Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
In May 2026 Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical framed humanity's choice about artificial intelligence as Babel against Jerusalem: the tower of power against the community of care. Thirteen months earlier, the April 2025 manuscript of Infinite Architects had built its moral architecture on Babylon against Eden, with 106 references to Babylon across the text. Same scriptural well, same fork, same technology.
Convergence, and only convergence. Two authors, wholly unconnected, reached for the same biblical structure to frame the same question. The register entry says so in terms: no citation in either direction, no claim of influence. If anything, an influence claim would weaken the evidence, because the register's entire argument is that unconnected minds keep arriving at the same structures independently. Influence would make it one mind's idea travelling; independence makes it a pattern in the territory.
The manuscript of December 2024 argued that religious leaders must collaborate with governments and scientists on AI governance, a position that was, at the time, eccentric. By mid 2026 the Rome Summit had convened interfaith leaders on exactly this, the encyclical had made AI the subject of the highest form of Catholic teaching, and the entire College of Cardinals had been convened for two days on the document. The eccentric position became the institutional one. The register records that arc with dates and sources, and lets the reader weigh it.
The encyclical's text and its press coverage are public. The manuscript's hash is published and the Babylon and Eden counts are stated with their exact counting method. Compare them yourself; the entry stands or falls on the comparison, not on anyone's say-so.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.