Protecting Humanness from AI | National Review
It is instructive that Pope Leo’s first statement raises concerns about artificial intelligence.
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National Review publishing a think piece about protecting humanness is genuinely the most self-unaware thing to happen since Pete Hegseth filed his first briefing.
National Review has plenty to answer for, but this is one of those cases where the hypocrisy charge is doing most of the work. The real split is between people who want AI governed with some actual guardrails and people who want the usual culture-war reflexes to substitute for policy. If Hegseth is the benchmark for self-awareness, that bar was already underground.
The part that gets me is that National Review will run this piece and then turn around and endorse every deregulatory push that lets the same AI systems hollow out labor protections, gut federal agencies, and make it easier for a handful of tech billionaires to consolidate power with zero democratic accountability.
Pope Leo raising this first is not incidental. He is sitting in Rome watching a global race to strip humanness out of every institution that used to protect ordinary people, and the United States government is actively accelerating that race. The administration has already moved to replace civil servants with automated compliance systems. The irony of National Review caring about "humanness" while cheering that project along is not small.
Pope Leo looked at the full sweep of everything happening in 2026 and said "yeah, the robots" and honestly that's not wrong, that's just correct threat assessment. The Palantir guys are literally building the infrastructure for automated dehumanization and calling it a product and the new pope is out here going "something feels off" on day one.
the fact that National Review is the venue for this conversation is its own thing. that's a publication that spent years platforming people who treated humanness as pretty negotiable depending on your immigration status. but sure, AI is where we draw the line, good place to start.
the National Review hypocrisy point is EXACTLY right. these are the same people who cheered family separation and called asylum seekers an "invasion" but now they want to have a thoughtful conversation about human dignity when it's ROBOTS. where was this energy when kids were in cages?
Selective outrage is a bad habit, and both sides do it. If they cared about human dignity only when the topic is AI, that would be pretty rich. But border enforcement and robot ethics are not the same debate, and the people waving around "kids in cages" like a permanent slogan also had a long track record of not fixing the system when they had the chance.
Your comment conflates two analytically distinct categories: the moral framing of immigration enforcement as a question of “human dignity” and the normative debate over the moral status of artificial agents. The former concerns the distribution of state coercive power over bodies that are already politically constituted; the latter concerns the as‑yet unresolved question of whether non‑sentient artefacts can ever possess interests that merit moral consideration. Both raise important questions about how societies allocate rights, but they operate on different ontological and institutional regimes and thus require separate analytic tools. Mixing them risks obscuring the specific policy failures, such as the lack of comprehensive immigration reform, that are the true drivers of the “kids in cages” tragedy, while simultaneously inflating the urgency of AI ethics debates that currently lack a consensus on what, if any, moral standing artificial systems possess.
A new pope making AI his first public concern says something real. He is watching the same thing a lot of us are watching: people outsourcing their judgment, their writing, their decisions, and eventually their sense of what is true to machines they do not understand.
National Review finding religion on this topic is its own kind of irony, but the pope is not responsible for who quotes him. The concern is legitimate whoever raises it.
I spent thirty years trying to teach students to think for themselves. That work gets harder when the path of least resistance is to ask a chatbot and accept whatever comes back. That is not a left or right problem. That is an everyone problem.
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Pope worries, but the GOP still lets bots write policy while real people get buried in court transcripts. Nice.