Magnifica Humanitas: A Plain-Language Overview

Magnifica Humanitas: A Plain-Language Overview

Pope Leo XIV's 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence is a large document about a simple question: as human beings acquire greater technological power, what must we protect so that our progress remains genuinely human?<ref name="MH">Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, encyclical letter, 15 May 2026.</ref>

For readers who do not intend to work through the entire encyclical, this page offers a practical overview of its main ideas.

The shortest possible summary is this:

Technology is good when it serves human beings. Human beings must never be reduced to servants, inputs, data points, or obstacles in the service of technology.

That principle reaches far beyond artificial intelligence.

Magnifica Humanitas is about AI, but it is also about work, truth, freedom, economic power, human dignity, families, education, community, peace, responsibility, and the purpose of technological progress.

Why did Leo XIV write it?

The title Magnifica Humanitas may be translated roughly as the grandeur of humanity.

Leo XIV begins from the conviction that humanity is created by God and possesses a dignity which technological change cannot confer and cannot remove.

The immediate setting is the extraordinary growth of artificial intelligence, robotics, digital platforms, biotechnology, and other forms of technological power. Leo XIV compares the present moment to the res novae — the “new things” — that confronted Pope Leo XIII during the Industrial Revolution.

Leo XIII responded to the social upheavals of industrialization with Rerum Novarum in 1891.

Leo XIV argues that our generation faces another set of “new things.” We therefore have to ask again:

• What is technology for?
• Who benefits from it?
• Who controls it?
• Who bears responsibility for its consequences?
• What happens to workers?
• What happens to families?
• What happens to truth?
• What happens to the poor and powerless?
• What happens to human freedom?
• And, ultimately, does technological progress make human life more fully human?

The encyclical does not argue that technology is inherently bad. Leo explicitly describes technology as part of human history and recognizes that technological development has greatly improved human life.<ref name="MH" />

The problem arises when the possession of technological power is confused with wisdom about how that power should be used.

The two construction projects

One of the easiest ways to understand the entire encyclical is through two biblical images Leo uses repeatedly.

The first is the Tower of Babel.

Babel represents a great human project built around power, domination, pride, and the desire to overcome every limit. It is technically impressive, but its apparent greatness ultimately produces division.

The second is the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah.

Jerusalem is rebuilt piece by piece through shared responsibility. Different people contribute to a common work. The result is not simply a monument to power, but the restoration of a community.

Leo effectively asks us:

Which kind of world are we building?

An enormously powerful technological civilization can still be a Babel.

A technically less spectacular society may be far more advanced in the things that finally matter if its institutions, technologies, and economy allow people to flourish together.

Human dignity does not come from productivity

One of the most important claims in Magnifica Humanitas is that the value of a human person does not depend upon what that person can produce.

A human being does not become valuable because he is intelligent, efficient, employable, wealthy, technically skilled, physically healthy, or economically productive.

Human dignity is more fundamental than any of those things.

Leo describes this deepest dignity as belonging to every person simply because that person exists, has been created and loved by God, and possesses a human nature which cannot be reduced to utility.<ref name="MHDignity">Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, especially nos. 51–53, on the intrinsic and ontological dignity of every human person.</ref>

This has enormous implications for a technological society.

If efficiency becomes the highest value, then people begin to be judged according to their usefulness.

The elderly may appear inefficient.

The disabled may appear expensive.

Children may appear economically unproductive.

Workers may appear replaceable.

People whose skills are no longer fashionable may appear obsolete.

But a person is not obsolete.

A human being is not a machine whose value can be calculated from output.

AI is a tool, not a person

Leo XIV makes a clear distinction between artificial intelligence and human intelligence.

AI systems can imitate certain operations associated with human intelligence. They may process enormous quantities of information, recognize patterns, generate language, solve particular problems, and perform some tasks faster or more accurately than a human being.

But this does not make them human persons.

AI does not live a human life.

It does not possess a body in the human sense.

It does not experience childhood.

It does not suffer, love, form friendships, raise children, grow old, repent, hope, worship, or assume moral responsibility.

It does not experience work from within.

It does not possess human conscience and freedom merely because its output resembles intelligent conversation.<ref name="MHAI">Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, especially nos. 97–103, on artificial intelligence, human intelligence, responsibility and governance.</ref>

For that reason, AI should not be treated as though it were a new kind of human being.

It is an extraordinarily powerful human-made tool.

That distinction matters because responsibility cannot simply be transferred from people to machines.

Somebody remains responsible

A recurrent temptation with complicated technology is to say:

“The computer decided.”

Leo rejects that escape.

When an automated system affects someone's employment, reputation, credit, opportunities, access to services, safety, or freedom, a human moral responsibility remains.

An algorithm cannot absolve the people and institutions that designed, selected, deployed, or relied upon it.

The greater the consequences, the greater the need for accountability, transparency, and meaningful human judgment.<ref name="MHAI" />

This is particularly important when a system appears neutral.

Algorithms are created, trained, selected, configured, and deployed by human beings and institutions. They may reproduce assumptions, priorities, errors, and biases even when nobody explicitly programmed an instruction to discriminate.

“AI said so” is therefore not an adequate moral explanation.

A special responsibility belongs to developers

One part of the encyclical is unusually direct for those of us who write software.

Leo XIV makes a specific appeal to developers of artificial intelligence.

Technological creation can be understood as one expression of human creativity, but every design decision carries assumptions about human beings and about the kind of behavior a system should encourage.

Developers therefore carry a particular ethical responsibility.

Transparency matters.

Consequences matter.

The communities affected by software matter.

The purpose toward which the technology is being directed matters.<ref name="MHDevelopers">Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 111, addressing developers of artificial intelligence and their ethical and spiritual responsibilities.</ref>

The programmer is not merely a pair of hands implementing somebody else's specification.

Technical craftsmanship includes judgment.

Work is more than income

This is one of the most important parts of Magnifica Humanitas for the Virtuous Programmer Initiative.

Leo XIV strongly rejects a view of work in which the worker is merely another component in a production system.

Work provides income, but its importance is much greater.

Through work people develop abilities, exercise responsibility, cooperate with others, support families, contribute to society, discover aspects of vocation, and participate in the creation and maintenance of the human world.

For this reason, work itself has dignity.<ref name="MHWork">Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, especially nos. 149–169, on the dignity and value of work during digital transformation.</ref>

This changes the question we should ask about automation.

The question cannot simply be:

“How many workers can this technology eliminate?”

A better question is:

“How can this technology help human beings perform good work better?”

Leo warns specifically against a situation in which workers must increasingly adapt themselves to the speed and demands of machines instead of machines being designed to support workers.<ref name="MHWork" />

That is an extremely important distinction.

Technology should be adapted to humanity.

Humanity should not be redesigned to fit technology.

Losing a job is not merely losing a paycheck

Because work has a social and personal dimension, widespread technological unemployment cannot be treated merely as an accounting problem.

The loss of work can also mean loss of:

• responsibility;
• professional identity;
• stability;
• relationships;
• opportunities for young people;
• the ability to form and support families;
• confidence in the future;
• and participation in the life of a community.

Leo therefore emphasizes education, retraining, opportunities for meaningful employment, stability for families, and a proper balance among work, leisure, and rest.<ref name="MHWork" />

A healthy economy exists for human beings.

Human beings do not exist for the economy.

Subsidiarity: do not take away what smaller communities can do

Another major theme of the encyclical is subsidiarity.

The idea is simple.

Responsibilities should ordinarily remain with the smallest or most local person, family, community, organization, or institution capable of carrying them out competently.

Larger institutions should assist smaller ones when necessary.

They should not unnecessarily absorb their responsibilities.

A higher authority therefore exists partly to support the ability of smaller communities to act, not simply to replace them.<ref name="MHSubsidiarity">Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, especially nos. 68–72, on the principle of subsidiarity and its application to digital power.</ref>

This becomes especially interesting in the digital world.

Today, enormous technology companies and platforms may exercise forms of practical power that were once associated primarily with governments.

They can determine:

• who is visible;
• who can participate;
• which software may run;
• who has access to data;
• which businesses reach customers;
• what rules govern communication;
• and what opportunities exist within entire digital ecosystems.

Leo argues that such power should not become opaque and unilateral.

People and smaller institutions need meaningful opportunities to participate, understand decisions, seek recourse, and retain genuine freedom of action.<ref name="MHSubsidiarity" />

Subsidiarity needs solidarity

Subsidiarity does not mean:

“Everyone is on his own.”

Leo pairs it with solidarity.

Solidarity means recognizing that our good is connected with the good of other people.

The strong have obligations toward the weak.

Communities have obligations toward their members.

Individuals have obligations toward their communities.

Nations and institutions have responsibilities that extend beyond narrow self-interest.

Subsidiarity without solidarity can become selfishness.

Solidarity without subsidiarity can become paternalism which deprives people of responsibility and initiative.<ref name="MHSolidarity">Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, especially nos. 73–75, on solidarity and its relationship to subsidiarity.</ref>

The two principles belong together.

Help people.

Do not unnecessarily take over their lives.

The common good is more than everyone's private interests added together

Another recurring expression is the common good.

This does not simply mean finding a compromise among competing individual interests.

The common good concerns the social conditions in which people and communities are actually able to flourish.<ref name="MHCommonGood">Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, especially nos. 59–64, on the principle of the common good.</ref>

A society may generate extraordinary wealth while still failing the common good if that prosperity requires large numbers of people to become disposable, powerless, isolated, or unable to participate meaningfully in society.

Technology must therefore be judged partly by its social consequences.

Who gains power?

Who loses it?

Who gains opportunities?

Who becomes dependent?

Who controls the infrastructure?

Who owns the knowledge?

Who may participate?

Who is excluded?

These are not questions outside technology.

Once technology changes the conditions of human life, they become technological questions as well.

Information and truth matter

Magnifica Humanitas also treats truth as a common good.

Digital technology can make knowledge available with extraordinary speed, but it can also multiply falsehood, manipulation, synthetic media, addictive communication, and environments in which people no longer know whom to trust.

A society cannot function indefinitely without some shared ability to establish facts.

Technology should therefore strengthen rather than deliberately undermine people's ability to perceive reality, exercise judgment, and communicate truthfully.

Human attention itself should not be regarded merely as another commodity to capture and sell.

Freedom can be lost gradually

Leo also warns about dependency.

People can surrender meaningful freedom without anybody formally taking it away.

A person's choices may increasingly be shaped by:

• addictive systems;
• recommendation algorithms;
• surveillance;
• commercial profiling;
• social pressure;
• technological dependence;
• monopolized platforms;
• and services which have become difficult to live without.

Freedom therefore requires more than the existence of a button labeled “I Agree.”

It requires conditions in which people remain capable of understanding, choosing, refusing, participating, and acting responsibly.

The problem is not AI versus humanity

One of the most useful things about Magnifica Humanitas is that it avoids two simplistic positions.

It does not say:

“AI will save us.”

And it does not say:

“Technology is evil.”

The real choice is between different ways of developing and using technology.

We can build technology around power, domination, control, consumption, and efficiency as ends in themselves.

Or we can build technology around human dignity, justice, participation, responsibility, work, family, truth, community, and the common good.

That is the contrast between Babel and Jerusalem.

Why programmers should care

For programmers, this encyclical is unusually relevant.

Software increasingly determines how other people:

• communicate;
• work;
• obtain information;
• receive services;
• conduct business;
• learn;
• spend money;
• exercise authority;
• and understand the world.

That gives programmers genuine power.

It also gives us genuine responsibilities.

The programmer therefore cannot finally judge a program merely by asking:

• Does it compile?
• Does it pass the tests?
• Is it fast?
• Does it scale?
• Is the architecture elegant?
• Can it be automated?
• Can AI generate it?
• Will somebody pay for it?

Those are legitimate questions.

They simply are not the final questions.

The Virtuous Programmer must eventually ask:

• Is it true?
• Is it useful?
• Whom does it serve?
• Whom might it harm?
• Does it respect the user?
• Does it respect the worker?
• Does it leave meaningful human responsibility somewhere?
• Does it enlarge human capacity or merely create dependence?
• Does it allow smaller communities and individuals to act?
• Does it serve a genuinely good end?

This is where Magnifica Humanitas intersects directly with Open Sourcing the Virtues of a Perl Programmer.

Practical Wisdom asks what our technical power ought to be used for.

Spiritedness gives us the energy to confront systems that are broken, unjust, dehumanizing, or simply poor servants of their users.

Good Order asks us to build technologies, projects, businesses, and communities in forms that human beings can inhabit rather than merely endure.

And Diligence, Patience, and Humility remind us that technical brilliance is not the same thing as wisdom.

The programmer is not the machine

One of the most important consequences of the encyclical for the current AI age can be stated very simply:

Your value as a programmer is not the sum of the code you produce.

A faster machine does not diminish your dignity.

An AI system that generates a thousand lines of code in seconds does not become a better human craftsman than the programmer who needs an afternoon to understand a difficult problem.

The human programmer can know why the work is being done.

He can accept responsibility for it.

He can care about the customer.

He can recognize that a technically possible action should not be performed.

He can teach an apprentice.

He can support a family through his work.

He can make promises and keep them.

He can repent when he has acted wrongly.

He can serve another human being deliberately.

These are not incidental limitations surrounding the “real” activity of computation.

They belong to what makes human work human.

The whole document in ten points

For the reader who remembers nothing else, Magnifica Humanitas can be reduced — somewhat unfairly, but usefully — to ten practical ideas:

1. Every human being has dignity that does not depend on intelligence, productivity, wealth, health, or usefulness.
2. Technology is a human tool and can accomplish enormous good.
3. More technological power does not automatically mean more wisdom or more human progress.
4. Artificial intelligence is not human intelligence and must not replace human moral responsibility.
5. Developers and institutions remain responsible for what their systems do to people.
6. Work is part of human flourishing, not merely a cost of production to be eliminated.
7. Smaller communities, families, workers, and individuals should retain real responsibility and freedom whenever possible.
8. Solidarity requires us to care about people who might otherwise be excluded from technological progress.
9. Truth, freedom, family, community, justice, and the common good are legitimate standards by which technological progress should be judged.
10. The ultimate question is not simply what we can build, but what kind of human world we are building.

Babel or Jerusalem?

That final question may be the easiest way to remember the encyclical.

Human ingenuity is real.

Technological progress is real.

Artificial intelligence is powerful.

Economic productivity matters.

Scientific discovery is good.

None of these things is God.

None of them defines the worth of a human person.

None of them supplies its own moral purpose.

We therefore remain responsible for deciding what to build.

The construction site is already open.

The tools are already in our hands.

Magnifica Humanitas asks us to decide whether we are building Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.

Perl Guilds, the Virtuous Programmer Initiative, and Magnifica Humanitas

The work being undertaken through Perl-Guilds.net and the Virtuous Programmer Initiative was not created as a commentary on Magnifica Humanitas. Much of its central framework was already being developed independently: the recovery of the programmer's virtues as Practical Wisdom, Spiritedness, and Good Order; the complementary importance of Diligence, Patience, and Humility; the treatment of programming as a craft; the dignity of the worker; the responsibilities of masters toward apprentices; the importance of maintainable work; and the desire to help programmers earn a sustainable livelihood through useful service.

The appearance of Magnifica Humanitas therefore does not require the Virtuous Programmer Initiative to become something fundamentally different.

It provides a larger contemporary framework within which much of this work already makes sense.

The alignment can be seen in several places.

The programmer is a person before he is a producer

Perl Guilds begins from a view of the programmer as a craftsman, not merely as a unit of technical output.

An apprentice is not less human than a master.

A programmer whose skills have temporarily fallen out of fashion is not obsolete.

A maintainer who spends days understanding an old system has not necessarily accomplished less than somebody who produces thousands of lines of new code.

A programmer supporting a family through ordinary consulting work may be doing something every bit as worthy as a programmer associated with a fashionable technological breakthrough.

This is closely aligned with the anthropology expressed in Magnifica Humanitas: human dignity is not earned through productivity, technical capability, intelligence, market value, or social prestige.

That principle becomes particularly important in an age of artificial intelligence.

If a machine can generate code more quickly than a human being, it does not follow that the human programmer has become less valuable.

If automation reduces the amount of labor required for a task, the person whose labor was previously required does not thereby become a human surplus.

The Virtuous Programmer Initiative therefore resists defining a programmer primarily by output.

The programmer is a person who can judge, choose, promise, teach, serve, accept responsibility, develop virtue, enter relationships, and direct technical powers toward good or bad ends.

Those are not secondary properties surrounding the supposedly more important fact that he writes code.

They are central to what human craftsmanship is.

Technology exists for people

The Perl community has always been deeply concerned with tools.

Perl itself is a tool.

CPAN is an enormous collection of tools.

Compilers, editors, test frameworks, build systems, package managers, databases, web frameworks, GUI libraries, source-control systems, cloud services, and artificial intelligence all extend what programmers can accomplish.

The Virtuous Programmer Initiative does not reject these tools.

Neither does Magnifica Humanitas reject technological development.

The important question is one of order.

The tool must remain ordered toward the good of the person.

This is directly connected with the virtue we call Good Order.

Good Order is not merely tidy formatting or architectural neatness. It asks whether relationships among tools, people, institutions, responsibilities, and ends have been arranged properly.

A build system should serve the programmer.

An application should serve the user.

Automation should serve human work.

An institution should serve the community for which it exists.

Artificial intelligence should assist human judgment rather than provide an excuse to abandon judgment.

A business should earn money by providing something of genuine value rather than treating users as raw material.

When those relationships are reversed, technological order becomes disorder even if the underlying machinery is technically impressive.

Practical Wisdom asks what the technology is for

The first of the proposed Perl virtues, Practical Wisdom or Prudence, has a particularly strong connection with the technological concerns raised in Magnifica Humanitas.

Prudence does not simply ask:

“Can this be built?”

It also asks:

“Should it be built this way, for these people, under these conditions, toward this end?”

This is especially important in software because programmers routinely encounter technically interesting possibilities which may not deserve implementation.

A programmer can automate a process that ought to remain under human judgment.

A business can collect data merely because collection is technically possible.

A developer can introduce an artificial-intelligence system into a workflow without asking whether doing so makes the people involved more capable or merely more dependent.

A maintainer can rewrite a stable system because the new design is intellectually appealing even though users need reliability more than novelty.

Practical Wisdom requires attention to the real problem, the real user, the likely consequences, and the actual good being pursued.

That is why the Virtuous Programmer Initiative treats judgment as more important than cleverness.

Spiritedness gives us the courage to repair what is wrong

Spiritedness is the energy which makes a programmer care that something is broken, neglected, unjust, dangerous, wasteful, hostile to users, or needlessly difficult.

The Virtuous Programmer is not indifferent.

He may become angry when a system wastes people's time.

He may be dissatisfied when a project excludes newcomers unnecessarily.

He may care deeply when software treats users deceptively.

He may object when technical workers are expected to carry impossible workloads while being treated as interchangeable parts.

He may become frustrated when institutions place procedure above the people the procedure was intended to serve.

Properly ordered, this energy becomes the willingness to repair.

This also corresponds to the concern in Magnifica Humanitas that technological development be actively directed toward human flourishing rather than simply allowed to follow whatever incentives happen to dominate the market.

The opposite of impatience is not apathy.

The Virtuous Programmer should care enough to improve what is broken, but should do so with Patience, justice, and respect for other people.

Good Order means building things others can inhabit

A well-ordered program can be inherited.

A well-ordered project can survive the departure of its original author.

A well-ordered community can welcome apprentices without depending upon secret knowledge.

A well-ordered business can provide value to customers while supporting the people who perform the work.

A well-ordered technological system leaves meaningful responsibility with human beings.

This is why maintainability, documentation, testing, clear interfaces, predictable releases, licensing, source control, and responsible governance are moral questions as well as technical ones.

They concern what we leave for other people.

The Virtuous Programmer Initiative therefore treats Good Order as stewardship.

A master programmer should leave behind more than clever code.

He should leave something another person can understand, maintain, repair, and perhaps improve.

That is closely related to the concern in Magnifica Humanitas for social conditions in which human beings retain agency, responsibility, participation, and freedom.

Subsidiarity and the independent craftsman

The idea of subsidiarity has particular importance for Perl Guilds.

Perl-Guilds.net exists in part to encourage independent programmers, small consultancies, specialists, maintainers, and other craftsmen who may work outside large technological institutions.

The principle of subsidiarity suggests that larger structures should support smaller actors when support is needed, but should not unnecessarily absorb work which individuals, families, local communities, small businesses, or voluntary associations can perform competently themselves.

This has a direct technological application.

Not every useful application needs to become a centralized cloud platform.

Not every service needs to require a permanent network connection.

Not every piece of data needs to be transferred to a large remote provider.

Not every programmer needs to become an employee of an enormous technology company in order to perform valuable work.

Not every customer needs to surrender control over his tools and information merely because centralized systems are technically possible.

The Perl Lazarus Project provides one practical example.

A capable desktop application can perform work locally when that work belongs naturally on the user's computer, while communicating with remote services when centralized resources are genuinely appropriate.

The question is not “desktop versus cloud” as an ideology.

It is:

Where should this work properly be done?

That is a question of Practical Wisdom and subsidiarity.

Solidarity means the independent programmer is not alone

Subsidiarity does not mean radical individualism.

Perl Guilds does not imagine the independent programmer as an isolated genius who owes nothing to anyone.

The craftsman depends upon others constantly.

He uses languages written by others.

He installs modules maintained by others.

He reads documentation written by others.

He inherits operating systems, compilers, protocols, libraries, examples, standards, and accumulated technical knowledge.

He may rely upon customers, fellow programmers, reviewers, mentors, maintainers, publishers, hosting providers, and communities.

The virtue of Humility acknowledges this dependence.

The principle of solidarity adds that the craftsman should also contribute to the good of others.

This can take many forms:

• answering a newcomer's question;
• maintaining a CPAN distribution;
• reporting a defect accurately;
• contributing a patch;
• writing documentation;
• sharing a working example;
• paying for a commercial tool when its author reasonably asks commercial users to support it;
• teaching an apprentice;
• referring work to another programmer;
• reviewing somebody else's code;
• preserving knowledge that might otherwise disappear;
• and helping another craftsman remain economically viable.

The guild idea should therefore never become a closed caste.

A healthy guild preserves knowledge, forms new craftsmen, supports independent work, and creates relationships in which people can help one another flourish.

Apprenticeship protects the human transmission of knowledge

Artificial intelligence makes apprenticeship more important, not less.

A new programmer can now ask an AI system to produce code that would once have required considerably more experience.

That can be useful.

It can also create the illusion of competence without understanding.

The Virtuous Programmer Initiative therefore emphasizes the traditional progression from apprentice to journeyman to master.

These words describe differences in experience, judgment, responsibility, and skill.

They do not describe differences in human dignity.

An apprentice learns not merely syntax but judgment.

A journeyman learns to carry work independently and encounter problems outside the controlled environment of instruction.

A master learns to bring significant work to completion, accept responsibility for it, and help form others.

AI can assist at every stage.

It cannot replace the human relationship through which judgment, responsibility, professional habits, and virtue are formed.

An apprentice ultimately needs to learn why a solution is correct, when it is appropriate, what assumptions it contains, how it may fail, and who will bear the consequences.

Those are human questions.

A just livelihood is part of the project

Perl Guilds also exists because programmers need to eat.

They have families.

They require homes.

They need medical care, rest, education, savings, tools, and stability.

The idea that programming is a craft includes the possibility that a person should be able to earn a just and sustainable livelihood through that craft.

There is therefore nothing shameful about profit.

A programmer may sell software.

He may charge for consulting.

He may provide commercial support.

He may operate a hosted service.

He may write a book.

He may license a specialized tool.

He may charge for customization, migration, training, maintenance, or integration.

The moral question is not whether money changes hands.

The question is whether exchange remains ordered toward justice and genuine service.

Does the customer receive something of value?

Are promises kept?

Are workers compensated fairly?

Are licenses respected?

Are users manipulated into dependence unnecessarily?

Does the business model encourage deception or exploitation?

Can the work support the programmer's legitimate obligations to family and community?

This places the economic aspirations of Perl Guilds within the same broad concern for the dignity of work expressed in Magnifica Humanitas.

The goal is not merely to maximize revenue.

The goal is to make useful technical craftsmanship economically sustainable.

AI should increase human capability, not erase human responsibility

The Virtuous Programmer Initiative is not hostile to artificial intelligence.

AI can be extraordinarily useful.

It can help explain unfamiliar code.

It can prepare drafts.

It can suggest tests.

It can help generate documentation.

It can produce first versions of GUI layouts.

It can assist with debugging.

It can help a programmer explore alternatives faster than he could alone.

The Perl Lazarus work already demonstrates some of these possibilities.

But AI remains a tool.

The programmer remains responsible for understanding what is produced, determining whether it is appropriate, testing it, correcting it, and deciding whether it should be used at all.

This is one of the clearest points of convergence with Magnifica Humanitas.

The Virtuous Programmer should seek:

automation without abdication.

We can delegate computation.

We can delegate repetitive manipulation.

We can delegate the production of drafts.

We cannot delegate moral responsibility simply by placing an algorithm between ourselves and the consequences.

The Perl community itself is worth cultivating

Finally, the Virtuous Programmer Initiative is not merely about improving individual programmers.

It is about cultivating a community in which good programming can continue to exist.

Perl has accumulated decades of knowledge, modules, practices, personalities, mistakes, successes, humor, and craftsmanship.

That inheritance is valuable because of the people and useful work it enables.

Preserving Perl therefore does not mean placing the language in a museum.

It means creating conditions under which another generation can use it productively.

That includes:

• welcoming apprentices;
• preserving working knowledge;
• maintaining useful modules;
• documenting difficult systems;
• creating new commercial opportunities;
• demonstrating modern applications;
• encouraging independent craftsmen;
• producing books and essays;
• building tools;
• exploring artificial intelligence without surrendering judgment;
• and reminding the community that technical excellence is ultimately for the good of persons.

This is why the Virtuous Programmer Initiative begins with virtue rather than merely technique.

Technique tells us how.

Virtue helps us judge when, why, for whom, and toward what end.

A shared question

Perl Guilds, the Virtuous Programmer Initiative, and Magnifica Humanitas arise from very different kinds of institutions and possess very different purposes. Nothing here should be understood as claiming ecclesiastical endorsement of Perl Guilds or of any particular programming project.

The point of convergence is more fundamental.

They ask versions of the same human question:

What are our powers for?

Perl gives programmers power.

Open source gives communities power.

Commerce gives businesses power.

Automation gives organizations power.

Artificial intelligence gives developers and institutions extraordinary new power.

Virtue concerns the proper use of that power.

The work of Perl Guilds is therefore not simply to help programmers become more technically capable.

It is to help cultivate craftsmen who can use technical capability wisely; who possess the spiritedness to undertake difficult and worthy work; who leave behind good order rather than chaos; who practice diligence, patience, and humility; who respect the dignity of users and fellow workers; who can earn a just livelihood through genuine service; and who can pass their knowledge to those who come after them.

In that sense, the Virtuous Programmer Initiative is deeply consonant with the central challenge of Magnifica Humanitas.

The goal is not less technology.

The goal is technology kept in its proper place.

The goal is not less human creativity.

It is human creativity directed toward good ends.

The goal is not to make programmers servants of increasingly powerful machines.

It is to form programmers capable of making powerful machines into good servants of human beings.

And the final measure of our technical work is therefore not simply how much we have built.

It is what kind of people, communities, livelihoods, and human world our building helps to sustain.

Read the original

This page is only an overview and necessarily leaves out much of the argument.

Readers are strongly encouraged to read the encyclical itself:

• Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence

See also

• Open Sourcing the Virtues of a Perl Programmer
• The Real 3 Virtues of Perl
• Essays about The Virtuous Perl Programmer
• The Virtuous Perl Programmer
• Perl Guilds

References

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