What Can AI Teach Us About Humanity?

📰 A conversation at the intersection of technology and meaning

I recently sat down with Father Paolo Benanti, a philosopher, engineer, and professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University, to explore a question that has moved from academic curiosity to everyday urgency: what does the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence tell us about who we are and how we want to live together?

Father Paolo brings a perspective that blends rigorous scholarship with pastoral concern. He has advised leaders across institutions, including within the Vatican, and he thinks deeply about the social and moral consequences of technological change. I came to the conversation as someone who has spent decades working on technology, research, and policy, and who believes deeply in the potential for AI to empower people and advance knowledge. Together we traded stories, examples, and concerns that, taken together, sketch a practical and human-centered framework for thinking about AI in the 21st century.

🤖 What AI reveals about what it means to be human

One of the most striking things Father Paolo and I returned to is how AI forces us to reexamine the qualities we historically took as unique to human beings. When systems begin to replicate certain cognitive faculties, or when they produce outputs that carry meaning for a user, we are pushed to ask whether meaning itself is an exclusively human domain. Father Paolo put this succinctly:

"When an LLM posing question to an user, it's not simple producing a text, but it's giving back something that for the user is something that bring a meaning. And the meanings is something that every one of us use to answer to the question, who I am."

That observation captures more than a technical point. It is a cultural and existential one. Language models and other AI systems do not merely compute; they produce artifacts that people read, interpret, and integrate into their sense of themselves. In some interactions the machine becomes a dialogue partner, a tool for reflection, and a prompt for creativity. This widening of the conversational field from human-to-human to human-to-machine introduces new modes of self-understanding.

There are three specific shifts worth highlighting.

• Dialogues expand. Conversations are no longer confined to human partners. Machines now participate in dialogues that shape ideas, knowledge, and meaning.
• Meaning becomes more distributed. When a model returns a response, that response sits between the user's intent and the world. It can help form judgments, suggest new directions, and shape identity, particularly when the user relies on it for learning or creativity.
• Human faculties are reframed. Skills like composition, problem solving, and discovery are being augmented and sometimes redefined by AI tools. This reframing invites us to reconsider what we value as uniquely human and how we cultivate those traits.

These shifts do not render human meaning obsolete. Instead they reconfigure the landscape where meaning is made. That reconfiguration has consequences for education, work, art, and moral formation.

🌱 Human flourishing in an AI era

We agree that AI has the potential to usher in a kind of new Renaissance. The parallel is not rhetorical. Just as printing, perspective in painting, and scientific tools multiplied human capacity during the original Renaissance, AI can democratize creative and intellectual tools at scale.

Father Paolo offered a hopeful image: photography democratized the visual arts; easy-to-use AI tools could do the same for diverse forms of expression. But he also warned that such a cultural flowering is not automatic. The Renaissance required both technology and a cultural movement that pushed people to use it in new ways. Similarly, AI will only help human flourishing if people want to go deeper, if communities cultivate curiosity, skill, and ethical reflection.

From my perspective, there are concrete ways AI can support flourishing:

• Everyday empowerment. Tools that reduce friction in routine tasks free people to focus on higher-level goals, relationships, and creative work.
• Creative amplification. AI can be a collaborator for artists, writers, and makers, lowering barriers to experimentation and enabling new forms of expression.
• Scientific acceleration. Breakthroughs like AlphaFold demonstrate how AI can substantially speed up discovery in biology, materials, and climate science.
• Public goods and resilience. AI can assist in crisis response, climate modeling, food systems optimization, and other areas that support the common good.

Those benefits, however, coexist with serious risks. Flourishing at scale requires attention to distribution, access, and the unintended harms that powerful technologies can create. The social conditions needed for flourishing include education systems that prepare people to use AI well, policies that encourage equitable access, and cultural norms that value the human goods AI should serve.

⚖️ Ethics, norms, and the political dimension of AI

Ethics in AI is not an abstract afterthought. Father Paolo reminded me that whenever a technology is introduced into social life, it reshapes power and order. He used a simple image: where you lay a railway and where you build a stop determines who gains access and who is excluded. The point is immediate and sobering: technical design choices have political consequences.

From that insight follow several practical implications.

• Ethics must be multi-stakeholder. It is not enough for developers to decide alone. Ethics needs involvement from communities, regulators, civil society, and those who will be affected by new systems.
• Ethics must translate into governance. High-level principles are important, but they must become norms, practices, and sometimes rules that shape system design, deployment, and accountability.
• Ethics aims at justice. Father Paolo described ethics as a tool to propose just outcomes, as much as is possible within complex systems. The goal is not perfection but a sustained commitment to fairness and inclusion.

During my work on international AI governance, one grounding norm repeatedly surfaced: respect for fundamental human rights. This is easy to declare and hard to operationalize, but it matters. At a minimum it provides a baseline for other norms and policies—privacy, non-discrimination, safety, and transparency are all easier to justify when rooted in human rights.

"There must be some grounding norms. One of them was respect for fundamental human rights. The idea, for example, that this technology should be used to benefit humanity seems to be an important consideration."

Practical governance requires balancing competing values. Innovation, for example, can conflict with privacy or fairness. A mature public conversation about AI must accept these tradeoffs and design institutions that negotiate them transparently and fairly.

🛠 Concrete uses: how Father Paolo engages with AI

Our conversation became concrete when Father Paolo described how he uses AI in daily life. His examples were revealing because they combined scholarly work with community care.

First, he spoke about a tool that helps him study texts by amplifying how he engages with highlighted passages and prompting questions. He called it "a wonderful Google product that is not a book LLM" and described it as a way to multiply inquiry and keep insights organized. Second, in a distinctly practical and pastoral example, he used low-code tools to build apps that helped maintain an old monastery owned by his community. Those apps enabled practical repairs, like installing new windows, by simplifying workflows.

These examples highlight two things I often stress:

• AI is first and foremost a tool for human projects. Whether the project is scholarship, care of a community building, or running a small organization, AI lowers barriers.
• Accessibility matters. Low-code and easy-to-use interfaces democratize the benefits of AI so people without deep technical expertise can solve practical problems.

I think it is important for conversations about AI to include these small-scale, human-centered use cases. They show how transformative effects can start from modest interventions that multiply across communities.

⛪ The Vatican, social teaching, and AI's moral horizon

Father Paolo explained why the Catholic Church has engaged with AI for the past few years. The Church's long-standing social teaching arose in response to industrialization and aims to protect dignity, promote solidarity, and critique inequalities produced by economic and technological change. From that perspective, AI is another chapter in a persistent story: technologies shape social structures, often producing winners and losers.

Pope Francis, Father Paolo noted, has signaled a moral attention to the most vulnerable. His early public acts included solemn gestures for migrants and for the planet; AI has become part of this moral agenda because of its potential to affect the lives of fragile communities.

That focus shifts the debate away from abstraction and toward lived impacts. The questions we must ask include:

• Who benefits from a deployment and who is left behind?
• How might automation reshape livelihoods, and what protections or transitions are needed?
• What norms are required to ensure dignity and solidarity in the age of algorithmic decision making?

These are not purely theological questions. They are social questions grounded in moral reasoning and evidence. The interaction between moral frameworks and technical practice can help illuminate obligations that might otherwise be overlooked.

💡 The "why" behind AI: four motivations

One of the most useful parts of the conversation for me was to restate why we pursue AI in the first place. When technology grows fast, it helps to return to the ends that justify the means. I summarized four motivations that guide my work and that I see echoed across responsible AI efforts.

1. Empowerment and flourishing. Can technology help people transcend barriers and flourish in their daily lives and creative endeavors? This is a foundational why. AI should expand human capability, not narrow it.
2. Economic growth and innovation. AI can power productivity, create new industries, and provide economic opportunities. Thoughtful policy can help ensure those gains are broadly shared.
3. Scientific discovery. AI has already accelerated breakthroughs in biology, chemistry, material science, and climate modeling. Systems such as AlphaFold show how machine learning can unlock previously intractable problems.
4. Public goods and crisis response. AI can improve responses to climate-driven disasters, aid in humanitarian logistics, and help tackle systemic challenges like food insecurity.

These motivations are complementary. A balanced approach to AI development asks how systems can be designed and governed to advance all four goals while minimizing harms.

🔎 Risks and responsible stewardship

No conversation about AI that takes human flourishing seriously can ignore risk. Several categories stand out as requiring immediate attention.

• Concentration of power. Technologies can centralize control and influence. That concentration can shape information flows, economic opportunity, and even political discourse.
• Bias and fairness. Models trained on historical data can reproduce or amplify social inequities. Careful measurement, intervention, and accountability mechanisms are needed.
• Safety and reliability. As systems take on higher-stakes roles, ensuring they behave predictably and robustly becomes essential.
• Transparency and explainability. People affected by algorithmic decisions should have avenues to understand and contest those decisions.
• Societal adaptation. Workplaces, educational systems, and social safety nets must evolve to support transitions induced by automation.

Addressing these risks requires technical work, policy frameworks, and cultural commitments. It also requires humility. The rapid pace of change means that institutions must learn and adapt in real time, employing both foresight and a willingness to course correct.

🔧 Practical steps I recommend for organizations and governments

From my perspective working at the intersection of research, industry, and public policy, here are practical steps that organizations and governments can take to steward AI responsibly.

• Adopt clear grounding principles. Start with human rights, fairness, and beneficence as guiding stars. Translate them into measurable objectives for products and services.
• Build multi-stakeholder governance. Include affected communities, civil society, scientific experts, and regulators in decision making from design to deployment.
• Invest in education and digital literacy. If the benefits of AI are to be broadly shared, people must have the skills to use and critique these tools.
• Design for accessibility. Low-code platforms and inclusive interfaces expand the reach of practical solutions, as Father Paolo's monastery example shows.
• Support safety research. Technical investments in robustness, adversarial resilience, and interpretability pay dividends as systems are used in higher-stakes contexts.
• Prepare social protections. Policies should anticipate transitions in labor markets and include supports for retraining and income stability where needed.
• Commit to transparency and accountability. Publish impact assessments, safety test results, and governance structures in accessible ways.

These steps are complementary. Taken together they form a practical agenda that balances innovation with responsibility.

📚 Education, culture, and the human desire to go deeper

Father Paolo emphasized how vital the cultural element is. Technologies are enablers, but culture shapes how we use them and what we value. The Renaissance comparison is instructive because the flourishing that followed required both technical innovation and a cultural thirst for exploration.

That cultural thirst includes commitments to:

• Critical thinking. People need the capacity to judge when a tool helps and when it misleads.
• Moral formation. Communities that cultivate empathy, civic responsibility, and concern for the vulnerable are better equipped to steer technologies toward the common good.
• Curiosity. A desire to push into new domains of art, science, and public life encourages creative deployments rather than purely extractive ones.

Education institutions, religious communities, cultural organizations, and families all play a role in nurturing these dispositions. The work is long term, but it is also the bedrock of a society that uses AI to uplift rather than marginalize.

🔁 Democracy, power, and the politics of placement

One of the recurring metaphors from Father Paolo is the railway: where you put infrastructure determines who can access it. In a digital age, "placement" is less about physical tracks and more about platforms, data governance, and market structures. Decisions about model access, data control, and platform rules are in many ways the new choices about where stations and stops will be built.

A democratic approach to these questions means public debate about the distributional consequences of AI. It also means regulatory frameworks that guard against monopolistic outcomes while preserving incentives for innovation. These debates are not easy, but they are essential to ensuring that the benefits of AI are shared broadly.

🔭 Looking ahead: hope with humility

My conversation with Father Paolo left me with a clear sense of both possibility and responsibility. AI offers tools that can amplify human creativity, accelerate discovery, and help tackle urgent global challenges. At the same time, AI prompts deep questions about meaning, agency, and social justice.

We need to hold both sets of truths together: pursue the benefits with ambition, and design safeguards with care. Part of that stewardship is practical: build governance structures, fund safety research, and expand education. Part of it is cultural: cultivate the desire to push into deeper questions about who we are and how we want to live together.

Father Paolo summed it up in a simple way: technologies reshape society, and ethics is the method by which we collectively negotiate those reshaping processes. Ethics is not a veto. It is a conversation among stakeholders that aims at the most just outcome possible in a complex world.

"Ethics is this, is questioning technology with the different stakeholders to try to make them part of this discussion. So ethics is something that could help us to have a just, for how much is possible in complexity, proposal of the outcome."

🧭 Principles to guide the next decade

Based on the themes we explored, I am guided by a handful of principles that should orient institutions and communities as they engage with AI over the next decade.

• Human-centered design. Systems should be designed to expand human agency, not replace it.
• Shared prosperity. Economic gains from AI should be distributed in ways that reduce rather than exacerbate inequality.
• Rights-based governance. Policies should be grounded in respect for privacy, fairness, and dignity.
• Transparency and accountability. Organizations should publish clear explanations of how systems are intended to be used and how they are tested for safety and fairness.
• Participatory policy making. Affected communities must have meaningful roles in decision making, not merely consultation.
• Continual learning. Institutions must be flexible, updating governance as technologies and societal impacts evolve.

These principles are not exhaustive, but they provide a practical compass. If we can collectively commit to them, the chance that AI will help produce a new kind of flourishing increases substantially.

📌 Final reflections

AI is a mirror and a tool. It reflects what we value and it multiplies what we can do. The question we now face is whether the reflection will sharpen our sense of what matters and whether the tools will be used to build lives worth living for a broader number of people.

Father Paolo and I returned repeatedly to the same dual claim: the technology opens remarkable possibilities, and those possibilities must be stewarded by ethical reasoning and social institutions that center human dignity. Practical examples, from assistive text tools for scholarship to low-code apps for a monastery, show how immediate and concrete the benefits can be. At the same time, the structural questions about power, access, and meaning require public deliberation and institutional care.

I believe the right posture is hopeful realism. We should be ambitious about what AI can achieve, but careful and principled in how we pursue those achievements. The work ahead is not only technical. It is moral, political, and cultural. If we can coordinate across those domains, AI can be a force for creativity, discovery, and shared human flourishing.