The Pope Said What Silicon Valley Has Been Avoiding
Pope Leo XIV just released his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, on the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. His central message: AI must be disarmed. Not rejected. Prevented from dominating the people it is meant to serve. He presented it alongside Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic. That is a signal worth reading carefully. This post is for leaders who are choosing, right now, what stays human in their organisation, and what does not.
The Pope just said what Silicon Valley has been avoiding.
Last week, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, on the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. His central message is this:
AI must be disarmed.
He was clear about what that means. Not rejecting the technology. Preventing it from dominating the people it is meant to serve. Decisions about technology, he said, must never be separated from conscience and responsibility.
This is the conversation I have been having with leaders for the past year, only in different words. My TEDx talk was called "What AI Can't Hear" for exactly this reason.
Then I noticed who presented it with him. Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the lab behind Claude. That tells you something.
Here is where I land:
→ Knowledge is cheap now. The thinking is the work.
→ AI gives us answers. ALL of them. It does not give us conscience.
→ The future will not work because it is fast. It will work because humans stay involved.
When one of the world's oldest institutions and a frontier AI lab end up in the same room asking the same question, it is worth paying attention.
What is one part of your work you hope stays human?
Want to think through what AI means for your own leadership? My Private AI Advisory is here.
What "disarming AI" means inside a real organisation
The encyclical reads like ethics. It is also a leadership prompt. Inside a real organisation, disarming AI is not abstract. It is the daily set of choices senior leaders are making, often without realising it.
Three places this shows up in coaching senior teams.
→ Who decides what AI is allowed to decide. The fastest path to losing trust inside a team is to let AI make decisions about people without naming who is accountable. That is a leadership decision, not an IT one.
→ Where conscience sits in the workflow. AI can give you all the answers. It cannot tell you which question was worth asking. Leaders who keep the question-shaping work human protect something AI cannot replace.
→ How team members are trained to push back. Teams using AI well have explicit permission to challenge what the model suggests, including the boss. Teams using AI badly use AI as a way to avoid disagreement.
My TEDx talk "What AI Can't Hear" was about exactly this. AI cannot hear what your team is not saying. It cannot hear the pause before someone disagrees. It cannot hear that the quiet person already has the answer. Leadership at this point in the AI era is largely about protecting those moments inside your team, not optimising them away.
If you want a practical tool for the conversation, my free What AI Can't Hear Pack includes the seven listening behaviours from the TEDx talk plus ten practical questions you can use with your team to talk about AI without fear or confusion. Leave your email here and I will send it over: https://www.thechangerepublic.com/free-resources