SUDDENLY artificial intelligence is everywhere. For decades it’s been promises, promises, but now it’s coming round the corner express.

Work, leisure, education, health – everything is up for grabs as trillionaire tech bros move fast and break things. Help or hindrance? Hope or Fear? Journalists and preachers have found AI a helpful junior colleague. But Pope Leo’s recent letter Magnifica Humanitas reminds us that technology is neutral: it’s people who ask it to work for good or ill.

Should we be afraid – very afraid, and wish the genie back into the bottle? Will the servant become the master as it takes over our lives in so many ways. What about our jobs and the very shape of our society and economy. Will we make ourselves, our species redundant? Or condemn ourselves to extinction once ‘they’ realise they’re smarter than us.

Then we look at our messed-up world, more than half in the hands of ruthless dictatorial paranoid rulers, with divisions, inequalities, cruelties, failures on every side. The worst angels of our nature seem to have taken charge. What moral claim do we have to continue the mixture as before? We have always taken it for granted that we must be the Top Species come what may. We take many scriptures to imply that we have the divine right to remake the world in our own image. Or could it be time to get out of the way and give up ruining the only planet we have to play with, and the lives of all who try to share it with us?

Leo offers us a stark choice: build a new Tower of Babel — a world shaped by technological pride and domination — or build a shared human city where technology supports communion, justice, and peace. Whoever we believe in, it’s time to make our choice, and commit to it.

So come on, Magnificent Humanity! Now is the moment to show that the title is just what we deserve. The race to our world’s moral or immoral future is on. Can we out-run our selfish, narcissistic, ruthless competitors, greedy for money, power and control? I’m not sure — but let’s at least have a darn good try!

Adam Green, Wiveliscombe