Pope wades into the great AI vs employment debate

There are not many documents that a New Zealand HR manager would be expected to read in the same week as the latest Fair Employment ruling and the latest payroll compliance update. Magnifica Humanitas may be the exception. Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, released on 25 May 2026, is a 42,300-word examination of what artificial intelligence is doing to human workers, human dignity and human society – and it is addressed, explicitly, to "all people of goodwill," not just the Catholic faithful.

Its practical implications, it turns out, are considerable.

The pontiff – the first American to hold the office, who took the name Leo as a deliberate echo of the 19th-century pope who championed workers' rights during the first Industrial Revolution – signed the document on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum.

That 1891 encyclical had shaped the modern concept of the fair wage and the right to organise. Its 2026 successor makes an analogous claim about the age of AI: that without moral and regulatory guardrails, the technology will deepen inequality, erode human dignity and reduce workers to what the Pope calls "cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency."

What the data shows

New Zealand is not immune to the forces Leo is describing. A recent HRD New Zealand analysis has flagged the rapid embedding of AI across the hiring lifecycle – from CV screening to AI-conducted video interviews – and the complex legal questions this raises for employers. Simpson Grierson's employment partner Rachael Judge and AI and technology senior associate Michelle Dunlop note that AI does not change an employer's underlying legal obligations: whatever a tool decides, the employer is accountable for the outcome.

Globally, the picture is sobering. The World Economic Forum estimates between 85 and 92 million jobs will be displaced globally by 2030. Goldman Sachs puts the likely proportion of the US workforce eventually affected at 6 to 7%, with comparable effects in similarly structured economies. The Mercer Global Talent Trends 2026 survey of nearly 12,000 executives and HR leaders worldwide found that employee concern about AI-driven job loss has surged from 28% in 2024 to 40% in 2026.

The moral framework

Leo's framing of the choice humanity faces with AI is built around two biblical images that translate surprisingly well into the vernacular of workforce strategy. The Tower of Babel – top-down, homogenising, efficiency-obsessed, stripped of accountability – and the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah – collaborative, distributed, human-scale, community-owned.

"The primary choice," the Pope writes, "is not between a 'yes' or 'no' to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem."

For HR professionals, the Babel syndrome the encyclical describes – "the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralises differences, and the pretence that a single language – even a digital one – can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance" – has a very practical translation. It is the adoption of AI hiring tools that encode historical bias. It is performance management systems that surveil workers without their meaningful consent. It is the reduction of a career to a skills matrix. It is the promise that a chatbot can replace a line manager.

The accountability gap

One of the encyclical's most pointed passages concerns what happens when algorithmic systems make consequential decisions without clear human accountability. When an AI system selects who is "worthy or not, without anyone bearing responsibility for that judgment," Leo writes, "political responsibility is also lost." Injustice goes unnoticed. Compassion and mercy "gradually disappear from view."

For New Zealand employers, this is not a hypothetical. AI is now being used in recruitment, and as HRD New Zealand has reported, major employers including Spark New Zealand are already deploying AI smart interviewers for early-stage shortlisting. The legal framework for managing those decisions – around bias, fairness, disclosure – is still catching up. HR professionals who wait for legislation to tell them what responsible practice looks like may find themselves already having caused the harm the legislation was designed to prevent.

The Pope calls for "robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility." That is a description of where New Zealand workplace regulation needs to go. HR leaders can either wait for regulators to get there, or help shape the pathway.

Christopher Olah of Anthropic, who appeared beside the Pope in Rome, was frank 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 conclusion 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 churches, in regulatory bodies, and in HR teams, that is precisely the role being called for.