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The last industrial revolution got its moral framework too late. AI doesn’t have to.
Last November, I was fortunate enough to meet Pope Leo XIV at a private audience on child dignity and artificial intelligence. I asked Pope Leo whether he was comfortable with artificial intelligence becoming the operating system for people’s lives.
He paused for what seemed like an eternity.
Then he said, simply: no.
On May 15, Pope Leo signed Magnifica Humanitas — his first encyclical, on artificial intelligence and the protection of human dignity — and it was published on May 25. He signed it 135 years to the day after his namesake, Leo XIII, published Rerum Novarum — the document that gave the industrial revolution its moral framework. The parallel is deliberate.
Rerum Novarum arrived decades after the industrial revolution began. By then, communities had already been hollowed out. Workers exploited. Children had already paid the price of progress that was not designed with them in mind. The moral framework came — but after the damage was done and the architecture was fixed.
What we decide in this window will shape the conditions of human life for generations.
The people building AI are unambiguous about the scale of what is coming. Google’s Demis Hassabis — Nobel laureate, founder of DeepMind, one of the architects of modern artificial intelligence — has described this moment as 10 times the industrial revolution, at 10 times the speed. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei speaks of systems surpassing human capability across almost every domain within a matter of years. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has suggested what lies ahead may require a new social contract on the scale of the New Deal.
These are not rhetorical claims. They are the considered assessments of those closest to the technology.
If they are right — and I believe they are — then what we decide in this window will shape the conditions of human life for generations. Not just for those who can afford the best tools or live in the most connected cities, but for everyone.
That is the real promise of AI. Not productivity gains or market returns — though those will come. The deeper promise is a genuine civilizational uplift: compressing decades of scientific progress, extending human capability to people who have never had access to any of it, expanding agency rather than concentrating it.
But that outcome is not guaranteed by the existence of the technology. It depends entirely on the values embedded in the systems being built, the diversity of voices shaping them, and the frameworks governing how they are deployed. Right now, those decisions are being made within an extraordinarily narrow circle; without the participation of the communities most affected, and without the moral frameworks that have guided humanity through transformation before.
Faith leaders bring something the technology sector cannot manufacture: the trust of billions.
This is not a criticism of those building AI. Most understand the weight of what they are carrying. The problem is structural: the two communities most capable of shaping this moment — the builders of AI, and the world’s great moral and faith institutions — have never been in serious dialogue. They occupy parallel universes, each with an incomplete picture.
That is what the Faith-AI Covenant project is designed to change. We are bringing together AI companies and the world’s faith traditions in structured dialogue on the values that must govern this technology. Not to obstruct. Not to regulate from the outside. But to bring the wisdom, moral authority and trust that faith communities have earned over millennia into the conversation, while the architecture is still being built, and the path dependencies have not yet run too deep to redirect.
Last month in New York, our first roundtable brought representatives from Anthropic, OpenAI and others into the same room as senior religious leaders from across every tradition. The conversations were unlike any I have had in four decades in this industry. Faith leaders bring something the technology sector cannot manufacture: the trust of billions of people who are not asking whether AI is impressive. They are asking whether it is just. 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 every government, every investor, every technology company: There is a constituency of nearly one and a half billion people who believe human dignity is nonnegotiable. And they are paying attention.
Rerum Novarum changed the trajectory of the industrial revolution. But it arrived too late for the people who needed it most.
This time, the moral framework is being written before the architecture is fixed. That is the moment we are in.
