You’ve heard the hype. Silicon Valley promises that artificial intelligence will fix everything. They say it’ll cure diseases, optimize our grids, and usher in a new age of prosperity. But they never talk about the cost. Not the dollar cost, but the human one.
When you strip away the marketing, you’re left with a cold, mechanical vision of the world. It’s a place where efficiency is the highest virtue and humans are just data points to be optimized. The Catholic Church has been dealing with this kind of top-down disruption for over a century. Long before the term AI existed, the Vatican was already fighting against the dehumanizing tendencies of the Industrial Revolution. They didn’t retreat into a bunker. They didn’t just complain. They stood their ground on a principle that is still the only real defense we have today: the inviolable dignity of the human person.
The old battle against machine logic
Back in 1891, Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum. The world was losing its mind over rapid industrialization. Factories were turning people into cogs. Owners treated workers like interchangeable parts in a massive machine. The Church didn’t hate the steam engine. It hated the idea that a human soul was worth less than a month’s output of steel.
Today, the language has changed, but the struggle is identical. We’ve traded steam power for neural networks. We’ve traded factory floors for server farms. The logic remains the same. When companies like Google or OpenAI tell you their tools are "neutral," don’t buy it. Every piece of code carries the values of the person who wrote it. If those values start with "maximize engagement" or "extract value," you’re already in trouble.
Subsidiarity is your best friend
One of the most misunderstood concepts in Catholic thought is subsidiarity. It sounds like a stuffy academic term, but it’s actually a radical guardrail for a digital society. Basically, it means that decisions should be made at the most local level possible.
In a world of black-box algorithms, power is constantly drifting upward. Huge corporations and centralized governments want to control the data, the rules, and the outcomes. They want a global, one-size-fits-all model for human behavior. Subsidiarity fights that. It argues that your local community—your neighborhood, your family, your parish—knows your needs better than a server in a data center ever will.
If we let AI automate every human interaction, we’re effectively nuking the concept of local responsibility. We’re outsourcing our moral judgments to machines that literally cannot understand what a "person" is.
The trap of the technocratic paradigm
Pope Leo XIV has been vocal about something he calls the "technocratic paradigm." This is the dangerous assumption that just because we can build something, we should. It’s a lazy way of thinking. It ignores the fact that technology isn’t a force of nature. It doesn’t just "happen" to us. We choose it.
When you look at how AI is being deployed in things like hiring, judicial sentencing, or even warfare, you see this paradigm in action. It’s the belief that an algorithm is more "objective" than a human judge. That’s a lie. Algorithms are trained on our past mistakes. They don't offer objective truth; they offer a statistical average of our biases.
The Church pushes back by saying that human judgment, flawed as it is, carries a moral weight that math can’t replicate. We have a conscience. We have the capacity for mercy, which is something no large language model will ever possess.
Practical steps for a human future
You don’t have to be a theologian to put these principles to work. If you’re tired of the Silicon Valley narrative and want to keep your humanity intact, you can start doing these things today:
- Demand transparency. If you’re interacting with an AI at your bank, your doctor’s office, or your workplace, ask if it’s a machine or a human. If they won’t tell you, opt out. We need to normalize the "right to a human" in all consequential decisions.
- Support local tech. Avoid the massive platforms whenever you can. Use tools that are open-source and community-governed. Keep your data within your circle as much as possible.
- Value human labor over efficiency. The next time you’re tempted to use a self-checkout kiosk or a chatbot, pause. Consider the human who isn't there because the machine is. Sometimes, doing it the manual way is a radical act of dignity.
- Build community. The biggest threat AI poses is isolation. It wants to keep you staring at a screen, scrolling through machine-generated content. Spend time in actual, physical spaces with actual, physical people. You can’t simulate that, and you shouldn’t try.
The future doesn’t belong to the machines. It belongs to us, provided we have the courage to treat it that way. Don’t settle for being a data point in someone else’s model.
Pope Leo XIV on the moral challenges of AI
This video provides a solid breakdown of how current papal warnings about AI mirror the social questions raised during the Industrial Revolution.
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