In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his papacy’s first encyclical – or worldwide papal circular. The stunning 42,300-word letter, titled Magnifica Humanitas, presents a sweeping indictment of the unchecked spread of AI and calls on greater oversight and regulation. This should have come as no surprise, however. In a speech to the College of Cardinals early in his papacy in 2025, Pope Leo had already warned of the risks artificial intelligence presents to “human dignity, justice and labor.” The selective use of these terms is significant. In his encyclical he went on to quote twentieth century philosopher Hannah Arendt and her formative work on totalitarianism.
This public invocation of Arendt invites us to revisit her work and its relevance for our current age, often labeled as the Fourth Industrial Revolution and seen as beginning approximately in 2013, when robotics, information technology and the internet of things started becoming increasingly autonomous and able to “learn.” Now is the time to ask the question that arguably lies at the heart of Arendt’s scholarship: “What makes us human?”
Many know the German-American philosopher from the now-popularized concept of the “banality of evil,” used to describe the bureaucratization of genocide through the mundane professionalism of Nazi leaders like Adolf Eichmann in planning the Final Solution. Writing from Eichmann’s trial in 1961, Arendt asked critical questions about the morality and ethics of being human, about the duties and responsibilities we hold towards one another in ensuring a just society. Ultimately, she held that political action is key to mediating runaway technologies and overly rationalized policies in order to prevent the type of dehumanization that at its worst can lead to genocide.
Deliberation, compromise, discussion in public settings; all are acts that constitute higher order thinking and organization. They also present opportunities for individuals to be accountable to others.
The Vita Activa
In her seminal book The Human Condition, Arendt drew upon ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle to lay out a roadmap for such ethical and moral practice through political engagement and cooperation. Published in 1958, the scholar was writing in a post-World War II environment of immense technological advancement and global economic growth. For Arendt, thinking about the Holocaust led to a consideration of how labor and work – fundamental acts in any human community – relates to the political. Upon analyzing the role bureaucratic and seemingly non-political workers played within the Nazi regime in enacting the Holocaust and later the role of technocrats in developing nuclear bombs, she settled upon a hierarchically ascending order of the concepts labor, work, and action to describe what she calls vita activa, or the active human engagement with the world.
Humans are inevitably caught up in natural rhythms of life, such as birth, death, and the ability to work the earth to ensure survival. Accordingly, Arendt’s use of labor refers to animal laborans, or the physical sustenance and reproduction of life that is immediately consumed. The daily washing up in a household, birthing and raising children, the sowing and reaping of crops, the hunting for food; these all are necessary aspects of society but runs the risk of reducing individuals to merely fulfilling the basest forms of drudgery.
Work, or homo faber, constitutes the human potential for technology and the creation of artifacts that transform the earth and leave a trace through time and space. Homo faber, after all, literally means man the maker. The carpenters, the artists, the scientists, the engineers; such workers, Arendt argued, create more sophisticated worlds through their labor but still run the risk of turning everyday life into a technical problem that can be solved through the right formula or manufacturing process. Sound familiar?
Accordingly, for Arendt it is action, or a political capacity, through which individuals using speech can create new worlds of civility and compromise. Deliberation, compromise, discussion in public settings; all are acts that constitute higher order thinking and organization. They also present opportunities for individuals to be accountable to others. So, while animal laborans, homo faber, and action are all formative to the human condition, it is action that can best fulfill the normative human condition, or who we should be. Political action, in other words, constitutes freedom because it goes beyond mere survival and production into a realm of collective decision making.
She coined the phrase vita activa in contrast to the ancient Greek concept of vita contemplativa, to refer to the way in which active engagement with the political realm became instrumentalized and subordinated to an increasing concern with capitalist development and rationalized bureaucracy in the West through changes such as the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the growth of capitalism. In other words, economic productivity became more important than active political involvement. Our societies grew more rationalized and the business of politics became increasingly technocratic. Through the lens of Arendt’s writing, then, we find ourselves in both familiar and new territory as we navigate new technological configurations.
Our societies grew more rationalized and the business of politics became increasingly technocratic. Through the lens of Arendt’s writing, then, we find ourselves in both familiar and new territory as we navigate new technological configurations.
Technology vs. Technocracy
If we define technology as “a system created by humans that uses knowledge and organization to produce objects and techniques for the attainment of specific goals” and a technocracy as a political system “governed and managed using purportedly objective scientific and technical principles, and in which ultimate power and authority rests with technical and scientific experts,” then the jump we make from the former to the latter involves how power is deployed. The former, technology, has been key to human development since ancestors shaped stones into tools and used wood to create fire. It is a deeply human impulse to imagine and instrumentalize the natural world in our favor. And Arendt was far from a Luddite. Her critique wasn’t anti-technology so much as a call for avoiding the type of highly rationalized forms of reason that risk stripping the dynamism, pluralism, and above all, political engagement from society, i.e. a technocracy. When we fall into the trap of technological determinism, or “the belief that technology acts as an independent force in our life, unaffected by social forces,” then we run the risk of not holding our use of technology and those wielding it accountable.
Arendt has already provided some rationale as to why such a political system is dangerous in the realm of work. If work life in its most efficient and calculated form comes to undermine moral and political realms, the ends come to justify the means in ways that eventually lead to a loss of “intrinsic worth” of everyday life and humanity, Eichmann and the Nazi regime being a key example of such a phenomenon. At the very least, even if Eichmann claimed to just be doing his job, he nonetheless existed as an individual who could be held accountable to society. In the age of AI, we run the risk of displacing not only individual creativity, but individuals as workers themselves. Without people at the helm, who then will be held accountable?
Does Technology Have Politics?
In a famous essay about technology and politics entitled Do Artifacts Have Politics?, American academic Langdon Winner argued that just as we look at laws and rules and social norms to better understand politics, we should also examine critically the “building of highways, the creation of television networks, and the tailoring of seemingly insignificant features on new machines.” Similarly, any massive development and implementation of new technologies call out for the type of political deliberation Arendt argued for. The deployment of technology is a political process. Accordingly, we as citizens are stakeholders and deserve to be part of such a process.
If Arendt were alive today, she undoubtedly would have been worried about how, in our globalized world of sophisticated production and relentless consumption, not only rationalization but also automation may displace individual creativity and politically-engaged world building. The societal shift towards massive automation and the ubiquity and “inevitability” of digital technologies like AI would have concerned her. If we take seriously her perspective, then we should work towards ensuring that technology, economic profit, and bureaucratic rationalization should never subordinate or replace the political actions that can ensure human dignity. Rather, we should be working towards a politics that incorporates the human aspect of any technological development. As we continue to co-evolve with technology, it may be useful to shift from asking “What makes us human?” to “What keeps us human in the age of AI?”
By Deniz Daser