The fundamental differences between the digital mutation and the industrial revolution.

Vision Paper by Francesco Grillo and Silvia Scarafoni.

Elaboration of an article originally published in Il Messaggero by Francesco Grillo.

“[...] The prodigious progress of the arts and the new methods of industry; the changed relations between masters and workers; the accumulation of wealth in a few hands and the widespread extension of poverty; the more vivid sentiment of their own strength awakened in the working classes […] caused the conflict to erupt.”

These are the opening words of what is considered one of the most important texts of the nineteenth century, alongside Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty. The encyclical of Leo XIII, the first Pope who found himself having to lead a Church without a State, aimed to propose a thesis of the industrial revolution that was an alternative to both the socialist and the liberal ones. Today, Leo XIV, with the choice of his name, places the same intellectual and social ambition at the centre of his pontificate. Compared to the revolution of 150 years ago, however, the current revolution presents two radical differences. Differences that complicate the operation, as the leaders of a millennial institution know well.

The encyclical the Pope dedicated to providing a theory of the Church on “new things” (Rerum Novarum) dates back to 1891. Rome had approximately 250,000 inhabitants (less than a sixth of those living there two thousand years prior) and was — like the rest of the world — without electricity, and not even telephones. Only a century and a half has passed since those years, and yet, human society has, in the meantime, experienced an unprecedented leap. What Leo called “the ardent desire for novelty” was already producing unthinkable progress and lacerating contradictions. The Church, with its social doctrine, sought a balance between those who believed in the necessity of encouraging the destructive innovation of captains of industry and those who responded by prophesying and organizing class struggle. The Pope saw the antidote to conflict in the formulation of workers’ rights to employment and a dignified wage and the establishment of associations to protect them: in this, the doctrine of a Church that decided to “enter the fray” stands in surprising continuity with the first trade unions founded by the Socialist Party, which was established the year after the encyclical. This paradox was already visible during the Industrial Revolution: as shown by Robert Solow, technology does not guarantee progress for all. If left unguided, it can produce growth without jobs and concentrate wealth in a few hands.

The New Revolution: A Biological Mutation

After 150 years, in an even more dazzling and fractured world, the new Leo finds himself facing a task that is intellectually more difficult. For two reasons.

The first is that the current revolution is not an industrial one but a biological mutation. The one that began in the mid-eighteenth century with mechanical looms and was further accelerated by railways, which allowed for specialization, changed the world outside of us. Productivity increased by several orders of magnitude, and the concentration of the means of production replaced a humanity of small artisans with multitudes of workers who owned nothing but their own labour. Digital transformation, on the other hand, changes us within. It has long been transforming our cognitive processes. Those through which we convert information into knowledge, that is, how we think. Even touching what Christians call the “soul.” With artificial intelligence, the capacities that have defined us could even be replaced by extremely fast machines (and without dreams). As Yuval Noah Harari has profoundly described, this is the rise of a new “useless class,” where entire populations risk irrelevance not due to lack of employment, but because of a loss of cognitive role in a society dominated by algorithms. While the industrial age created a world of poverty, the digital age threatens to create a world of irrelevance. It is possible to argue that the industrial revolution was creating a poor humanity; the artificial intelligence revolution risks rendering us, instead, useless.

The Search for Meaning: Filling the Void in a Fractured World

As Luciano Floridi argues, we now live in the infosphere, an environment where it’s impossible to distinguish between online and offline life. What we lack is a new ethics capable of guiding responsibility in this digital age. Floridi calls this condition “onlife,” where our digital and physical experiences are so interconnected that old conceptual frameworks no longer suffice.

The second difference in the two contexts is that, while Leo XIII wrote his theory in competition with those of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, for Leo XIV the challenge is to fill a void. Today, there is no one — not even in the major consulting firms and universities where my generation grew up — who truly still has a comprehensive theory of what is happening. And this is perhaps precisely because — as the natural scientists who formulated the uncertainty principle would warn — it does not so much change the observed facts, but rather the observer’s position. We need new tools to understand knowledge, precisely while the world changes before our eyes.

A world reduced to chasing squalid headlines, to vivisecting symptoms of much deeper discontents, no longer has the strength to study and, therefore, to solve problems. And among these symptoms are also populisms — including American ones — in response to which we are reduced to dividing ourselves into polarized tribes (to which some would even want the Pope to adhere). The Church, however, can succeed. Or rather, it can contribute, with other women and men of good will and courage, to finding a key to understanding, and thus, to acting. Perhaps its advantage lies in feeling part of a millennial history. After all, the future cannot be understood without the historical memory of those who, before us, sought to capture the meaning of new things.

References  

Business Insider. (2025, May 11). Pope Leo XIV identifies AI as humanity’s new challenge, echoing Rerum Novarum. Link.

Floridi, L. (2014). The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0198736247

Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper. ISBN: 978-0062316097

Solow, R. M. (1987, July 12). We’d better watch out. New York Times Book Review. Link.

Pullella, P. (2025, May). Pope Leo XIV invokes Leo XIII to confront the age of artificial intelligence. Link.

Reuters. (2025, May). Pope Leo tells cardinals they must continue the precious legacy of Pope Francis. Link.