One of the smartest observations I have read lately about AI comes from economist Alex Tabarrok, co-founder of Marginal Revolution.

In a brief post Tabarrok argues that the same AI technological disruption can be described either as a nightmare or as a gift. Say AI could produce 40% unemployment, and it sounds apocalyptic. Say AI could make possible a three-day work week, and it sounds almost utopian. But the two scenarios are not as different as they appear. The difference lies in how society distributes the gains.

That matters enormously for Christians. AI is not only a technical question. It is a moral question. If this new technology greatly increases productivity, the central issue will be whether human ingenuity is used to protect the dignity of the person or merely to maximize efficiency, concentrate wealth, and discard the weak.

A civilization shaped by Christian anthropology should be able to see the difference. The human person is not a unit of labor. Man is not made for the machine. Work has dignity, yes, but so do rest: contemplation, family life, worship, creativity, and care for others.

Tabarrok argues that history gives us some reason for confidence. Over the last century and a half, human beings have already seen the amount of life spent working fall dramatically, while leisure, childhood, and retirement expanded. That did not have to end in collapse. It can happen again. But it will not happen automatically, and certainly not morally by accident.

That is why the AI debate should not be reduced to fearmongering or boosterism. The real battle is over whether human ingenuity will be guided by a true vision of the human person. If it is, AI could help recover something modern life has steadily eroded: time to live as human beings, not merely to function as producers. If it is not, the same technology could become one more instrument for degrading labor and hollowing out human dignity.

The future of AI will depend in no small part on whether we still have the wisdom and courage to insist that progress must serve the human person, not the other way around.

A recent, little known but quite important study from the National Bureau of Economic Research seems to conclude that the current, most popular AI tools are not helping in increasing human knowledge, but to the contrary, may be contributing to perpetuating errors and hiding significant pieces of knowledge.

The study, called How AI Aggregation Affects Knowledge, tried to solve a simple question: How humans learn together when AI steps in as a super-smart middleman that summarizes what everyone believes—and then that summary gets fed back to us as “new information”?

Using a complex math model (those curious, check it directly on the link,) the study observed how AI works when it comes to learn, summarize and then share human knowledge. This is the process:

• AI watches everyone’s beliefs, “trains” on them (like how ChatGPT or similar systems learn from huge datasets), and spits out a polished, synthesized version of “what the crowd thinks.”

• That AI output then gets sent back to the people, who treat it as fresh info and update their own views.

• Over time, the AI keeps retraining on the new mix of human + previous-AI beliefs. It’s a loop: humans → AI summary → humans update → AI retrains, and so on.

Study findings

1. Speed of the AI matters a lot:

If the AI updates too quickly (it rapidly absorbs and reflects whatever the crowd is saying right now), the researchers couldn’t find any reliable way to tune it to make learning better. Actually it often makes the group converge on beliefs that are farther from the truth.

But if the AI updates slowly enough, then yes: there are smart ways to set counter weights so the AI reliably helps the group learn more accurately across many scenarios.

2. Local/specialized AI is better than one giant global AI

Local AIs (ones trained only on nearby people, or on one specific topic; like a medical AI only using doctor data, or a neighborhood forum AI) consistently help everyone get closer to the truth, no matter the situation.

Swapping out those specialized local AIs for a single all-purpose global one makes learning worse: the group ends up more wrong or more confused about certain things.

Why is this important?

- AI-generated content is already becoming training data for future AI. The study shows this loop can widen the “learning gap” instead of closing it, making society as a whole less able to figure out what’s true.

- Fast-moving, always-updating AI (like real-time models or rapid fine-tuning) is risky. If companies keep making AI that retrains super quickly on the latest internet chatter, it becomes harder to design it in a way that genuinely helps collective understanding. It might amplify fads, echo chambers, or even small errors until they look like “consensus.”

- One-size-fits-all global AI could hurt accuracy. The study suggests we’d be better off with many smaller, topic-specific or community-specific AIs rather than replacing them with one giant system. A global AI might smooth things out overall but make us systematically worse at certain topics or in certain communities.

Bottom line: The study says AI isn’t automatically a neutral tool for “wisdom of the crowd.” When its outputs loop back as training data, the speed and scope (global vs. local) decide whether it makes humanity smarter or dumber in the long run.

Some twenty years ago, the U.S. military sponsored a meeting between technology developers and a group of theologians and philosophers. The goal was straightforward: could the people building the future and the people thinking most seriously about the human person find common ground?

A good Catholic journalist friend of mine attended that meeting. He came back baffled. There was almost no real dialogue between the two sides. The techies -programmers, computer scientists, wtc- were convinced they did not need philosophers or theologians. They believed they were the ones shaping history, and that they alone had the knowledge and power to decide where humanity was going.

That was the atmosphere of the early digital age: the world of Ray Kurzweil, of The Age of Spiritual Machines and the transhumanist horizon.

There was a real sense in those years that technology was not merely expanding human capacities, but preparing to replace humanity as we know it. The curve of progress seemed to point toward the emergence of a superior intelligence: more rational, more efficient, more capable, and perhaps, in the minds of some, more worthy of inheriting the future than we were.

But that mood has changed.

Today, many of the people closest to the development of AI still believe they are participating in a revolution. But unlike the old tech culture, they no longer seem equally certain about where that revolution is going. In fact, many now understand that nobody really knows.

And that is precisely why ethicists, philosophers and theologians matter again. Check my story yesterday about the Catholic priest helping guide Anthropic’s Claude.

More people in AI are interested in what the Catholic Church has to say, not because they suddenly became religious, but because they have discovered a limit in their own worldview. They know AI is powerful. They know it is moving fast. They know the race is real. But they also know that power alone does not answer the most important questions.

What is intelligence for? What is freedom? What is judgment? What is creativity? What is responsibility? What, in the end, is a human being?

These are not technical questions. They are human questions. Which means they are also philosophical and theological questions.

The Church does not confuse intelligence with wisdom, or power with purpose. She insists that the human person is not a machine, not a data point, not a bundle of impulses, and not raw material for technical optimization. Man is made in the image of God. That is not a poetic slogan. It is the foundation of human dignity.

I know many Catholic parents who think that, for their own salvation and their children, they need to take the Benedict Option and disengage from this tech-controlled world. The hermit life has a long and strong tradition in the Catholic church.

But for those who choose to engage, Catholic engagement must be bold, creative, and intellectually serious. The truths are ancient, but the challenge is new.

For years, the modern world assumed it could build the future without asking what man is. AI is exposing the weakness of that assumption. And at the very moment our civilization is losing confidence in its own definition of the human person, the Church still has one.

That is not a small thing. That is the opening.

Father Brendan McGuire, Pastor at St. Simon Parish, Author of “The Soul of AI”

One of the more striking signs of the age is that even the builders of artificial intelligence now seem to know, at some level, that code alone is not enough.

In a fascinating recent piece for Observer, young journalist Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly tells the story of Father Brendan McGuire, a Catholic priest with a Silicon Valley background who helped Anthropic think through the ethical architecture behind its A.I. system, Claude.

According to Tremayne-Pengelly’s reporting, McGuire and other Catholic voices were brought in to help shape Anthropic’s “Claude Constitution,” the principles meant to guide how the system behaves. McGuire said the company was asking for “direct help from the Vatican” because the industry was moving so quickly.

That should get every serious Catholic attention.

For years, modern culture tried to persuade itself that moral reasoning could be detached from theology, that human dignity could survive the collapse of any serious account of the human person, and that technological progress would somehow regulate itself. That fantasy is breaking down in real time. When the architects of A.I. start reaching for priests, theologians, and the language of conscience, it is because they have run into an old truth: you cannot build human-centered technology if you no longer know what a human being is.

Tremayne-Pengelly reports that McGuire spoke of helping make the model “more discerning,” and added, “I think we have to help these machines be tilted towards good.”

That is an arresting phrase. Of course, a machine cannot possess virtue in the way a human soul can. It has no conscience in the strict sense, no capacity for repentance, no moral agency before God. But the people training these systems are still making choices about what those systems will reward, imitate, normalize, refuse, or amplify. And those choices are moral choices, whether Silicon Valley likes the word or not.

This is where Catholics need to be both sober and confident.

Sober, because there is a real temptation to speak about A.I. in quasi-religious terms. The danger here is not just hype. It is anthropological confusion. If we begin to treat synthetic fluency as personhood, or predictive power as moral insight, we will not elevate the machine. We will degrade the human being.

But Catholics should also be confident, because this debate is not alien territory for the Church. Catholic thought has been wrestling for centuries with reason, will, virtue, law, truth, formation, and the ends of human life. In other words, with precisely the questions the tech world now realizes it cannot avoid.

The central Catholic claim is not complicated. Human beings are made in the image of God. That means our dignity is not earned by utility, speed, novelty, market value, or computational capacity. It is intrinsic. Any technology worthy of man must begin there. If it does not, it may still be profitable. It may still be impressive. But it will not be humane.

That is why this story matters. Not because a priest advised a tech company. And not because one firm may be more ethically serious than its competitors. It matters because it reveals that the deepest questions posed by A.I. are finally forcing our culture back toward first principles.

And first principles are exactly where the Church is strongest.

I have lived through every major wave of digital technology — not as an observer, but as someone who built things with his hands, in real places, with real communities. From the early days of HTML in a newsroom in Lima, to mobile-first design in Erbil, to AI-powered personalization today, I have watched technology arrive, disrupt, and reshape how people find meaning, connection, and truth.

Every one of those waves felt significant. None of them felt like this.

What we are living through with Artificial Intelligence is not another upgrade. It is not the internet getting faster, or social media getting smarter, or search getting more precise. Those were evolutionary changes — important, often disruptive, but changes that left the fundamental architecture of human agency intact. You could still choose whether to engage. You could still, more or less, understand what was happening to you.

AI is different. It is the first technology that does not just carry human thought — it begins to “replicate” it. As the only being created to the image (Imago) and likeness of God, human intelligence will never be completely replicated.

But that doesn’t change the fact that today’s attempts seem to be succeeding in creating “the next best thing.”

That is a revolutionary change, in the precise sense of the word: it does not build on the old order, it overturns it. And revolutions, history reminds us, can go in more than one direction.

I have sat in a refugee camp in South Sudan and understood, in a way that no report or statistic could convey, that the distance between a life of dignity and a life of desperation is often nothing more than access: access to food, to information, to tools that work for you rather than against you. I have seen what happens when powerful technology reaches the forgotten. I have seen what happens when it doesn’t.

That experience is why I cannot approach AI as either a cheerleader or a pessimist. I am Catholic. That defines my life. But I am not a theologian or a philosopher. So I will speaking, mostly trying to provoke though rather than define it.

This space, therefore, exists because I believe the future of AI will not be decided solely in laboratories or boardrooms. It will be shaped -for better or worse- by the quality of the ideas circulating in public. Grounded ideas. Ideas forged in contact with real human experience, across cultures and languages and conditions that most technology builders have never encountered.

I have worked across four continents and four languages, and I am currently immersing myself in the art of AI prompt engineering; because I believe that understanding these tools from the inside is the only honest way to think about them. And as someone who has spent a lifetime at the intersection of faith, culture, technology, and human dignity, I believe such perspective belongs in this conversation.

Thank you for being here.