The Choice the Drone Cannot Make

What's happening

On May 14, Pope Leo XIV addressed La Sapienza University in Rome, the first papal visit there since 2008, when Benedict XVI's invitation was withdrawn under faculty protest. Leo used the address to denounce what he called a "spiral of annihilation" in AI-directed warfare. Citing Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, he argued that the integration of new technologies into combat is reshaping the relationship between human decision and human killing. European military budgets have risen sharply this year, he said, "at the expense of education and healthcare," enriching defense firms while starving public goods. His specific concern about AI is that it "absolves humans of responsibility for their choices." An encyclical developing the argument is expected within weeks.

What the Text says

The first conversation after the first sin is an attempt to relocate the blame.

Genesis 3:12-1312The man said, "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate."13Yahweh God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

Adam blames the woman, and behind her, God (the woman you gave me). Eve blames the serpent. Each line is technically accurate. The woman did hand him the fruit. The serpent did speak. The text refuses the move and continues issuing consequences to each in turn. The Hebrew verb in Adam's mouth, natenah-li, "she gave to me," repeats the verb used through Genesis 1 and 2 for God's giving of every other gift. Adam takes the language of divine provision and converts it into an alibi. The deflection is the second sin, intertwined with the first.

What Genesis 3 names is that the buffer between act and actor is not a modern invention. It is the oldest human reflex. Every layer of mediation between the hand that decides and the body that suffers, whether the order from a superior, the law on the books, or the screen that shows a coordinate rather than a face, extends a structure that began in the garden.

The reflection

The Pope's framing of AI as a moral buffer is sharper than it looks. Systems of automation extend a story Adam already knew. Killing through a chain of mediations was possible long before computers; the chain just becomes harder to trace as it lengthens. When the trigger is pulled by a model trained by a vendor on a contract approved by an agency on a budget set by a legislature, no link in the chain has to feel the weight.

Scripture is not naïve about complexity. It has whole books on apparatuses large enough to obscure their authors. Babel, Egypt, and Babylon all describe what happens when a system grows past the point where any single actor can locate themselves inside it. What Genesis 3 insists on, before any of those systems exist, is that the apparatus does not absorb the responsibility. Someone ate the fruit. The chain is just where we have learned to hide it.