AI Meditations, Pt. 2: On Others
AI Meditations, Pt. 2: On Others
On the 29th of April, 2026, a delegation from Meta, Google, and Amazon secured a brief audience with the Pope.
The formal meeting was short. The real one happened afterward, and Pope Leo was not giving out blessings.
They were there because the Vatican was weeks from publishing the most consequential moral document on artificial intelligence anyone had produced this century, and not one of them knew what it was going to say.
Holders of more compute than most nation-states, running the operating systems that influence what billions read, buy, watch, and believe, were holding court in the back channels of an institution that dates back 2,000 years to Saint Peter. All to understand how the Church would represent AI and, by proxy, their institutions.
Four weeks later, Leo XIV walked into the Synod Hall and used a word nobody had on their card.
Disarmed.
A Word From the Nuclear File
Artificial intelligence, the Pope told the room, "needs to be disarmed." He acknowledged the word was strong and that he'd chosen it deliberately.
Leo was not claiming a language model is a warhead, even if disarmament is nuclear vocabulary. He was doing something more precise: borrowing the only framework humanity has ever built for a technology so consequential that its moral governance could not be left to the people who made it.
Part 1 of this series was about the river, the way these systems flow in two directions, shaping us while we shape them. This one is about who's standing at the headwaters.
The Right Yardstick
Andrew Ng, founder of Google Brain and co-founder of Coursera, has been saying since 2016 that "AI is the new electricity." A decade on, the analogy has aged into precision rather than out of it.
Electricity defined a way of life. It rewrote the inside of the home, the design of the workplace, the rhythm of the day, the geography of the city, and every element of how we communicate, gather, and engage.
If that's the scale we're working at, the useful precedent isn't the dot-com bubble or the smartphone era. It's the last time a technology rewrote daily life that deeply. Which means rewinding about 135 years.
The Last Time This Happened
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII published an encyclical called Rerum Novarum, or "of new things." It was the Church's formal reckoning with the Industrial Revolution, arriving roughly a century into it. Cities had filled with factories. Factories had filled with workers. The structures that had organized labor for the previous thousand years (guilds, family farms, craft apprenticeships) had been dismantled and replaced with something faster, more efficient, more productive, and considerably more brutal to live inside.
Rerum Novarum put on the record, in language deliberately written to outlive its moment, a moral framework for what the dignity of a worker required. That framework has achieved just that, outliving the factory owners it was written about and the technology it was responding to.
If our modern life thinks in quarters and IPOs and lock-up periods, an encyclical thinks in centuries. If Part 1 was about our collective drift toward System 1 (fast, automatic, frictionless, satisfying), an encyclical is the gargantuan System 2 giant awakening, and doing deep, heavy thinking.
The Human in the Time of AI
On May 25th, Leo XIV broke with tradition and delivered the encyclical personally, rather than doling it out to his cardinals. The encyclical was titled Magnifica Humanitas, or Magnificent Humanity, with a rather unambiguous subtitle: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.
Pope Leo signed it on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. None of that timing is accidental.
The claim Pope Leo is making (rightly) is that AI is to 2026 what industrialization was to 1891, and the reckoning the Church staged then is the reckoning that has to happen now. Technology, Leo writes, is "never neutral." It takes on the character of whoever designs it, funds it, regulates it, and uses it.
That is not a claim about capability. It's a claim about authorship. And it means the only honest way to evaluate these agentic systems is to evaluate the people and incentives behind them.
Which brings us to who was in the room.
Moral Voices the Incentives Cannot Bend
Importantly, seated among the cardinals and theologians was Chris Olah: thirty-three years old, Canadian, an atheist, a co-founder of Anthropic, and by Forbes' arithmetic worth somewhere around seven billion dollars.
Olah opened by conceding that every frontier lab (his own explicitly included) operates inside a set of incentives that can conflict with doing the right thing. He said the industry needs informed critics willing to tell the labs when they are failing. And then the line the room actually stopped for: what the world needs is "moral voices that the incentives cannot bend."
His full remarks have been published by Anthropic, and they're worth a read. If for nothing else, then for the spectacle of a man who builds the technology standing in front of the Pope and the assembled press, testifying that his own industry's incentive structure does not reliably self-correct.
It would be easy to over-read the morning as harmony, and the reporters in the room didn't. There was visible daylight between what Leo asked for and what Olah described as achievable from inside a competitive lab. That gap is the honest artifact of the day.
The Skeptical Counter
Some of the scholars quoted around the encyclical were politely doubtful any of this matters. Silicon Valley, the argument runs, does not read papal documents. Encyclicals work on the faithful, not on the industry.
Maybe true? Who's to say. But that's probably not the point. Even if Rerum Novarum did not greatly reshape the tendencies of factory owners in 1891, it still established a framework on the record, in language durable enough that it outlived them and was still sitting there, fully formed, 135 years later when the same questions had to be asked about a different technology.
Moral voices may not bend the incentives, but they can (and should) document the gap. Documentation is how the reckoning, when it comes, knows what to call itself.
The Question They Were Both Asking
In 1982, Donald Fagen opened his solo debut The Nightfly with "I.G.Y.," and not with a mood piece. With a banger. A jazz-funk groove centering on the International Geophysical Year of 1957 and 1958, a real eighteen-month scientific collaboration that, in American cultural memory, came to stand for an entire worldview.
A moment when science, cooperation, and benevolent technology were going to deliver undersea cities, a tunnel under the Atlantic, and machines that would make the big decisions on our behalf, programmed by men the lyric credits with both compassion and vision.
And that's the line. That's the key.
Fagen was looking back at midcentury Space Age optimism, wondering (perhaps with his wry and sardonic styling) if the makers of our grand future would be men of "compassion and vision." Who's at the controls? And do we understand the bargain we're making, with systems we can't fully understand or control? And what happens if we've ceded too much ground to those who, as Olah said, have incentives that can conflict with doing the right thing?
Pope Leo, in 2026, asked the same question with an institution behind him (arguably the best institution for this kind of question), and got one honest answer, on camera, from a man with every commercial reason to give a different one.
But an answer from inside the labs was never going to be sufficient, and Olah said as much himself: what the industry needs is people who can see what it cannot see from the inside. That is the job Leo took up in May. It is also, perhaps less comfortably, becoming our job as well. Whether we can keep diligent watch while being lulled into a comfortable state of AI-enabled everyday utility remains to be seen.
Which leaves the last question of this series, the one the artists got to decades before the rest of us. Not what the machines are, or who built them, but what we become in their company. That's the next meditation. I hope you'll come back for it.