The first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, "Magnifica Humanitas," veers away from being just another meditation on technology; it is a civilisational warning. Placing the safeguarding of human dignity at the cynosure of the encyclical and deliberately recalling Rerum Novarum remind us how each revolution (industrial then, AI now) eventually becomes a moral question. Artificial Intelligence is not just changing the tooling with which we work; it is changing power, labour, war and the language with which human worth is measured.

The International Labour Organisation now estimates that one in four workers globally is in an occupation with some exposure to generative AI, and that the highest exposure category is more severe for women than for men. In other words, the machine is no longer hovering at the edge of work; it is entering the workspace, the office, the classroom, and the professional mind. The old fantasy that technology would only assist labour is giving way to a harder reality: technology is beginning to reorder labour itself.

The ethical frame matters. UNESCO's AI ethics recommendation places human dignity, transparency, fairness and oversight as critical to any serious AI regime. This principle ought to be written into the public conscience. The danger is not machines becoming too intelligent, since we are nowhere near achieving Artificial General Intelligence; the danger is humans becoming morally lazy, sauntering on the pavement of efficiency created by AI. An algorithm must not be allowed to become sovereign, since sovereignty without conscience is merely rebranded domination.

There is another dimension of the AI revolution that Pope Leo's encyclical warns us about: the unprecedented concentration of power. In earlier industrial eras, power was distributed among governments, factories, labour unions, media institutions, and financial systems. Today, however, immense influence is increasingly concentrated within a handful of technology corporations; they now possess the ability to shape what billions of people see, read, consume, believe, and even fear. This fundamentally alters the balance between the citizen, the state, and the market. In many ways, data has become the new instrument of political and economic sovereignty.

India enters this debate with both promise and peril - mostly peril. The IndiaAI Mission seeks to "democratise" access to computing, improve data quality, build indigenous capacity, and support startups, among other things. That ambition is welcome. But ambition is not the same as readiness. A country that dreams of leading the AI age must first ask whether its workers, teachers, and graduates are being prepared for it.

The more resonant lesson of the encyclical is that progress without dignity is a contradiction, not a triumph. AI may increase productivity, streamline administration, and widen access to knowledge. It may also deepen inequality, concentrate power, hollow out labour, and turn human judgment into a decorative afterthought. Pope Leo has done the world a service by refusing to confuse speed with wisdom. India should listen carefully, because the real test of the digital age will not be how fast we compute, but how faithfully we remain human while computing.