first threatened to reduce workers to commodities, and drawing a direct line to now.

A recent HRD Australia analysis found that employee concern about job loss due to AI has surged from 28% in 2024 to 40% in 2026, based on a Mercer Global Talent Trends survey of nearly 12,000 executives and HR leaders worldwide.

Separately, a survey of Australian senior executives and HR personnel found that 100% of HR managers believed their organisation would reduce headcount due to AI within two years, with 60% believing that one in five jobs would be lost.

The IMF estimates around 60% of jobs in advanced economies will be significantly affected by AI – with the risk being not mass unemployment, as HRD Australia has reported, but polarisation: a widening divide between roles that AI augments and roles it eliminates.

Babel in the boardroom

Leo's central metaphor is a choice between two building projects from the Hebrew scriptures. The Tower of Babel – grandiose, centralised, driven by pride, and ultimately catastrophic – against the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, a distributed, communal, human-scale endeavour in which every family had their section of wall to rebuild.

The parallel to the current AI moment is clear enough. The Pope is not anti-technology – he states plainly that "technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity." But he insists that technology is never neutral, because it "takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it." When those who devise, finance and regulate it are a small number of private transnational actors with resources exceeding those of many governments, the question of for whom the technology is built becomes acute.

The Australian government has been moving to rein in workplace AI, with early data suggesting that while mass unemployment has not yet materialised, there is a "slight softening" in the growth rate for occupations most exposed to AI. The fair work implications of AI-assisted hiring and performance management are already before tribunals. One recent case even featured an employment submission that the Commission flagged as potentially AI-generated.

The HR professional's mandate

The encyclical calls for "robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility." It does not exempt employers from that obligation. When AI systems influence employment decisions – hiring, promotion, redundancy – someone must bear accountability for those decisions. The Pope calls this "accountability": the capacity to identify who must explain, monitor and, if necessary, remedy the harm caused.

Navigating the evolving landscape of AI regulation in Australian workplaces requires HR teams to act now, as Kingston Reid's Alice DeBoos and Jessica Tinsley have argued in HRD Australia. Employers who understand both the current legal framework and the likely direction of future reforms will be better placed to maintain the trust needed for successful AI adoption. Just because AI makes a decision, as report co-author Dominic Meagher has put it, "doesn't mean that it's an excuse for the company to sidestep their obligations."

Leo would concur. For him, the obligation is not merely legal but moral. The dignity of work – its role as "a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment" – cannot be reduced to a line item in an efficiency calculation.

Christopher Olah, the Anthropic co-founder who appeared alongside the Pope at the Vatican, was direct about his own industry's limitations. Every frontier AI lab, he said, including Anthropic, "operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing." His appeal was unambiguous: "If we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives – people who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend."

In the Australian context, those critics include not only the Church, but unions, regulators, and the HR professionals who will ultimately decide how these technologies are implemented on the ground.