Babel or Jerusalem? Where the Church Is Behind the Curve on AI

From The Faith & AI Project

Pope Leo's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, turns in its third chapter — "Technology and Dominance" — to the hardest question AI forces on us: are we standing on a Tower of Babel that's destined to fall, or can the thing be rebuilt brick by brick? In the final panel of our 3-part series, Edmund Mitchell sits down with three expert guests who live this tension from worlds that rarely meet: a frontier-lab AI safety leader, a Catholic builder who bootstrapped an AI company, and a Harvard formation scholar: Andrew DeBerry — President of Arimathea Investing; founding member of the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation and SENT Ventures; Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force Reserves for the Pentagon's AI policy office; has led responsible-AI teams at Microsoft, Amazon, Google X, and Meta John Johnson — Founder and CEO of Patmos Hosting, a bootstrapped, profitable AI data-center company that owns its infrastructure "down to the dirt"; founder of the Albertus Magnus Institute; wrote his thesis on the beatific epistemology of St. Thomas Aquinas Letty Garcia — Director of the Leadership Initiative at Harvard Business School; MTS from Harvard Divinity School; Diploma in Ignatian Spirituality from the Gregorian University in Rome; doctoral studies in adult learning and leadership at Columbia's Teachers College We dig into: — "Pope Light" (a Luddite) of "Pope Ultra" (a doomer) — Why it's a recovery document, not a regulations document — The Tower of Babel vs. Nehemiah: patch the windows, or get off the tower and build from the ground up? — "AI is cultivated, not built" (#98) — Counterfeit personhood: why "you can't baptize the machine" — Throwing rocks at Silicon Valley, or funding the windows? — Building a profitable nine-figure AI company — What secular AI safety already knows that the Church hasn't engaged — Ignatian discernment and the discomfort AI is designed to remove — Why a machine has no will — Owning the sandbox: open source, GitHub, and a Catholic Digital Commons — The warning against "technical salvation" — The Catholic "love robot" — "Remember your dignity, O Christian" CHAPTERS 00:00 Landing the series with "Technology and Dominance" 01:30 Letty: the real thread is formation and co-responsibility 03:00 The canon-lawyer-and-mathematician Pope 04:14 John: "Pope Classic" 08:22 A recovery document, not a regulations document 09:10 Don't read it as "can I use AI or not" 12:24 The historical moment 13:00 Tower of Babel or brick by brick? Get off the tower 14:50 Change management and "move the movable" 16:20 What does secular AI safety know that Catholics don't? 19:10 Learning communities and a "God-and-AI lab" 23:20 The Patmos model 27:10 "Don't fund the windows" 34:10 AI is "cultivated, not built" 37:00 The call: deep research + discernment 39:40 Counterfeit personhood 42:23 Human freedom, writing an "AI covenant" for your home 44:50 Open source, GitHub, and a Catholic Digital Commons 49:50 Ignatian discernment for the AI black box 52:40 The discomfort AI is built to remove 55:20 Shaping the experience 59:00 The "Catholic love robot" 1:02:20 Tool vs. relationship 1:03:50 Faith-informed design principles 1:06:00 A moral compass is the will 1:08:32 Objective truth, benchmarks, and a hybrid future 1:10:50 Beware "technical salvation" 1:13:10 You can't engineer salvation 1:16:40 Disarming our words and the civilization of love 1:19:20 Both/and leadership and the deep work of thinking 1:21:10 "Bring the stone" 1:22:21 "Remember your dignity, O Christian" 1:26:48 Closing: Babel or Jerusalem?