What is anthropological regression?

Search for this phrase and two different arguments come up. One is about employment and belongs to the text the phrase comes from. The other applies it to capability and AI, a borrowing from that text. Both are worth having, so the first step is working out which one a given sentence is making.

The paragraph it comes from is about jobs#

The sentence is in paragraph 154 of an encyclical whose full title is Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. The paragraph begins with work as more than income: a means of sustenance, and also a setting for expression, for relationships and for a person's share in the life of the community. It then argues that a society guaranteeing employment to only a small fraction of its people, despite a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli. The paragraph calls this a paradox of material progress and says it undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace. Graded entry.

Read in full at source on 4 October 2026, the paragraph's closing sentence sets the concern inside technological and organisational change that proceeds outside democratic control, so it belongs in an encyclical about AI. The harm it names is the absence of work. Nothing in the paragraph concerns a skill fading because a person used a tool, and it offers no measurement of anything. It is a moral and policy argument, and it ends by asking that access to work for all be a priority of public policy.

Earlier writers used the same two words for something else#

Jan Szmyd, writing in a 2014 volume of Analecta Husserliana edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, titled a chapter "Anthropological Regression in the Modern World". As the publisher describes it, the chapter argues that technical civilisation and neoliberal economics produce emotional impoverishment, instrumental human relations, consumerism in place of authentic being, and confusion between virtual and real experience. That is a cultural diagnosis with no connection to employment. Only the publisher's description was read, not the chapter, so the summary here is as far as this page goes. Graded entry. The phrase therefore has at least two senses before anyone applies it to AI, and a writer who uses it without saying whose should expect to be misread.

Lending the phrase to the capability argument is an interpretation#

The encyclical's three losses, inactivity, absent responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, have a structural cousin in the capability literature. Take away the task that exercised a person and what the task maintained goes with it. In the colonoscopy study by Budzyn and colleagues, detection of adenomas in unassisted procedures fell from 28.4 to 22.4 per cent after AI was introduced. In the high-school trial by Bastani and colleagues, students who had used unrestricted GPT-4 scored 17 per cent lower than those who never had it once the tool was withdrawn. Budzyn, Bastani.

The mechanisms differ in a way that matters. The encyclical's person has lost the work. The people in those studies kept their jobs and their classes and lost something inside them, while the output stayed fine. A person can be fully employed and still be missing the daily tasks that formed them, and that is the borrowed use. The measurements cover skill on a defined task. None of them measures impoverishment in the wider human sense the encyclical means, so the phrase can carry the worry and cannot carry a finding. Rahim Hirji's own version of the argument is about repetitions: in his essay of 18 January 2026 he wrote "The reps you skip are the reps that would have made you." That is an argument about practice, set out in the missed reps, and the encyclical gives it a moral vocabulary without supplying evidence for it.

Using the phrase without overclaiming#

Say whose sense is in play. If the sentence is about the absence of work, it is the encyclical's. If it is about people in work losing practice, it is a borrowing and should be marked as one. Do not cite the encyclical as evidence that AI deskills workers: the paragraph does not say so, and the graded entry records that the document measures nothing. For the measured side, start with deskilling.

Key sources

• Leo XIV (2026). Magnifica Humanitas: Encyclical Letter on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, paragraph 154. The Holy See, 15 May 2026. Graded entry.
• Szmyd, J. (2014). Anthropological Regression in the Modern World Versus Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's Metaphysics of Ontopoiesis of Life. In Tymieniecka, A.-T. (ed.), Phenomenology of Space and Time, Analecta Husserliana 116. Springer. Graded entry.
• Budzyn, K. et al. (2025). Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy. The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, 10(10), 896-903. Graded entry.
• Bastani, H. et al. (2025). Generative AI Without Guardrails Can Harm Learning. PNAS, 122(26). Graded entry.
• Hirji, R. (2026). The Case for Being Bad at Things. Box of Amazing, 18 January 2026.

Related SuperSkills research#

On the measured loss, deskilling and capability debt. On the practice behind it, the missed reps. On a related cost to the person, outsourced recognition. On how religious institutions have addressed AI, what religious leaders say about AI.

About this research#

Written by Rahim Hirji, author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026), keynote speaker on AI and human capability, and founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company. The phrase "anthropological regression" is not claimed by this research. The paragraph of the encyclical was read in full at source and the quotations are exact; the 2014 chapter was read only as described by its publisher. The interpretation is kept separate from the findings.

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