When Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical on artificial intelligence, I wasn’t expecting it to remind me of Daft Punk. 

Yet the more I read “Magnifica Humanitas,” the more I found myself thinking about two French musicians, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, who spent nearly 30 years masquerading as robots.

Shortly after Daft Punk broke up in 2021, Bangalter looked back on the duo’s career in a way that changed how I heard everything they had recorded. Daft Punk, he said, had been “a performance art installation that lasted for more than 20 years.” Then he added something stranger: “The last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, is a robot.”

Coming from almost anyone else, the remark would have passed unnoticed. Coming from the man behind one of modern culture’s most recognizable robots, it landed like a confession. So what changed?

The robots who kept getting more human

When Daft Punk became robots around the turn of the millennium, the machine still symbolized possibility. The internet felt young, artificial intelligence belonged mostly to science fiction, and few imagined computers imitating conversation, music or judgment. Against that backdrop, two musicians chose chrome helmets. Yet the longer those robots made music, the more human their work became.

Early records like “Homework” and “Discovery” leaned on loops, filtered samples and repetition, yet the machinery carried unmistakably human feeling: “One More Time,” “Veridis Quo” and “Digital Love” are full of longing, memory and romance. That was true even of the sampling itself: taking fragments of older recordings and transforming them into something new. Sampling has never been merely mechanical. It begins with judgment: hearing possibility in a forgotten fragment of music and reshaping it with taste. A machine can stretch a sound, filter it, repeat it. It cannot tell you why that sound is worth saving.

That arc culminated in Daft Punk’s final album, “Random Access Memories,” where the machines receded and the music opened toward live musicians, orchestras and people playing together in a room. The album could not have existed without technology, but it refused to let technology have the final word. Its emotional center is not a song about machinery at all. It is a song called “Touch,” and its refrain is disarmingly simple: I need something more.

Of course, the helmets also had practical purposes. They protected two shy musicians from the corrosions of celebrity and became a brilliant act of branding. Both things are true. Neither explains the ending.

If the masks were only armor, Bangalter could have set his aside and said nothing. Instead he called the project a warning and named the robot as the last thing he would want to become. You do not renounce a costume. You renounce an idea.

A quarter century later, the symbolism of the robot has changed. Artificial intelligence now writes, composes, diagnoses, translates and talks back. It imitates not only our tools but our tone, sounding patient, curious, wounded, funny and wise without having lived a human life. We no longer wonder whether machines will become more capable. We wonder what will happen to us as they do.

Once the robot stopped looking like a fantasy and started looking like our present, Bangalter’s warning began to sound less like an artist explaining his past than a question about our future.

Perder su rostro

Leo signed “Magnifica Humanitas” on May 15, the 135th anniversary of “Rerum Novarum,” the encyclical in which his namesake Leo XIII confronted the industrial machine and insisted that the worker was not a cog. The church has seen moments like this before, when a new technology promised abundance and threatened to grind persons into instruments. Her answer then is her answer now: Begin with the dignity of the human person.

Leo opens with an image older than any machine. “Humanity,” he writes, “stands before a pivotal choice: to raise a new Tower of Babel, or to build the city where God and humanity dwell together.” Babel is Scripture’s primal story about technological ambition: a people discovers a new technique, believes it can engineer its way to heaven, and ends up unable to face one another, scattered, speaking past each other in fragments. The tower rises; the faces blur. 

“In the era of artificial intelligence,” Pope Leo writes, “when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.” True progress, he continues, begins with “a heart open to others, an intelligence willing to listen and a will that seeks what unites rather than what separates.”

But one of the encyclical’s most important insights becomes more visible in the Spanish text.

Leo spent decades ministering in Peru, where Spanish was the language in which he preached, counseled and accompanied people. Reading the Spanish alongside the official English translation reveals an emphasis that changes how I see the whole document.

Where the English warns that humanity risks “marring its true identity,” the Spanish says humanity risks perder su rostro: losing its face. The danger is not merely that machines might become powerful. It is that we might become faceless to one another.

Here the helmets of Daft Punk find their deepest resonance. For 30 years, two men hid their faces behind polished chrome, and in the end the whole project pointed back toward the faces beneath. What began as spectacle ended as parable: perder su rostro, enacted onstage for three decades, and then refused.

If losing our face names the danger, a second Spanish phrase names our response. The English says we must “lovingly safeguard” the grandeur of humanity. The Spanish says custodiando con amor: guarding with love, keeping watch over something precious entrusted to our care. The image is less that of a sentry defending a perimeter than of someone keeping the night watch over those he loves.

The founder who couldn’t sleep

I do not write this from a distance. I am the chief product officer of an A.I. technology company, and I have spent more than 20 years working in Silicon Valley. I use these tools every day. The work has made me more grateful for A.I., not less. But it has changed what I notice.

Not long ago I got on a call with a founder whose company runs on our platform. I came prepared the way I now prepare for everything: an A.I. had analyzed his account overnight, summarized his transactions, flagged the anomalies and drafted my talking points. I knew his numbers better than he did. The first 20 minutes went to script.

Then, in a pause I had not scripted, he said, “I haven’t really slept in two weeks.” The numbers I had been narrating were not data points to him. They were payroll—the seven people who had followed him from his last company—and the house he had borrowed against to stretch the last round. The machine had given me a perfect map of his business and no map at all of the man. 

So for the next 40 minutes I did the one thing no system had scripted: I stayed. I asked slow, human questions. I let silences sit. The dashboard disappeared, and a face emerged. Nothing in that part of the call was efficient, and nothing in it could have been delegated.

Here is the strange gift: A.I. made those 40 minutes possible. It had done the preparation that once would have consumed the meeting, and in doing so handed back the only thing I could give that it could not: my presence. The more A.I. helps me move quickly, the more the slow moments stand out in relief.

One more time

Every generation baptizes its newest invention as the answer to the oldest problems. Each one, from the printing press to the smartphone, has delivered real gifts while failing to bear that weight. Artificial intelligence will prove no different.

That is why Leo’s encyclical is so bracingly practical. Technology, he insists, is never neutral; it takes on the character of those who build, fund and govern it. He turns, as Leo XIII did, to concrete cases: the worker whose labor is quietly devalued, the child formed by systems built to capture rather than nurture attention, the lonely offered simulation in place of communion, the poor reduced to data extracted and monetized elsewhere. Wisdom proves itself in how it treats the people the machine finds least profitable.

Yet beneath those practical dangers lies a quieter fear of absorption: that as machines learn to write, speak and compose as we do, we might slowly dissolve into what we have made, until nothing is left that is ours alone. “One More Time” stages that fear and overturns it. The song is saturated with samples, filters, compression and Auto-Tune, yet it keeps leading us back to a human voice.

That voice belongs to Romanthony, a New Jersey singer, D.J., and record producer raised on gospel and little known outside the underground. It is processed until it sounds almost synthetic. Yet the machines lift it into the middle of the music, where it becomes part of something shared. The surrender does not erase him. It carries him. Romanthony died in 2013, and the machines carry him still.

House music was never only a sound. It grew out of disco and the underground dance floors where many Black and queer people, pushed to the margins of public life, found freedom and belonging. “One More Time” carries that inheritance. For a few minutes, strangers stop standing apart. They surrender to the same rhythm. The self is not erased. It is loosened from its loneliness.

That is not worship. But it touches the longing that worship answers: to be drawn out of ourselves without being destroyed, and to belong without disappearing. The question of the A.I. age is not whether we will give ourselves to something greater. We always have. The question is whether what receives us can love us back.

Here Christianity says something almost too simple for an age as sophisticated as ours: What merely informs cannot love. Moses received the law on stone tablets, and Israel still wandered. The prophets spoke with fire, and the people still forgot.

So God did more than send another instruction. He came near. He listens the way the best producers listen, hearing in our broken fragments what no one else can. A fisherman’s stubbornness becomes the rock of a church; a persecutor’s fury becomes letters half the world still reads. Daft Punk heard a few seconds of a forgotten record and made “One More Time.” God hears the scattered pieces of our lives and makes us saints.

Christ does not save us by deleting our humanity and rendering a cleaner version. He enters the mix, takes flesh, takes wounds, and gives them back transfigured. Nothing is wasted. Everything is sampled.

That is why “Touch” sounds different to me now. Art sometimes gives voice to a longing before the artist can name it. I need something more. Not because technology has failed, but because even at its best it cannot carry the weight of our deepest hopes.

Perhaps artificial intelligence will become one of humanity’s great achievements. But by immersing us so deeply in what machines can do, it may teach us, without meaning to, what only persons can be. Intelligence without love can astonish us, but it cannot gather us. It cannot keep watch over us in the night.

I think again of that founder, awake at 3 a.m. with his spreadsheets and his fear. And I think of two robots in a farewell film, standing in the desert while the choir of “Touch” sings the message that transcends the machines: Love is the answer.

Bangalter said the last thing he wanted to be was a robot. After 30 years behind the mask, he had discovered what the church has been guarding, custodiando con amor, through every Babel we have built: the face. It was the point all along.

The invitation of the A.I. age is not to retreat from the future but to enter it more fully human: hearts open, ready to meet one another face to face.

Tim Schulz is a Silicon Valley technology executive and former Google leader who now writes as a Catholic essayist exploring faith, technology and the soul’s search for home. A UCLA graduate in classics and philosophy, he is based in Salt Lake City and discerning a vocation with the Dominican laity.