That’s not from the Bible. It’s from Frank Herbert’s Dune — specifically, from the Orange Catholic Bible, the fictional scripture of a civilization that had already fought and lost a war against Thinking Machines, and decided: never again. I first encountered the line watching David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of the book. It lodged in my brain the way certain sentences do — not because I fully understood it, but because it felt like a warning written for a world that hadn’t yet arrived.

That world has now arrived.

On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV — a 70-year-old American mathematician — stood in the Vatican and presented Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical. Forty-two thousand words on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. He signed it on May 15th, exactly 135 years to the day after Pope Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum, the encyclical that confronted another ‘time of grappling’ with the impact of machines: the Industrial Revolution (ca May 1891). Rerum Novarum laid the foundation for Catholic social teaching on workers’ rights. The symbolism was not subtle. The Pope sees AI as the Industrial Revolution of our era, and as the leader of one of the world’s largest religions, he has a bona fide claim to contributing his perspective on this ongoing debate.

Sitting beside him at the encyclical’s presentation was Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic.

One thing I should tell you: I grew up Catholic, although these days I identify more broadly as Christian — my family was progressive, questioning, a times skeptical of the dogma even as we embrace the core beliefs. I’ve spent years studying across traditions since. But when I saw Olah sitting next to the Pope, I felt something I didn’t expect. Pride. Not for the Church, exactly. Not for Anthropic, exactly. For the fact that someone in Silicon Valley showed up to a conversation most of the industry would rather blithely skip, and admitted — publicly — that “every frontier AI lab operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.” Then he went further: “We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.”

That’s not PR. That’s a concession — and an invitation. And the Pope didn’t let it stay comfortable. His encyclical doesn’t say thou shalt not. It says something harder: disarm.

“To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly.”

In Dune, Herbert imagined prohibition. Pope Leo XIV is imagining something much more difficult: engagement with constraints, shared accountability, and the ongoing work of making sure the tools we build reflect the humanity we want to protect. He’s not telling us to stop. He’s asking us to pay attention to what we’re building — and its transformative effect on us as a species. This distinction is harder to maintain than it might seem.

A few days after the encyclical dropped, I was watching Peter Diamandis’s Moonshots podcast, and Salim Ismail — one of his panelists — said something that stopped me:

“This is the first technology that forces us to define humanity.”

He followed it with a question that, if you sit with it long enough, rearranges the furniture in your head: What should humans be for when machines can read, write, and diagnose better than us?

And then, for me, most memorably Ismail said: “The meaning of life can’t be based on productivity.”

That’s the secular translation of what the Pope is saying. If you define human worth by output — by how much you can produce, how efficiently you can perform, how many tasks you can complete in an hour — then you are playing a game you have already lost. The machine of ‘machine learning’ is already faster, more efficient, more capable. The machine doesn’t sleep or rest. The machine will, on an increasing number of metrics, outperform you on nearly everything that can be measured.

What’s left for us, then?

The Pope has an answer, and it’s not the one I expected.

In §148 of Magnifica Humanitas, he writes that our work, as humans created in the image of the Creator, “in some way continues His, for thereby we contribute to the progress of society and the common good, put to good use the capabilities we have received, improve and beautify the world, support our families, engage in cooperative relationships and, through listening and dialogue, learn to build together something that no one could achieve alone.”

Build together something that no one could achieve alone. That is not a description of productivity. It is a description of relationship. The Pope is defining work not by what it produces, but by what it makes possible between us, the human beings who create it. The output matters less than the collaboration, the listening, the dialogue. The value of human work, in this framework, is not that it’s efficient. It’s that it’s shared — and that it’s constructed by humans, no matter how flawed or inefficient.

Pope Leo is not anti-technology. He calls AI “a valuable tool” that “requires vigilance.” But he is relentless on one point that the tech industry would prefer to blur: technology is never neutral. “Every design choice reflects a vision of humanity” (§111). Every model, every algorithm, every interface was shaped by people who decided what to measure, what to optimize, what to ignore. Those choices express a specific view of what humans are for — and which humans matter more than others.

This is something I think about every time I open an AI tool. It’s why I keep coming back to Anthropic’s Claude. The word anthropic means “human-centered” — involving and concerning the existence of human life, especially as a constraint on theories of the universe. The conscious choices Dario and Daniela Amodei (and their team) have made in Claude’s design are ones I can palpably feel. They engaged an Oxford-trained philosopher, Amanda Askell, to help shape the model’s personality and values in pre-training. That’s a design choice. It reflects a vision of humanity, one that I largely agree with.

But not every lab makes the same choices. Remember Alexandr Wang, back in June 2025, saying he wanted to wait to have kids — specifically, until there’s a Neuralink to insert into his infant’s brain, to optimize it during peak neuroplasticity? (Alexandr Wang is the founder of Scale AI and now runs Meta’s AI Lab.) High cringe. That’s a design choice. It also reflects a vision of humanity. Just a very different one.

The Pope sees this clearly. Later in the encyclical, he writes: “If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy” (§117). George Orwell put it more bluntly in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal — but some animals are more equal than others.” These are not theological abstractions. They are direct challenges to the assumption that runs quietly beneath much of Silicon Valley’s self-regard: that the purpose of technology is to optimize the human, and that whatever can’t be optimized doesn’t count. Or perhaps even deserve to exist…

We all need to stay very conscious of the underlying philosophies being embedded in our tools by Big Tech. Because those philosophies are shaping us, too, whether we notice or not.

When the Pope warns that AI “frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work” (§150), he is naming a dynamic that most of us have already felt but not yet put into words. The tool was supposed to serve us; it was supposed to deliver 10-hour workweeks and Universal Basic Income. Instead, we have AI psychosis and massive layoffs. Perhaps this will all even out in time, but we need to keep asking: are we serving the machines, or are they serving us?

The Pope calls this what it is: “a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression” (§154). We are getting more powerful and somehow less human at the same time.

Looking back, one philosopher who saw this coming (not the technology, but the crisis it would create for human self-understanding) is Hannah Arendt.

In 1958, Hannah Arendt published The Human Condition, in which she drew a distinction that maps almost eerily onto this moment. She separated human activity into three categories. Labor is what we do to survive — the repetitive, the consumed, the never-finished cycle of biological necessity. Work is what we create that outlasts us — the durable things, the craft, the objects and institutions that give shape to a shared world. And action is how we show up as irreplaceable individuals among other people: speech, initiative, beginning something genuinely new that no one else could have engendered.

AI is already taking over labor. It is rapidly encroaching upon our work product, as well. The question that remains — the one Ismail is asking, the one the Pope is asking, the one I am asking — is whether anything remains that truly belongs to us. Traditionally, people have looked to the “fruits” of their labor to show who they were – to showcase their merit, if you will. That’s why when something is “artisanal” we often value it more highly – it shows the imprint of the human mind and hands that crafted it. Machine-made has usually meant - less intentional, less care. Not human. How does this change as machines begin to match our abilities?

Arendt’s answer is action. The capacity to start something that didn’t exist before. To show up not as a what — an input, a function, a role, a productivity metric — but as a who. A particular, unrepeatable person, choosing to begin work. That capacity cannot be generated. It cannot be optimized. It can only be lived by a mortal being.

This is what the Pope is alluding to in §148, when he describes work as building “together something that no one could achieve alone.” He is describing what Arendt would recognize as action dressed up as labor — the part of human work that is relational, creative, collaborative, and irreplaceable. The part that no machine can fake, because it doesn’t require a something. It requires a someone, to think it through, plan it, iterate on it, and fail, perhaps many times. And eventually (hopefully), succeed in crafting “some thing”.

A brief but necessary note on who else is in this conversation: The encyclical speaks to 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide, many of them in Latin America, Asia, and Africa — the same regions where data annotation workers label training sets for poverty wages, critical minerals are mined for AI chips, and data centers consume water and electricity that local communities cannot spare. The Pope is not speaking only to Silicon Valley. He is speaking for people who build the infrastructure of AI but have no voice in how it is governed, and who, at the moment, largely don’t benefit from the enormous profits earned by AI companies. Any conversation about the ethics of AI that stays inside the largely White, Western tech bubble is not yet credible.

I want to revisit the distance between the two commandments we mentioned above.

Herbert’s fictional civilization looked at thinking machines and said: never again. Total prohibition. They dismantled every intelligent machine and spent 10,000 years developing human potential instead — Mentats, the Bene Gesserit, the Spacing Guild. The human mind became the technology. It is a beautiful science-fiction solution. It is not available to us now.

The Pope is standing in the real world, where the machines are already here — already in your pocket, already writing your emails and summarizing your meetings and diagnosing your medical symptoms. He is not saying thou shalt not. He is saying something harder and more human: Beware. Be attentive to what you are building, and who it is building you into.

Every design choice reflects a vision of humanity. That includes the design choice you make on a Monday morning when you open a tool and begin to type. The tool you choose, the company behind it, the values embedded in the model — these are not neutral. They are choices. Small ones, daily ones, but choices. And they say something about what you believe humans are for.

The meaning of life can no longer be “I output more than the machine”. The Pope knows this. Arendt knew it in 1958. The question is whether we fully grasp it yet, or whether we cast it back to the dark corners of our mind. What will we decide to build, together, with that wisdom?

never forget: The human mind is the original generative engine.