On a warm September morning at a tiny cafe in Honolulu, a Zen Buddhist priest handed out copies of Pope Leo’s “Magnifica Humanitas.” Tech industry insiders filtered in from Hawaii Tech Week, taking their seats alongside startup founders, recent college graduates and Honolulu locals interested in what insights the leader of the Catholic Church might have to offer on artificial intelligence.
Lilinoe Andrews, a Hawaiian language instructor from the University of Hawaii, led the 15 or so people gathered in an oli, a traditional chant asking for wisdom. Jackson Sayama, a state representative and senator-elect, read the opening paragraph before the other participants read aloud from selections that Cristina Moon, the Zen Buddhist priest who organized the event, had printed with a Claude-designed Hawaiian motif on the cover.
The event was unusual for Hawaii Tech Week, Ms. Moon explained in a Substack post: “Whenever I’d tell people about the event, I’d watch a wave of confusion break across their faces. Then, after doing a quick double take, their eyes would grow wide and they’d exclaim, ‘Oh, I really want to go to that!’”
She explained in an interview with America, “I think there was an understanding that [A.I. is] of such a world-changing nature that it would make sense for people who care about the world and about the direction of humanity to comment on it.” And the pope’s commentary met a desire she said she has seen among industry professionals: “I think just in general, there’s this understanding or this feeling of, there have got to be wiser voices here” than those that dominate the public conversation on A.I. today.
Ms. Moon said she initially started to read “Magnifica Humanitas” alone but was overwhelmed by the recaps of the history of Catholic social teaching—it is not until chapter three out of five that the encyclical addresses artificial intelligence directly. She was inspired to host a communal reading using shorter excerpts after seeing a Medium post from Natalie Foster, a friend and former coworker, who had recently organized a “Magnifica Humanitas” reading in Oakland, Calif., that, crucially, used Claude- and human-curated excerpts rather than taking on the encyclical’s full 192 pages. Ms. Moon cut a few more paragraphs by hand to shorten the reading from an hour to 45 minutes.
Ms. Foster, an economic justice advocate and former president of the Economic Security Project, said she and Deepti Doshi, a former Meta director who is now co-director of New_ Public, a nonprofit focused on creating healthy and meaningful online communities, wanted to host a communal reading because they felt it would help them to process a long encyclical. Initially concerned that the heaviness of a papal encyclical might deter potential guests, the two advertised the event as lighthearted, featuring custom cocktails (Pope-erol Spritzes and Large Language Mojitos). In the end, though, Ms. Foster described the gathering as “more solemn than festive.”
“People were there for the pope’s words,” she told America. “They were there to reflect on A.I. and what it’s going to mean. They were there to reflect on humanity.”
The event drew people from a variety of religious backgrounds and none at all: Ms. Foster is the daughter of an evangelical preacher from Kansas, Ms. Doshi grew up in a Jain family, and four or five attendees said they were interested in the encyclical because they were Catholic. Most, she said, were more interested in artificial intelligence than any religious themes, although, she said (echoing Ms. Moon), there is a greater openness to religious expression emerging in the tech industry.
There also appears to be an increase in interest among some tech leaders in working with religious leaders on some of the ethical questions posed by A.I. Recent reporting from The New York Times explored how Anthropic, the company behind Claude, held confidential seminars with faith leaders and philosophers on the possibility of Claude possessing some form of moral consciousness and even “lobbied the pope’s advisers to take the prospect of A.I. model consciousness seriously” ahead of the encyclical’s release.
Discussing what interested her in the encyclical from a religious perspective, Ms. Foster said, “[Christianity] is a huge part of my upbringing, so I’m interested in moral leaders of different persuasions and what they have to say.” She described one woman who attended her event in Oakland and wore a sticker that said “person of goodwill,” referring to how the encyclical addressed not just Catholics but all “people of goodwill.”
“I sort of heard it as her saying, ‘Look, I’m not religious, but I’m here because I think this is important,’” Ms. Foster said. “We had a lot of people who work in A.I. in the mix, as well as others who are very, very concerned about A.I. It’s just kind of the broad spectrum, and it felt even-handed and thoughtful,” she added.
Ultimately, there was not much discussion as a group of the encyclical’s themes or its specific ideas either in Oakland or Honolulu; both events focused primarily on working through the text. One thing that did stand out to Ms. Foster from what she heard from participants was their interest in the pope’s apology for slavery: Rather than discussing it through the lens of changing church teaching, as many Catholic commentaries on the document have done, her readers were interested in Leo’s comparison of “the work around A.I. as the new slavery,” she said.
Pope Leo writes in the document that without “ethical and humanizing reflection, the growing power of digital systems could lead us toward new atrocities that are no less shameful than those of the past that we now deplore.”
Ms. Foster said it was important to her and Ms. Doshi to include the encyclical’s paragraph on slavery; they also highlighted the section on transhumanism, which they described as “the idea that human limits are problems to be engineered away.”
“The Pope says the opposite: limitation is actually where humanity flourishes,” a summary prepared for their reading said.
Ms. Moon said she was also touched by the section on transhumanism. “We always talk in Buddhism [about] suffering, illness and old age or death. Those are the things that are sort of unavoidable as a human being,” she said. “The way that I describe it is, ‘It’s not a bug; it’s a feature of human existence.’”
Before reading the encyclical, she said, “I had always been uncomfortable with the idea of chasing after living forever or that sort of thing, but I had never been able to connect it to the social justice part of, ‘How does that influence the ease with which we devalue certain people?’”
Ms. Moon explained that she chose to host her event at Hello Again, a small coffee shop in Honolulu’s Chinatown, because she saw it as an example of how technology automation could be used to serve human dignity.
The shop’s owners chose to use an automated drink machine to produce beverages in order to free up baristas to spend more time speaking with customers in order to build a sense of community. Likewise, they keep basic drinks relatively inexpensive to encourage guests to return multiple times a day.
“I know we could easily get sidetracked or go down this road of what feels really dire and scary about A.I. and automation, but I wanted to point out that this [coffee shop] is an application of what, essentially, the pope is saying we should be exploring: How do you use A.I. and automation and technology to support the things that are uniquely human that only humans can do, like building relationships?”
Ms. Moon was not the only one inspired by Ms. Foster and Ms. Doshi’s Oakland reading of excerpts from the encyclical; several others have followed suit, including, most recently, an event held at Homeboy Industries, the Jesuit-run nonprofit in Los Angeles that focuses on gang member rehabilitation. The events have drawn tech insiders and community members outside the industry from various religious and social backgrounds who share concerns about the future of artificial intelligence.
Michael Tubbs, the former mayor of Stockton, Calif., and one of the organizers of the Los Angeles event, told America while planning the reading, “I hope organizers come, I hope people with fancy titles come, I hope church ladies come, I hope young people come.”
“The biggest thing I’ve seen is that there’s not enough people, regular people, non-tech people who are engaged in the conversation that’s going to shape their lives,” he added. The event was co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative, Common Sense Media, Homeboy Industries, Nefesh LA (a transdenominational Jewish nonprofit), End Poverty in California and LA Voice (a youth community organization).
Mr. Tubbs said he was moved by the encyclical because it spoke to a concern he had long had: “We need more religious leaders to weigh in on tech. We need more philosophers and ethicists who don’t have any profit motives, who aren’t running for office and need donations, to weigh in with moral authority about how, as humans, we should be thinking about this.”
The former mayor said he was concerned “just from being in politics” that “the partisan divide is not going to be the lens that’s going to lead to the outcomes we need to see for the most people to flourish. And that’s why [A.I.] has to be elevated as a moral issue, as a human rights issue, as an issue of humanity.”
He explained that coming from the pope, the encyclical also “provides an entryway to have a conversation with a wider group of people about this technology that gives us something to contend with, to agree with, to disagree with, or to talk about, but in a language that may be more accessible to some people, and a frame that may be more familiar to some people.”
Reading the encyclical together, he said, was “a great opening salvo to that work.”
Ms. Foster, the Oakland event organizer, wrote on Medium that “gathering in person to reckon with something that will shape all of our futures—rather than scrolling through it solo—felt like its own kind of statement.
“The event itself became a small, lived reminder of what it means to be human and to be with other humans, even as we talk about the technology that’s remaking that question.”
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