Humanity Before the Machine Overtakes Us
I travelled from Diriyah to the new Red Sea city, Red Sea Global, and stood on a shore of the Arabian Peninsula unlike the Gulf in its anxiety, and unlike Hormuz in its tension. The water seemed to suggest a wider identity: maritime, commercial, human; not founded on fear of the other, but on mutual passage. Around the same time, I received welcome echoes from the NATO conference in Riga about our KE2045 proposal, as recorded by NATO’s journal of strategic communications, from Spain, Latvia, Britain, and Finland. I felt that the West, despite its fatigue, was still trying to repair its language. Then I looked eastward to the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, and was unsettled by the discourse of Russia’s grand ideologue, Alexander Dugin, about our region: an apocalyptic tone that reads the Middle East through a waiting messiah, a Third Temple, and a Mahdi in occultation, as though all were gathered on a stage for the end of the world. Enough! We are not material for other people’s myths.
So I returned in search of a wiser judgment, and paused before the words Magnifica Humanitas, “Wondrous Humanity,” the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, signed on the 135th anniversary of his predecessor’s Rerum Novarum, “On New Things.” It was as though the Church were saying that artificial intelligence is the new industrial revolution, and that the question is the human person. The power of the encyclical is that it does not begin with the machine, but with the human being. It does not ask: what can the algorithm do? Rather, it asks: what remains of the human when everything becomes calculable, sortable, priced, and predicted? It opens with two images: Babel, rising toward heaven without mercy, and Jerusalem, the city where God and the human dwell together. The Babel of our age may be built without clay or stone: out of data, computing centres, and manufactured voices that obscure the truth. And in the encyclical there is a sentence worth remembering: technology is never neutral; it takes on the qualities of those who design it, finance it, regulate it, and use it.
The algorithm calculates utility; conscience recognises the face. The algorithm sees the case; conscience sees the orphan, the captive, and the poor. The algorithm asks: what is most efficient? The human being asks: what is most merciful? That is why the encyclical reaches its highest point in war: life and death must not be delegated to systems without conscience, which make killing faceless, without remorse, and without accountability.
Here, Catholic ecclesiastical jurisprudence advances, not because its text is deeper than Islamic ones. The Qur’an contains an entire chapter called Al-Insan, The Human, which opens with a question older than the modern one: “Has there come upon the human being a span of time when he was not a thing remembered?” Rather, it advances because it possesses the courage of articulation at the moment it is needed. What is required is not a sermon against the machine, but a civilisational covenant for the human before the machine, issued from pulpits of light: from Mecca and Medina, from Al-Azhar, the Muslim World League, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, to say to the world: the human being is not raw material for the machine; the market is not God; war is not destiny; and truth is not a commodity. In the age of artificial intelligence, it is not enough to ask: who owns the algorithm? We must ask: who owns meaning? Who protects the weak? And who reminds the world that intelligence without mercy may be the highest form of ignorance?
I saw that Red Sea there, and imagined how it parted for Moses. Water, on that day, was not geography, but a promise that a path may open from where we thought passage impossible. Not an apocalyptic East that reads us as a symbol, nor a materialist West that reduces us to a market, but a horizon we cross in our own voice. And that voice is not born of delay; it is born when we recover the courage to name the world before the machine names it for us.
Discipline begins in Atturaif…
and in the world it is tested.
Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan
Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.