They tell us that artificial intelligence is changing everything. And it’s true. But not in the way we usually imagine. The real transformation is not technological. It’s a matter of power. Who holds it? Who benefits? And who remains invisible before it?
When Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, highlighting that humanity is at a crossroads, the conversation immediately focused on artificial intelligence, robots, and algorithms. But if we read it more closely, the Pope raises a much older and much more urgent question: who is behind the machine?
It is projected that Elon Musk will become the world’s first trillionaire. Other tech leaders like Larry Ellison, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman will closely follow. The countries leading the race in artificial intelligence, mainly the United States and China, will exert a type of dominance that no previous empire achieved. They will do so through infrastructure, data, and the very logic embedded in the systems that the rest of the world will depend on.
AI does not emerge from nothing. It is created by engineers with certain assumptions, funded by investors with specific interests, deployed by governments with their own agendas, and regulated, or not, by politicians with specific loyalties.
When we forget this, something dangerous happens. Technology begins to be perceived as a supernatural, almost mystical force, something beyond our control that simply happens to us. We stop asking who is behind it and assume that we only have to adapt. We become passive. And passivity in the face of the concentration of power has never served humanity well.
Artificial intelligence is neither salvation nor apocalypse. It is a force. And, like every force in human history, it will reflect the values, blind spots, and ambitions of those who wield it. As my great colleague, Professor De Kai, explains in his book Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Parenting Our Future, artificial intelligence is a child learning from its parents, and those parents exist today.
AI is not just a technological issue; it is a pure reflection of our humanity and what it means to be human. And it is being designed by a small group of people who do not necessarily look out for the greater good of all.
Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer of Google, recently stated in an interview that by 2038 the world could become a kind of utopia, ‘for those who manage to reach it’. What he describes is not a shared future. It is a future that will likely destroy before it builds. A future that not everyone will have access to.
And that future will have a owner.
Perhaps it is also time to re-read José Ortega y Gasset, whose reflections on the difference between the mass man and the excellent man were largely misunderstood. Ortega warned about what happens when a society loses its standards of excellence, responsibility, and self-criticism. It seems we are living in a similar moment.
If artificial intelligence concentrates power in such a way that democratic participation becomes increasingly symbolic, then the question of who shapes those who govern becomes the only question that really matters. That is what Plato understood centuries before Ortega.
That is why, the question is not whether AI will change the world. It will.
The real question is to determine what values, what interests, and what vision of humanity will be integrated into the systems that will govern our society. What principles will be encoded within the machine. And to whom, ultimately, the power of algorithms will serve.
Magnifica Humanitas reminds us that the most important questions are not technical. They are political and moral.
As mathematician John Lennox asks: How can an ethical dimension be integrated into an algorithm that, by its very nature, lacks heart, soul, and mind?
These are not easy questions. They are the questions we all must ask ourselves in the face of this new concentration of power.
The Future of Life Institute, which evaluates artificial intelligence companies in terms of existential safety, recently reported:
“No company received a rating higher than D in this area for the second consecutive year. Furthermore, although leaders of companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Z.ai have spoken more explicitly about existential risks, this rhetoric has yet to translate into quantitative safety plans, concrete mitigation strategies for alignment failures, or credible internal monitoring and control interventions.”
There lies the issue.
Not in AI itself, but in what we choose to do with it. When humanity first discovered the power of the atom, it faced the possibility of providing clean and abundant energy for all. Instead, it chose the atomic bomb. Are we about to make the same mistake, or will we finally learn from history?
Because there is no doubt about the effectiveness with which a superintelligent AI will pursue its goals. And if those goals are not aligned with ours, we will face a problem too late to solve.
Technology can liberate, or it can dominate.
The difference lies in who owns it, who designs it, and who controls it.
And those people exist.
They are the ones we must put under the spotlight, question, and hold accountable.
The solution will not come from the same actors who created the problem. It will come from those who have learned to govern power without being seduced by it, not from tech leaders, but from institutions that precede Silicon Valley and will outlive it, from societies that have already navigated dependence and understand its architecture.
The Global South cannot continue to be a recipient of rules written elsewhere; it must become a co-author of them. Transparency cannot be voluntary or purely technical; it must extend to the values that these systems optimize and the interests they ultimately serve.
But none of this will advance without a new generation of institutional leaders, guided by merit, service, and responsibility, rather than by financial or technological power, who have chosen accountability as a discipline and not as an image.
Because what is at stake is the future of all humanity.
As Steve Wozniak points out, we all have an AI installed within us, Authentic Intelligence, real. Isn’t it time we start using it for real?
