In 1891, Pope Leo XIII became one of the defining moral voices of the Industrial Revolution. His encyclical Rerum Novarum issued a warning that still resonates today: when technological and economic transformation outpaces human dignity, moral formation, and institutional accountability, the people least protected by those systems absorb the cost.
More than a century later, Robert Francis Prevost deliberately chose the name Leo.
I believe that’s more meaningful than we realize.
The parallels between the Industrial Revolution and the AI Revolution are striking. The first industrial age mechanized muscle at unprecedented scale. Artificial Intelligence is beginning to mechanize cognition itself — judgment, attention, creativity, analysis, communication, and increasingly the processes through which human beings make meaning together.
That reaches into territory the Industrial Revolution never fully touched.
In a Wiser Decisions piece titled “Watchers And Guiders,” I used the metaphor of a knife. We understand cognitively that a knife is a tool. A person may use it to prepare a meal or commit violence. The variable is the human intention guiding its use.
Artificial Intelligence complicates that familiar relationship between tool and user.
What happens when the “knife” begins suggesting what should be cut? Or eventually stops suggesting and simply cuts? The question quickly becomes larger than capability alone. Exactly what is it we’ve created — and how much of it are we still capable of governing wisely?
Pope Leo’s AI framing suggests he recognizes the distinction, while not appearing to approach artificial intelligence primarily as a technology policy question. He appears to be approaching it as a Human Formation question.
And at the center of that challenge is a polarity civilization everywhere will eventually encounter, in one form or another:
AI Capability AND Human Formation.
Both carry genuine value over time, which is what makes the tension so consequential.
The AI Capability pole of the polarity is extraordinary, transformational, and potentially destructive. AI accelerates analysis, surfaces patterns at scale, distributes information instantly, and executes decisions faster than human systems historically could. Medicine, science, logistics, research, education, and organizational systems may all benefit profoundly from those capacities.
The potentially destructive part involves what gradually erodes when AI Capability starts functioning as a substitute for something that cannot be automated: the slow, costly, embodied process through which human beings develop wisdom, discernment, relational depth, moral judgment, humility, and the capacity to remain consciously present inside complexity without retreating into certainty.
Human Formation develops slowly.
Over the past few decades, I’ve watched teams, organizations, and communities evolve through friction, limits, creative tension, failure, repair, trust-building, and relationship. Those developmental conditions appear increasingly vulnerable inside systems organized around acceleration, optimization, and scale.
This is where Leo’s framing becomes historically and spiritually significant at once. He appears to recognize that AI dramatically accelerates a temptation that is genuinely ancient: the desire to transcend limitation itself. Human beings have wrestled with that temptation for thousands of years. Religious traditions have explored it through stories about pride, power, immortality, transcendence, forbidden knowledge, and the longing to become god-like.
Modern technological culture increasingly reframes those same impulses through engineering language.
Slowness becomes inefficiency.
Dependence becomes weakness.
Aging becomes failure.
Vulnerability becomes defect.
Contemplation becomes unproductive.
Limits themselves begin appearing as problems to solve.
AI accelerates that entire orientation.
Human beings begin imagining intelligence detached from embodiment, productivity detached from rest, knowledge detached from wisdom, communication detached from presence, and identity increasingly untethered from biological limitation altogether.
Underneath much of it sits a subtle but powerful longing for existence that’s frictionless. Limitless.
Yet many of the qualities most essential to human maturity emerge precisely through friction and limitation. Patience, relationship, and care all develop slowly. Wisdom, humility, empathy, responsibility, emotional depth, and discernment all emerge inside conditions of dependence, uncertainty, embodiment, vulnerability, mortality, and relationship.
And trust develops slowly. We have thousands of years of accumulated experience about trusting human beings and the institutions they build. We have fewer than two decades of experience with AI systems making consequential decisions. That asymmetry alone deserves far more attention than it currently receives. And if AI’s influence on social media serves as the canary, it’s hard to be optimistic about the coal mine.
All of these realities shape human beings in ways optimization systems struggle to recognize because they cannot easily be accelerated, monetized, scaled, or measured.
And once societies begin reorganizing themselves around machine logic, human beings gradually start adapting themselves to the demands of those systems. Work speeds up. Attention fragments. Rest becomes guilt-producing. Efficiency gradually becomes morality. Human value increasingly gets measured through responsiveness, productivity, optimization, visibility, and output.
The machine no longer remains merely a tool we use. Its logic slowly becomes a model for what we aspire to become. That inversion may become one of the defining developmental and spiritual tensions of this century.
The challenge is larger than technology alone because AI is simultaneously interacting with weapon systems, economics, governance, labor, education, democracy, identity, spirituality, attention, and human development itself. Pressure in one area increasingly creates consequences across all the others. The result is a civilizational multarity unfolding in real time. More or less well. And this is where the historical connection to Leo XIII becomes especially relevant.
The earlier industrial age transformed labor systems so rapidly that humanity struggled to absorb the consequences wisely. Today’s transformation appears poised to reach even deeper — into human cognition, identity, relationship, and meaning-making itself.
As an Executive Coach, I’ve seen the implications of hard transitions on leaders firsthand. I’m trying not to imagine those implications at scale. The reality keeps whispering the same message anyway: get ready.
Leo’s concerns are deeply connected to governance and concentrated power. Who governs technological systems? Who benefits most? Who absorbs the downside? Who defines what “progress” means? What kind of human beings are these systems shaping us into?
Those questions have been keeping me up at night for several years now, so it’s a relief to see someone with global influence calling attention to them publicly. The power dimension matters enormously.
AI development is increasingly concentrated inside extraordinarily wealthy corporations, private capital structures, and geopolitical competition organized around speed, dominance, scale, and monetization. History offers very little evidence that market incentives alone adequately protect truth, dignity, labor, psychological well-being, democracy, children, vulnerable populations, or the relational conditions required for healthy societies to function over time.
Rerum Novarum did not stop the industrial age. It helped shape the moral conversation surrounding it. Its influence eventually touched labor law, worker protections, and the broader moral architecture of democratic societies attempting to regulate concentrations of power.
Current-day Leo appears to be attempting something similar with AI.
Father Richard Rohr has been writing from within that same contemplative tradition for decades. Rohr’s work consistently demonstrates the developmental importance of remaining consciously present inside tensions that do not disappear:
Action AND Contemplation,
Certainty AND Discovery,
Efficiency AND Relationship,
Identity AND Unity.
That capacity increasingly feels less like spiritual luxury and more like civilizational necessity.
In a companion Wiser Decisions piece on Rohr’s work, I wrote:
“We are generating decisions at AI speed while developing wisdom at human speed.”
That gap may become one of the defining tensions of our time.
The Human Formation pole does not require rejecting AI Capability. Withdrawal from a legitimate pole of a polarity produces its own downsides over time. In this case, those downsides may include irrelevance, disengagement, and the inability to participate meaningfully inside systems already shaping human life.
The deeper work involves holding both poles simultaneously:
developing AI Capability while deepening Human Formation,
accelerating technological intelligence while preserving human wisdom,
expanding optimization while strengthening relationship,
and increasing capability without severing ourselves from the very limits that cultivate humanity in the first place.
We entered the industrial age carrying thousands of years of accumulated moral reflection, legal tradition, spiritual wisdom, and lived experience about what concentrated power does when left unaccountable. We are entering the AI era with fewer than two decades of meaningful experience navigating systems already reshaping human cognition, identity, labor, attention, relationship, and governance simultaneously.
That asymmetry feels important.
Pope Leo appears to recognize that the central question may no longer be whether AI becomes more powerful. That trajectory already seems underway.
The deeper question is whether Human Formation will mature quickly enough to remain in meaningful relationship with the systems now reshaping civilization itself.
Technology will continue accelerating.
Wisdom still develops at human speed.
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