Chilean academic: Pope's 'paradise of machines' warning carries urgency for Latin America

Small errors can compound into systemic crises, Cantero argues

Pope Leo XIV warned on Sept. 25 during a visit to France that humanity risks losing itself amid a “paradise of machines” that invades and conditions daily life. His remedy, presented at the Élysée Palace, was not a new technology but “education in ethical discernment.” Later that day at UNESCO, he warned that new technologies could become instruments of domination and injustice.

Chilean academic Carlos Cantero, writing Sept. 30 in a United Press International commentary, argued the pope’s warning carries a specific message for Latin America. “Systems rarely collapse because of a single isolated failure,” Cantero wrote. “More often, small deviations accumulate, each pushing the boundary a little further, until conduct once considered unacceptable becomes normal and institutions lose their capacity to correct themselves.”

Cantero, an academic at the International University of La Rioja in Spain and author of “Digital Society: Reason and Emotion,” invoked physicist Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory to frame the argument. “Social systems are not weather systems, but the metaphor remains useful: a seemingly minor decision can trigger consequences no one anticipated,” he wrote.

Digital society amplifies the risk, Cantero argued, because political statements cross borders in seconds and false information can circulate before institutions have time to correct it. He wrote that a leader does not need to intend a crisis to help create one, and that poor judgment or an uncorrected abuse of power can set off a chain reaction that becomes increasingly difficult to control.

Ethics, Cantero wrote, is part of “society’s connective tissue. When dishonesty is tolerated on a small scale, distrust can spread far beyond the original offense.” Corruption, he argued, widens the gap between what institutions say and what they do.

The commentary describes the process as a gradient: “an almost imperceptible shift in the boundary of what society is willing to tolerate.” Cantero draws on Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and counterposes what he calls the “banality of good” — the comfortable belief that personal decency alone is enough, that a person who does not steal or participate directly in wrongdoing has fulfilled their responsibility. “The public official who knows of an irregular contract and says nothing, or the colleague who shrugs at a falsified report, may not have committed the original wrongdoing. But silence can become a form of complicity by omission.”

Cantero cites education as a case study in gradual deterioration. In the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 2022 PISA assessments, Chile posted Latin America’s highest mathematics score, 412 points, compared with an OECD average of 472. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, the average Latin American student trails OECD peers in mathematics by the equivalent of five years of schooling. “These results reflect problems accumulated over years, not a sudden crisis,” the commentary states. Cantero writes that the pope’s call for education reaches beyond technology, pointing toward an ethical formation concerned with the whole human person.

The commentary contrasts two natural disasters to illustrate how decisions determine outcomes. In February 2010, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck central Chile and killed roughly 500 people. Six weeks earlier, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake in Haiti had taken more than 200,000 lives, according to widely cited estimates. Cantero notes that disaster-risk experts have identified Chile’s strict building codes and their enforcement as major factors in limiting casualties, decisions made decades before the quake struck.

Cantero points to Pope Leo XIV’s May encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which warned of the dangers artificial intelligence can pose to democracy. Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, participated in the encyclical’s presentation at the Vatican. David Sacks, co-chair of President Donald Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, agreed with the pope’s emphasis on human dignity but warned that sweeping government power over artificial intelligence could itself create risks of censorship, surveillance and control.

“These voices do not agree on every remedy, but they point toward the same reality: technological power is advancing faster than many of the institutions and leaders responsible for governing its consequences,” Cantero wrote.

Cantero wrote that the problem is not confined to one ideology or one country, and that errors of judgment can come from the left or the right, from governments or businesses. What matters, he argued, is whether institutions retain the capacity to recognize mistakes and correct them, regardless of who holds power.

“Public ethics is part of the infrastructure that allows democratic institutions to function,” the commentary concludes. “Every tolerated omission shifts the boundary a little further, and every small act of corruption makes the next one easier to accept.”

“A butterfly’s wingbeat does not guarantee a storm,” Cantero wrote, “but it can help create the conditions under which a storm becomes possible. The task of leadership is to recognize small deviations while they can still be corrected and to act with ethics as a compass.”