jofftherecord.uk - Magnifica Humanitas

Let AI lead us happily back to ancient principles of teaching and learning

I'm not a churchgoer, but my house sits on the path between our local church and the vicarage. This was the backdrop for a series of impromptu but highly stimulating chats with the Reverend Kate Daymond in early summer 2026 exploring our overlapping thoughts about AI, education and theology.

Our reference point was the 'encyclical' published in May 2026 by Pope Leo XIV, entitled Magnifica Humanitas, a profound expression of spiritual and political concern about the future of our species. Through these discussions I discovered that theology provides a very helpful framework to get our heads around AI, whether we are religious or not.

Kate invited me to express my educationalist perspective on these things from the pulpit as part of a Sunday morning service. Our Q&A interaction is published below.

Introduction (Reverend Kate Daymond)

Back in May, Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity).

At the Vatican launch, Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind the AI known as Claude, welcomed the Pope taking a stance on AI. As an atheist, he stressed how computer scientists like himself need thoughtful, critical voices from outside of their lab, because AI raises questions about what it means to be human and who we want to be as societies.

Along with many other pioneers and CEOs of AI, they are worried about the consequences for humanity of their inventions. They are all struggling to balance doing the right thing with the high expectations of shareholders and political autocrats, and the intense competition to dominate this emerging dimension of human evolution.

Back in February our guest this morning was invited to discuss these things at an extraordinary weekend in Silicon Valley. It was co-hosted by the CEO of Microsoft AI and co-founder of Google’s DeepMind.

So let me introduce Jonathan Wheeldon who is an adviser and trustee for school groups that run over 70 state-funded schools (40,000 pupils) across England.

I’ve invited Jonathan to give a few insights on AI from the perspective of school leaders and how we should be preparing young people for an AI world.

His experience in schools began in 2013 with a late-career teacher-training (PGCE) and two years teaching English A-level in West London. Previously, over a 20-year career in media and entertainment Jonathan also served as global CFO of Macmillan Publishers and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Really Useful Group, and in international posts at EMI and Universal Music, living for many years in Madrid, New York and Los Angeles.

Q1 - So, Jonathan, tell us why you care so much about AI in education

9 in 10 young people are using AI regularly. But 3 out of 4 teachers say they do not know how to teach AI or how to teach with it.

Their reasons include: a lack of time, confidence, training and permission.

It is a very worrying situation.

Because unlike most of the technology breakthroughs during my lifetime, AI has profound disruptive implications, not just for the world of work, but for how we learn. It even questions why we learn - why bother to make the effort to study and remember when AI can do everything for us?

It’s exciting and scary in equal measure.

On a positive note, AI is in some ways triggering a welcome return to the past - away from the suffocating influence of a national examination system which many believe is fast becoming an obsolete form of assessment.

AI helps us to remember and appreciate some ancient principles of teaching. Especially Socratic principles. These are pupil-centred, based on personal growth through the art of good questioning, interpersonal dialogue, oracy skills (listening and speaking) and critical thinking.

These principles are more inclusive and enduringly human than our narrow academic assessment-driven system. They often exist in primary schools, but the principles get lost in the secondary phase of education.

They are the kinds of things the first Bible reading this morning refers to as a “wise and discerning mind” in the context of King Solomon.

But the thing I care about most is educating pupils in AI literacy. So what is AI literacy? Let me start by saying what it is not.

It is not simply asking ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude for shortcut answers to essay questions or homework.

Learning should have elements of friction, of struggle and stretch. Without that we risk “outsourcing” our thinking. This so-called “offloading” of the hard work of learning, (of reading, thinking and writing) has been described as cognitive surrender or cognitive atrophy.

And if we’re not careful, these dangerous side-effects of AI could be a very dark turn for our human species.

By contrast, AI literacy is understanding how AI models actually work. This includes:

where they can enhance human learning, stimulate imagination and improve productivity,
spotting when they might be wrong, where they are biased, and where they are creating harmful dependencies in learners, especially through inappropriate relationships with their human-seeming ‘chatbots’
ultimately enabling pupils to think ethically for themselves, and make “wise and discerning” human judgments about machine outputs.

To be very clear, AI literacy is not a subject in its own right. It must underpin every subject. And every age group.

Q2 - Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas is the first encyclical you’ve read – how did you find it?

I think it’s a superb achievement and frankly I think it took everyone a bit by surprise.

Pope Leo the 14th is concerned about sacrificing human dignity on the altar of technocratic principle. This echoes the very influential papal encyclical published 135 years ago in 1891 by the last Pope Leo (the 13th), who is very explicitly the inspiration for the current Pope.

Both Leos are good examples of nominative determinism - lion-hearted souls who demonstrate the roots of their name Leonardo by being brave in challenging the dominant economic forces of their age. In speaking truth to power.

Leo the 13th's concerns back then were about the pace of the 19th century industrial revolution and the devastating impact of unchecked capitalism on individuals and communities. The parallels with the situation in which we find ourselves right now in the world are very clear.

The 1891 encyclical was called Rerum Novarum (“Of new things”). It was not explicitly anti-capitalist, but it helped establish a better balance between capital and labour:

it told Catholics that it was OK to join trade unions,
it stimulated the formation of Christian Democratic political parties across Europe (e.g in Italy, Germany and Belgium),
it paved the way for the expansion of the welfare state,
in short, it marked a moment when the Church reasserted itself in shaping the modern world and not just reacting to it.

In this new encyclical for the age of AI the current Pope Leo picks up some familiar themes about balance, humility and reconciliation.

I particularly like his two contrasting biblical analogies:

Firstly the Tower of Babel. It’s a good analogy because we can easily recognise the huge ego, and god-like ambition of humans doing things simply “because we can”. The pride in the technical prowess of humans to build a super-efficient, singular, dominant structure.

But technological progress often blinds us to the dehumanizing consequences for individuals, communities and for diversity. When I first read the Babel story I felt that God’s intervention, to disperse humanity across the globe and prevent a single language, seemed a bit spiteful and negative. He seemed angry that his upstart human species were getting ahead of themselves and needed some push-back.

On reflection, in the context of the data colonialism of the global tech monopolies and their ‘large language models’, it’s easy to see how a single language could easily become tyrannical and oppressive. So its prevention and the preservation of the diversity of humanity spread across the globe can be seen as a compelling analogy for the importance of moderation and balance. In accommodating the many and diverse sources of richness and beauty in “humanity’s magnificence”.

Pope Leo then contrasts the homogenizing hubris of Babel’s tower-builders with Nehemiah’s humility, consultation and community relationship-building which is central to the rebuilding of Jerusalem in a way that accommodates diversity.

Q3 - How do these two biblical stories help shape our approach, and guide us in an era of digital transformation?

Our industry-driven culture has for centuries caused us to believe unquestioningly that all technology-driven economic growth is synonymous with human “progress”. Our education system reflects this culture to a large extent.

So Pope Leo’s biblical analogies are helpful in getting us to think very deeply about what it is we truly value and what we want to preserve about being human.

He reminds us that we are social beings, not just individuals. He reminds us that community and the quality and diversity of the lives we lead are more important than GDP growth and industrial efficiency for its own sake.

Industrialization has always wrestled with humanity and AI is taking this to another level.

Q4 - In what ways might the economy reinvent itself to ensure that no person, people or planet will be treated as expendable in the process of developing AI?

It’s been said that the AI revolution will do to the middle-class what the 19th century industrial revolution did to the working class and we are already seeing aspects of this in the worrying drop-off in graduate employment over the last couple of years.

We can’t stop this process, so we have to prepare for it and try to at least shape it.

The fact that those with the privilege of a good education are at least as vulnerable as the less privileged might possibly mean that AI’s evolution will be more controllable. That will depend on whether we can evolve consciously and co-intelligently with AI.

Many people worry about AI and robots replacing human work. But what is more likely is that AI will “divide the best from the rest”.

What I mean by this phrase is that “the best” will evolve co-intelligently with AI, becoming superhuman in capability, productivity and influence over others. They will adapt to create powerful new roles with large financial rewards.

The “rest” may end up cognitively diminished, distracted and ever more dependent on manipulative algorithms and shortcuts for just about everything. We have been seeing evidence of this over the last decade through the mental health deterioration of young people, often attributed to social media and technology addiction.

So rather than humans being replaced by robots, it's more likely that many humans will become robot-like. They will develop many of the attributes of robots, unwittingly surrendering to the seductive and addictive technologies we adore, and that undo our capacity to think.

In the most dystopian vision humanity will lose its place at the top of the evolutionary tree, becoming enslaved to a dominant AI. This is often called artificial general intelligence (AGI), or the Singularity.

Actually, this type of thing was predicted with astonishing foresight by Aldous Huxley almost a century ago in his novel Brave New World. I’d recommend reading it, or re-reading it if you read it when you were younger. Alternatively, this two-minute read, written by Neil Postman summarises it brilliantly, explaining why Huxley had better foresight than Orwell’s alternative dystopian vision of “1984”.

Anyway, to avoid or to slow down this dark and divisive evolutionary pathway for our species, there are some things we can do. We don’t necessarily need any new policies, we just need to pursue existing policies in social justice and cybersecurity more vigorously. The Europeans are ahead of both the US and the UK in policymaking and enforcement in these areas.

Much of that is outside my sphere of influence, but in my domain, we must rethink education in ways that help all young people access, wrestle and shape AI for their benefit. We should certainly not be avoiding AI in education.

Q5 - AI takes on the ethical characteristics of its designers, investors, regulators and users. What can we do to promote an ethical and equitable evolution of AI?

A very good question.

I’d like to focus on generative AI. This is what most people mean when they mention AI. Generative AI means products such as ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), Claude (Anthropic) or Co-Pilot (Microsoft) which are based on Large Language Models or LLMs.

An LLM predicts text sequence based on recurring patterns it has observed on a vast, almost unimaginable scale and at astonishing speed. LLMs “trawl and scrape” the internet and other sources of published content and are therefore built on everything we as humans have ever expressed (and continue to express).

So they are a reflection of everything we are (or have been), for better or worse.

They are getting more accurate and efficient all the time, but the early versions of LLMs (only a few years ago) produced some terrifying results without any moral filtering. Since that time an enormous amount of time has been spent fine-tuning them to produce tolerably “ethical” outputs.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the term used to train AI. This is done through employing huge numbers of real human beings. To some degree we can be reassured that this is a quasi-democratic self-correcting process as there is a reasonable level of competition between AI providers. This means that most people will abandon products that are clearly unethical or blatantly harmful. So, for now at least, it is practically impossible for any one individual or corporation to dominate generative AI with malicious intent.

Even so, individual human ethical values are complex, subjective and rarely generate a complete consensus amongst people. Values and rights are hierarchical or ideological and compete with each other, even within the same religion or community. So recognising the bias and exploitative potential of AI products, especially on immature minds, is a critically important skill for both teachers and pupils.

For this reason, it is essential that we educate people to be wise and discerning, because in doing so, engaging with generative AI is more likely to make it organically self-improving and be (more or less) aligned with what a majority might regard as a moral framework.

We all learn and evaluate things differently. Becoming wise includes the skill of learning how we learn - this is known as metacognition.

We should remember that the world’s knowledge and wisdom have never been more accessible to people. But this accessibility will mean nothing if we don’t give young people the metacognitive skills to navigate human knowledge and competing values. And to recognise that knowledge, language and power are all inextricably linked in ways that we can only really appreciate through a process of lifelong learning.

Of course the biggest threat to the integrity of AI is the same as it has been for the internet and for the 19th century industrial revolution - it is the self-interest, greed and insecurity of the traditional 3 Cs - countries, corporations and criminals.

But if we can at least educate ourselves and our young people on the merits of lifelong learning and to challenge power when it becomes corrupted, then there is scope for hope.

Q6 - How might we respond to Pope Leo's call to “disarm AI”?

Let's consider prayers and actions under two headings:

Education

face the challenges and difficulties of discernment at a time when it is so hard to know which news and information is reliable.
fulfil our inter-generational responsibilities in guiding young people to embrace, rather than avoid, the friction of learning - that we can instil in one another deep learning and critical thinking.
find ways to support teachers, recognising that our future depends on their energy, skill and care.
promote reform of our education system, encouraging leaders to accept that it requires institutional humility in recognising that some structures, credentials and pathways may no longer serve learners or the community in the digital age.
avoid new forms of “slavery” through unconscious or lazy cognitive surrender and addiction to the technologies we adore but which undermine our capacity to think.

Cultural and political engagement

reject the paradigm of war in daily communications; say no to polarizing rhetoric and algorithms that reward conflict
accept and be grateful for our bodies and minds and not see our human limits and our fragility as design defects to be eliminated.
see that salvation and transcendence do not come through escaping the limits of our physical reality, nor through AI-driven ‘cognitive optimization’, but in the space where compassion and relationships mature, and through fulfilment in love and grace.
encourage people (young and old) to hold trans-national tech monopolies to account for the products they develop and to put social responsibility and environmental care at the heart of their purpose.
support policies that moderate the aggressive competition to dominate transformative AI and other technologies, instead working more slowly and collaboratively with a shared responsibility for peaceful solutions.
Finally we could pray for more equitable sharing of computational resources and the dismantling of ‘epistemic asymmetries’. This term refers to the profound structural imbalance of knowledge, information and data control between AI tech monopolies and the rest of humanity. This is sometimes also referred to as ‘data colonialism’ and should be recognised for what it is.

Power and disarmament

Pope Leo says we are all responsible - that we must choose whether to fuel the mentality of force (which is often through indifference, cynicism, lies or hatred), or to preserve more proactively the mindset of peace (with truth, moderation, closeness and care).

He proposes five paths toward daily and public responsibility:

the need to disarm words
building peace through justice,
adopting the perspective of victims,
cultivating a healthy realism and
reviving dialogue and multilateralism.

Architectural Blueprints for Humanity's Future

Slidedeck of Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas

Click to scroll (14 slides) - created with Gemini Notebook

July 26th, 2026

St Peter's Church

Petersham

Richmond Park in the background

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