This morning I fed Pope Leo XIV’s new letter on artificial intelligence into NotebookLM and asked for a summary.
The summary was fine.
The ideas were better.
I’m not Catholic.
But I found myself nodding along as I read it.
What caught my attention wasn’t theology. It was humanity.
As someone who spends a lot of time speaking, writing, and experimenting with AI, I found several ideas worth thinking about. Not because they came from the Pope, but because they address questions all of us are facing as AI becomes a bigger part of everyday life.
Here are the five lessons that stuck with me.
1. Don’t Confuse a Person with a Data Point
We live in a world obsessed with measurement.
Productivity.
Engagement.
Response times.
Followers.
Views.
AI is making it easier than ever to quantify almost everything.
The problem?
Not everything that matters can be measured.
You can’t put kindness on a spreadsheet.
You can’t create a KPI for character.
You can’t calculate the value of a mentor, a friend, or a trusted advisor.
People are more than data.
That’s worth remembering.
2. AI Isn’t Just a Technology Story
A relatively small number of companies are building tools that billions of people will use.
Those tools will influence how we search for information, communicate, make decisions, learn, and create.
Whether you love AI or hate it, that’s a lot of influence concentrated in a few places.
The question isn’t simply:
“What can AI do?”
It’s also:
“Who gets to decide?”
And honestly? Who’s in that room matters.
I have more confidence in some of those decision-makers than others. When I look at the track record of certain leaders (cough cough Mark Zuckerberg)—the years of prioritizing engagement over wellbeing, growth over trust, scale over consequence—I find myself less than reassured that they’re the right stewards of the most powerful technology ever built.
Compare that to someone like Dario Amodei at Anthropic, who has been publicly obsessive about safety and guardrails from day one.
Same technology.
Very different philosophy.
3. Being Human Isn’t a Bug
This was my favorite point in the entire letter.
The Pope argues that our limitations aren’t defects to eliminate. They’re part of what makes us human.
That reminded me of a conversation I had with one of my sons years ago when he was studying biotechnology.
Someone asked him:
“If you could choose your unborn child’s genes and eliminate any problems, wouldn’t you?”
My son has retinitis pigmentosa and night blindness.
His response?
“I’m glad my parents didn’t do that.”
That answer has stuck with me for years.
Sometimes we get so focused on eliminating every limitation that we forget those experiences also help shape who we become.
Failure teaches resilience.
Loss teaches gratitude.
Mistakes teach wisdom.
The goal isn’t to become a better machine.
The goal is to become a better human.
4. Technology Can’t Solve Every Problem
I love AI.
I use it every day.
But there are some things AI simply can’t do.
It can’t tell you what matters most.
It can’t give your life meaning.
It can’t decide what kind of person you want to become.
AI can help us write faster, research faster, learn faster, and communicate faster.
But it cannot answer life’s biggest questions.
Those are still our responsibility.
5. The Real Question Isn’t “Can We Build It?”
It’s “Should We?”
Technology has always moved faster than wisdom.
AI may be the biggest example of that yet.
Will this help people?
Will this reduce suffering?
Will this strengthen relationships or weaken them?
Will this make us more human or less?
Those seem like pretty good questions to ask before we hit the accelerator.
One Final Thought
I’ve been saying this in my keynotes for the past year:
Humans do brain work. AI does drain work.
That’s the partnership I’m interested in.
AI still can’t replace compassion.
It can’t replace wisdom.
It can’t replace relationships.
And it certainly can’t replace the human heart.
The Pope’s letter wasn’t really about artificial intelligence.
It was a reminder about what it means to be human.
And in a world racing to build smarter machines, that’s a conversation worth having.