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The last industrial revolution found its moral framework too late. AI is not needed.
Last November, I had the good fortune to meet Pope Leo XIV in a private audience on the dignity of children and artificial intelligence. I asked Papa Leo if he was comfortable with artificial intelligence becoming a viable system for human life.
He was silent for a long time.
Then he simply said: No.
On May 15, Pope Leo signed Magnifica Humanitas — his first book on artificial intelligence and the defense of human dignity. It will be published next week. He signed 135 years to the day after his namesake, Leo XIII, published Rerum Novarum — the document that gave the industrial revolution its moral framework. Compatibility is intentional.
Rerum Novarum came decades after the start of the industrial revolution. At that time, the communities were already missed. Workers are exploited. Children have already paid the price for a development that was not designed with them in mind. The moral framework came — but after the damage and construction.
The people building AI are not fooling around with the scale of what’s to come. Demis Hassabis of Google — Nobel laureate, founder of DeepMind, one of the architects of modern artificial intelligence — described this period as 10 times the industrial revolution, with 10 times the speed. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei talks about systems surpassing human capabilities in almost every domain in a matter of years. OpenAI’s Sam Altman suggested what’s coming may require a new social contract on the scale of the New Deal.
These are not rhetorical claims. They are a thoughtful assessment of those close to technology.
If they are right — and I believe they are — then what we decide in this window will change the conditions of human life for generations. Not just for those who can afford the best equipment or live in the most connected cities, but everyone.
That’s the real promise of AI. Not productivity gains or market returns — or those will come. The deep promise is a true civilizational upliftment: suppressing decades of scientific progress, extending human power to people who have never reached any of it, expanding agency rather than focusing on it.
But that result is not guaranteed by the presence of technology. It depends entirely on the values embedded in the systems being built, the diversity of voices that shape them, and the structures that govern how they are used. Currently, those decisions are made within an unusually small circle; without the participation of the most affected communities, and without the moral frameworks that have guided humanity through change in the past.
This is not a criticism of those who create AI. Most understand the weight of what they carry. The problem with the structure: the two communities most capable of shaping this era — AI developers, and the world’s major moral and religious institutions — have never been in serious conversation. They live in a parallel universe, each with an incomplete image.
That’s what the Faith-AI Covenant project is designed to change. We bring together AI companies and the world’s religious traditions in a structured discussion about the values that should govern this technology. Not to prevent. Not control from the outside. But bringing the wisdom, moral authority and trust that religious communities have gained over a thousand years into the discourse, while structures are still being built, and path dependence is not yet too deep to be redirected.
Last month in New York, our first roundtable brought representatives from Anthropic, OpenAI and others in the same room as top religious leaders from all cultures. The conversations were unlike any I’ve had in forty years in the industry. Faith leaders bring something the tech industry can’t: the trust of billions of people who don’t question whether AI is awesome. They asked if it was okay. Whether it will leave their communities behind, or bring them forward.
Those are the right questions. And they need to be asked now.
The encyclical sends a clear signal to all governments, all investors, all technology companies: There is a place for almost one and a half billion people who believe that human dignity cannot be negotiated. And they pay attention.
Rerum Novarum changed the course of the industrial revolution. But it came too late for the people who needed it most.
In this case, the behavior framework is written before the structure is prepared. That’s the time we’re in.
