A Papal Encyclical About AI, And The Speed We Build At

And, what it costs.

Last month, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on AI and human dignity, and I finally got through it. I should say up front that I am not Catholic. My closest tie to the Church is that I spent twelve years in a Catholic convent school, where the nuns taught me discipline, structure, and good penmanship. My years at the convent school shaped how I think more than I usually admit.

So when the head of the Catholic Church wrote a long letter about artificial intelligence, I was curious, mostly about what he’d say about the technology, less about the doctrine.

Not about the technology

The pope isn’t a technologist and isn’t talking about the models and their benchmarks. He isn’t writing about product teams either. The further I read, the more I thought about the argument I have been making about product organizations.

The encyclical covers far more than this: AI and warfare, the dignity of work, truth, and the worth of a person. I am pulling one thread, the one about how responsibility gets distributed. The question under it is older and simpler: do the systems we build around a powerful new tool serve people, and who holds the power? To answer it, he uses two scenes from the Bible.

The first is the Tower of Babel. People decide to build a tower tall enough to make a name for themselves. One language, one direction, everyone aligned. It looks impressive, but it rests on self-sufficiency and sameness, and it ends in confusion and dispersion. The second is the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. A city sits in ruins, and the walls get rebuilt. Nehemiah, leading the rebuilding, gives each family a section of the wall, listens to their concerns, and coordinates the work, instead of handing out solutions from the top. The city comes back through shared responsibility instead of one person’s heroics.

Same failure in product organizations

I have spent the last year writing about that exact failure, just inside companies instead of cities and countries. We wait for one person to be brave enough to say the requirement doesn’t make sense, to stop the experiment that is really just a launch, to admit they don’t have the answer. We build organizations that quietly run on individual heroics, then act surprised when the heroics don’t scale and don’t survive the person leaving. I have been calling the alternative structural courage: build the system so the right thing is the normal thing, and nobody has to be a hero to do it.

The pope refers to the principle as subsidiarity. In plain terms: responsibility should sit as close as possible to the people doing the work, and the levels above them exist to support that work, not to swallow it. When a higher authority pulls every real decision upward, it doesn’t just slow things down. It tells the people closest to the work that their judgment doesn’t count, so they stop offering it. That is almost exactly what I watch happen on teams. People’s judgment gets overridden, and what looks like a lack of courage is really a lack of empowerment.

He pairs that with a second idea, solidarity. He says, “The future of each individual is connected to the future of all.” For organizations, distributing responsibility downwards isn’t enough on its own. When people operate in isolation, everyone turns to protecting their own corner. In my own writing, I have called that density: one brave team is a rounding error, and a behavior is only sustainable when enough teams and leaders behave that way. Distribution falls apart without connection.

The pope also talks about the common good as a set of conditions that lets people do well. I understood this as a version of what I called ‘enabling constraints’. A good ‘enabling’ constraint doesn’t tell people what to do. It shapes the conditions so the right move becomes the obvious one.

Where AI makes it worse

A handful of large AI players have changed the conditions the rest of us work in. They reward what gets produced and how fast, not the judgment behind it. I keep noticing that most organizations adopt AI the way they adopt everything else: they measure speed. Organizations are spending hours discussing how to adopt AI faster, who gets to build with it, and who gets to decide what to build. We are shipping faster, and a lot of the time, we are shipping the wrong things faster.

The encyclical names the same worry. It warns against treating people as more valuable when they are efficient, until a person becomes a means of getting results. That is what happens to a team measured only on speed.

I have spent years building with AI, so the tools don’t make me nervous. You can hand a team the best AI available, but if the system doesn’t change, people optimize for what is being rewarded. And right now, what is being rewarded is speed: speed of delivery, speed of showing that we are using AI, speed of showing leaders we are thinking about it.

So structural courage matters more right now. If the questions your system asks stay the same, AI just helps you answer the wrong ones faster. The tool was never going to supply the courage to ask a better question. That has to be built into how the work gets measured.

The pope aims these principles outward, at states and the large platforms. The harder thing for product leaders is to aim them at yourself. It is easy to diagnose the broken system above you. It is harder to ask whether the team you run demands courage for things that should be routine, and then redesign that.

Borrowing the structure, not the faith

I am not borrowing the faith underneath any of this, and I am not turning a product argument into a religious one. The structural answer is centuries old, about how groups of people build things. The problem is real. Don’t build your city, or your org, on one person’s bravery. Spread the responsibility, hold it together, and shape the conditions so doing the right thing doesn’t take a hero.

The nuns who drilled structure into me would probably find it funny that an encyclical is what made the idea click. Then again, maybe they wouldn’t be surprised at all.

Where in your organization does doing the right thing still depend on one person being brave enough to do it?