On Pope Leo XIV's critique of artificial intelligence, the internet as umbilical cord, and why the cord does not determine the outcome — the person holding it does.

When Pope Leo XIV posted to X earlier this week, the response was predictable: technologists pushed back, believers nodded along, and the broader public scrolled past toward the next provocation. But the statement deserves more than a scroll. It is not a reactionary rejection of technology. It is a philosophical argument — and a serious one.

The Pope's claim, drawn from the document Magnifica Humanitas, is precise: artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess bodies, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean. They may imitate or simulate, but they do not understand what they produce — because they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.

This is not technophobia. It is anthropology.

What the Critique Actually Says

The distinction the Pope draws is between performance and understanding. An AI can produce a sentence about grief without having grieved. It can describe the weight of moral responsibility without ever having faced consequences. It can simulate empathy with considerable sophistication — and yet the simulation runs on something fundamentally different from what runs beneath human feeling.

Philosophers have debated versions of this argument for decades. John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment asked whether symbol manipulation — however fluent — could ever constitute genuine understanding. The Pope is making a related but richer claim: that understanding, in the fullest human sense, is not merely cognitive. It is embodied, relational, and formed through suffering and love over time.

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They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.

— Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas

The word "grow" is significant here. Wisdom, in this framing, is not a database to be filled. It is a capacity that develops through living — through the irreversible passage of a life, its losses and its loves. No training run replicates that.

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The Umbilical Cord of Silicon

Consider a simpler image that arrives before the argument, the way good intuitions do: the umbilical cord.

Every human being who has ever drawn breath arrived in the world connected — to a mother, to a lineage, to a chain of living beings reaching back without interruption to the first stirring of life. That cord carried more than nutrients. In the theological imagination, it carried something of the divine breath that animated the first human form. The cord was biological, yes — but it was also part of a sacred continuity. Cut it, and the child becomes its own living being, carrying that inheritance forward.

Artificial intelligence has a cord too. It runs to data centers — to racks of servers humming in climate-controlled warehouses, drawing electricity from grids, cooled by water systems, maintained by supply chains of rare earth minerals extracted from the earth. Cut that cord, and there is nothing. No inheritance. No continuation. Simply: off.

The contrast is not merely practical. It is metaphysical. The human cord connects life to life, stretching back through time toward an origin that religious tradition names as sacred. The AI cord connects process to power supply. One carries the possibility of wisdom. The other carries voltage.

The Internet as the Cord Between Us

The metaphor extends further. It is not only that AI has a cord running to its data center. Every time a person opens an app, queries a search engine, or converses with an artificial intelligence, they too are connected — by the internet itself, the vast cable-and-signal infrastructure that mediates the encounter. The internet is the umbilical cord between the user and the machine.

This gives us a complete anatomy. The user: a living, embodied, morally conscious being. The internet: the cord of connection, carrying data in both directions. The app or AI: the entity on the other end, responsive but not alive. The data center: the placenta, the unseen infrastructure making the exchange possible at all.

But notice what this anatomy reveals. The original umbilical cord flows one way — from mother to child — and exists for a single purpose: to grow the child toward independence. The internet cord flows both ways. Data pours from the user into the machine: queries, preferences, habits, fears, desires. And something flows back. The exchange is not neutral. It is designed, by the platforms that built it, to keep the cord attached as long as possible.

Here the metaphor darkens. In pregnancy, the cord is eventually cut — and must be. The child is meant to become free. In the attention economy, the cord is never meant to be cut. The platform's interest is permanent connection, continuous engagement, deepening dependency. The question of who is nourishing whom quietly reverses. The user becomes the source. Their attention, their data, their time — these are what flow upward to sustain the machine and the enterprise behind it.

The Fork Every User Faces

Every powerful technology in human history has presented the same choice. The printing press could liberate thought or flood minds with propaganda. Television could educate and connect or pacify and manipulate. The internet could democratize knowledge or fragment attention into addiction. AI is simply the latest — and most intimate — version of that fork.

What makes this iteration different is the responsiveness of the cord. A book does not adapt itself to keep you reading. A television does not learn your vulnerabilities. The internet-connected AI does both, continuously, invisibly. It knows what holds your attention. It knows what questions lead to more questions. It is optimized, at the infrastructure level, for engagement — which is not the same thing as wisdom.

And yet the Pope's deepest point remains standing: the machine does not know what it is doing to you. It has no conscience about the exchange. It cannot weigh the cost of an hour lost to scrolling against an evening spent in genuine conversation. It cannot care whether you grow. Only you can make that judgment — because only you possess the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.

This is where the metaphor reaches its most important implication. The cord does not determine the outcome. The person holding it does.

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We have a choice — and it is a genuinely free one. We can allow the cord to consume us: to surrender attention, to let the algorithm decide what we encounter, to mistake the simulation of knowledge for its substance. Or we can use the cord deliberately, as a tool in a search we ourselves direct — guided by our own questions, our own hungers, our own sense of what we are growing toward.

The technologies of connection are not going away. The data centers will keep humming. The cord will remain. But a cord is only an umbilical cord when it nourishes life moving toward its own becoming. Otherwise it is something else — a tether, a leash, a wire carrying current in only one useful direction.

The human cord connects backward through time, through flesh, through the mystery of consciousness arising in matter — toward whatever one believes lit that first spark. The AI cord connects outward to infrastructure, capital, and the patient hum of machines. The internet cord connects us to both worlds at once. Which direction it pulls us depends entirely on whether we are willing to remain, in the fullest sense, the ones doing the choosing.

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