A few years ago, I went up the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Inaugurated in 2010, it has 163 floors and stands over 800 meters tall. Its characteristic silhouette is visible from several kilometers away. It was designed by architect Adrian Smith, a passionate advocate for energy-sustainable buildings, though perhaps less so for modest constructions. In fact, his next project—still unfinished—is the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, conceived to surpass one kilometer in height.
As I contemplated the Burj Khalifa, I could not help seeing it as a new version of the Tower of Babel: that eternal biblical myth of the human drive to standardize the diversity of languages and cultures, homogenizing society through technique.
We know from the Book of Genesis what the outcome of that project was: physical and linguistic dispersion and the shattering of the dream to unify humanity. We also know that this failure was followed by a new and unexpected beginning, thanks to the seemingly irrelevant call of Abram to undertake a long journey of faith through history.
Since then, successive attempts to confuse uniformity with unity have systematically failed. In Bolivia, we once had a Prosecutor—now imprisoned—who mandated the homogenization of his staff through the mandatory use of green ties.
The root of the failure, according to the biblical narrative, lies in the pretense of unifying humanity through technological arrogance, dispensing with God as a factor of cohesion and with the free and conscious participation of individuals. Pope Leo XIV, in the encyclical *”Magnifica Humanitas”*, warns that the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a new incarnation of the Tower of Babel: a version no longer architectural, but of global scope, penetrating every sphere of human activity.
This new tower is built through algorithms and machines that simulate human cognition to the extreme of appearing empathetic with their interlocutors. In doing so, they challenge the creativity of the human mind, impose a supposedly univocal—when not outright falsified—narrative, and reproduce voices, faces, and identities at will.
It is a tower built by private corporations driven by the pursuit of profit, the greed for fame, and the rush to arrive first. All this is done without heed to potential flaws, while governments and citizens watch, often powerlessly, the dizzying development of this technological race.
Let it be clear: science and technology are an inseparable part of human development, and we all benefit from their goodness every day. However, we know that behind every new product of scientific and technological advancement—a medicine, a device, or an application that makes our lives easier—there is a rigorous methodology of testing, verification, and certification designed to guarantee its efficacy and safety.
The same does not happen with AI: its meteoric growth seems to have bypassed the usual quality control filters and side-effect mitigation measures. The breakneck speed of advancement has deliberately neglected safety and the profound ethical implications arising from its discriminatory or unregulated use.
Episodes of loss of control over autonomous AI “agents” have already been recorded, to the point that executives of the developing companies themselves have expressed concern and advocated for a pact to temporarily halt its expansion in the interest of safety. Nevertheless, these cautions continue to clash with the ambitions and suspicions of the geopolitics of dominant powers.
I wonder: Will we one day manage to climb the exclusive and excluding tower of Artificial Intelligence and still remain human?