A Post from our Founder, Matt Randerson: What Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical reveals about dignity, power, and the future we are building

Lately I have been thinking about the 5 major socializing institutions that form us (Family, Education, Religion, Economy, and Government). These institutions are critical helping us understand norms and behaviors that help us assimilate into and survive in a culture from birth to death.

Religion is a significant and historic institution in a culture and society. My aim in this post is not persuasion toward or away from a particular faith tradition. This article is meant to encourage all of us to reflection regarding the weight and magnitude of this time in history. What happened this week (May 25, 2026) with the Pope of the Catholic Church matters greatly for the humanity regardless of religious faith.

Across civilizations, religious institutions have helped people make meaning, form moral imagination, practice belonging, organize communities, and wrestle with questions that exceed the limits of economics, politics, and technology.

So when one of the world’s oldest religious institutions releases a major publication on artificial intelligence, I think it deserves our attention. Not because everyone will share the same theology, it matters because moments like this tell us something about the scale of the question now in front of us.

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, was released on May 25, 2026. For Catholics, it is a significant teaching document. Regardless of religious affiliation, background, or belief, it is a cultural moment worth pausing over because when an institution with centuries of influence turns its attention so directly toward artificial intelligence, it is signaling that AI is no longer merely a technical matter. It has entered the realm of human meaning.

The Pope’s message is a clarion call amidst extraordinary technological acceleration: the human person must not become secondary to the systems, tools, efficiencies, and ambitions we create. Artificial intelligence is beginning to shape how people work, learn, create, communicate, encounter truth, make decisions, and understand their own value. When a technology begins to touch that much of human life, the question can no longer be limited to what it can do. The deeper question becomes what it is doing to us, and what kind of people we hope to become with it.

The historical connection makes this especially clear. The Vatican noted that Magnifica Humanitas bears the Pope’s signature dated May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical responding to the social upheaval of the 2nd Industrial Revolution. Choosing to release it on the anniversary was not simply a symbolic date. It was a way of placing artificial intelligence (the catalyst to the 4th industrial revolution) inside a much older and more serious human conversation: how societies respond when technology becomes powerful enough to reorder work, power, dignity, and daily life.

The 4th Industrial Revolution & the historical weight of this moment

The 2nd Industrial Revolution did not merely give the world new machines. It changed how people worked, where they lived, what labor was worth, how capital moved, how families organized, and how societies understood progress.

It’s forcing us to ask whether technological and economic growth could or should be separated from the dignity of the human person. Artificial intelligence is now pressing similar questions in a digital age:

• What is work worth when more cognitive tasks can be automated?

• What is truth worth when synthetic media can be generated at scale?

• What is judgment worth when decisions are increasingly shaped by systems most people cannot see or understand?

• What is human connection worth when machines can simulate empathy, companionship, and care?

These are the questions that arise when technology becomes intimate enough, powerful enough, and pervasive enough to shape the conditions of human life. And that may be why the broader response to the encyclical that matters.

The Guardian, writing from a broad editorial posture, framed the document as significant because it places human dignity at the center of a digital revolution reshaping labor, care, warfare, and public life faster than our ethical systems can respond. That framing helps clarify the larger point: this is not just a religious leader commenting on a new technology. It is one of the world’s oldest moral institutions placing AI inside the long history of social questions that emerge when technology changes the conditions of human life.

For the last several years, the public debate around AI has often moved between two familiar extremes. One side speaks in the language of acceleration: productivity, innovation, scale, disruption, competitive advantage. The other speaks in the language of alarm: job loss, misinformation, bias, surveillance, autonomous weapons, and loss of control. Both sides are responding to real things. AI does create extraordinary possibilities, and it also creates genuine risks.

But neither posture is enough by itself because the deepest question is not whether AI is useful or dangerous. The deeper question is what AI is for. That question moves us beyond adoption for its own sake and beyond resistance for its own sake. It asks whether the systems we are building are ordered toward human flourishing, or whether human beings are slowly being reorganized around the logic of the systems themselves.

This is where the language of human dignity becomes practical rather than sentimental. Dignity is a way of saying that people cannot be reduced to their usefulness, output, data, productivity, purchasing behavior, or predicted preferences. It is a way of saying that the human person must remain more important than the system built to serve them.

That may sound obvious until a technology becomes infrastructure. When a technology is optional, we can treat it like a tool. When it becomes infrastructure, it begins to shape the environment in which choices are made. AI is moving quickly in that direction. It is entering hiring systems, classrooms, healthcare, finance, customer service, creative production, warfare, media, search, governance, and everyday communication. It is beginning to affect not just what people do, but how people are evaluated, informed, influenced, included, excluded, and understood.

WIRED captured this well in its coverage of the encyclical, describing AI as part of the “invisible infrastructure” of contemporary daily life rather than simply another technology. That phrase matters because invisible infrastructure has a way of becoming morally invisible too. Once a system becomes normal, people often stop asking whether it is shaping them well. They simply adapt to it.

The AI conversation needs more than technical fluency. It needs moral attention. The central issue is not whether organizations, schools, governments, or individuals will use AI. They will. The more important question is whether they will use it with a clear enough understanding of what should not be diminished in the process.

A company can adopt AI and become faster while becoming less trustworthy. A school can use AI to produce more answers while forming less judgment. A platform can optimize engagement while degrading truth. A workplace can become more efficient while making people feel less seen, less valued, and less responsible for the meaning of their own contribution. A society can become more intelligent in its tools while becoming less wise in its choices.

This is the tension Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical places before the public. The concern is not that technology is inherently opposed to humanity.

The concern is that technology, when guided primarily by power, profit, speed, or control, can begin to treat human beings as material to be optimized rather than persons to be honored.

Religion News Service summarized one of the encyclical’s warnings as a concern that AI could widen inequality, weaken democracy, and undermine what it means to be human if it serves the powerful few rather than humanity as a whole.

That concern is not religiously exclusive. It is humanly recognizable. We can feel it when a system makes a decision about a person without that person understanding how the decision was made. We can feel it when work is discussed only in terms of cost savings and not in terms of dignity, contribution, formation, or community. We can feel it when communication becomes more abundant but less trustworthy. We can feel it when simulated intimacy begins to compete with real relationship. We can feel it when the future is described as inevitable, as if human beings are only passengers inside technological momentum.

The encyclical matters because it interrupts that sense of inevitability. It reminds us that the future is not only something to be predicted or optimized. It is something to be morally shaped. Its deeper value is that it insists on a prior question: What vision of the human person is guiding our choices?

Every AI strategy has an anthropology underneath it, whether or not it names one.

• If people are understood primarily as users, the goal will be engagement.

• If people are understood primarily as consumers, the goal will be conversion.

• If people are understood primarily as workers, the goal may become output.

• If people are understood primarily as data, the goal will be prediction.

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But if people are understood as bearers of dignity, creativity, conscience, relationship, and responsibility, then the purpose of technology must be judged differently. It must be judged by whether it helps people become more fully human, not merely more productive.

This is where I believe the HumanCulture lens becomes especially relevant. The future of AI will not be determined only by model capabilities. It will also be determined by the cultural values of the people and institutions deploying those capabilities. The question is not simply what AI can automate. The question is what leaders believe should be elevated, protected, and made more possible because AI exists.

That is a different kind of leadership question. It means executives cannot treat AI only as an efficiency initiative; they have to ask what kind of human dignity are creating or diminishing when more work becomes mediated by machines. Brands cannot treat AI only as a personalization engine; they have to ask whether automation deepens trust or makes the relationship feel extractive. Schools cannot treat AI only as a cheating problem or a productivity tool; they have to ask what kind of judgment, curiosity, and wisdom students still need to form. Communities cannot treat AI only as a convenience layer; they have to ask where human presence, accountability, and care must remain irreplaceable.

These are not secondary questions. They are the questions that determine whether AI becomes a tool for human flourishing or a force that quietly rearranges human life around non-human priorities.

Whether you are religious or non-religious, it can be harder to ignore the release of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical coinciding with the anniversary of Rerum Novarum - A profound clarion call for leaders and workers of every kind in the middle of an industrial revolution to think carefully about the effects the revolution was having on humankind, forever.

It asks us to stop treating AI as merely a tool we are adopting and start treating it as a force that is testing what we believe about humanity.