An Era That Needs More Humanity

The Real Question Is Not Technological

These reflections have a deeply personal origin for me. They were born from a lecture I had the honor of giving to the academic community of Seton Hall University, in New Jersey, in January 2026. That conversation began with a very simple concern: before asking what artificial intelligence can do, we must ask what it is doing to our attention, our character, our relationships, and our capacity to decide.

Months later, that concern gained new depth with the publication of Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, signed on May 15, 2026, and dedicated to safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. There, the Pope issues a call that runs through this entire piece: faced with the risk of new forms of dehumanization, we have a duty to “remain profoundly human.”[5]

That statement changes the starting point. The discussion around artificial intelligence cannot be reduced to productivity, competitiveness, or the speed of innovation. It must begin with the person. Every technology functions as both a mirror and an amplifier: it reflects desires, multiplies habits, and accelerates tendencies that already exist. It can strengthen learning or replace it; facilitate bonds or turn loneliness into a market; democratize opportunity or reproduce exclusion; expand creativity or normalize appropriation without responsibility.

The challenge is anthropological. It affects our understanding of freedom, intelligence, relationships, truth, and dignity. In an environment capable of producing arguments, simulating emotions, and reproducing voices and faces, preserving what is human requires far more than learning to use a tool. It requires judgment, character, and the firm will not to delegate our conscience.

Ethics and Values: From Discourse to Decision

Since that lecture at Seton Hall, I have continued researching a question that grows more urgent by the day: how content generated by artificial intelligence can weaken our capacity to recognize truth, trust one another, and build community. This issue affects education, politics, work, people’s reputations, and family relationships.

In this context, ethics can be understood as the disciplined pursuit of the good, applied to our decisions. It does not consist merely of knowing rules, but of discerning what we ought to do, why we ought to do it, what values are at stake, and who will be affected by our choices. Values, in turn, are the goods we consider worth protecting, pursuing, and honoring: truth, justice, freedom, dignity, solidarity, privacy, creativity, and care for the most vulnerable.

Values do not exist only in institutional statements. They become visible in practice: in the data we hand over, the content we share, the tools we use, the systems we design, the criteria we use to evaluate a person, and the limits we are willing to set. In the age of artificial intelligence, our technological decisions are also moral decisions.

From the Rome Call to Concrete Decisions

One of the most important precedents I regularly cite in my lectures is the Rome Call for AI Ethics, presented in Rome on February 28, 2020, on the initiative of the Pontifical Academy for Life. Its first signatories were Microsoft, IBM, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the Italian government’s Ministry of Innovation. From its origin, it was neither an exclusively religious proposal nor a document reserved for specialists. It brought together the Church, technology companies, international organizations, and governments around a shared responsibility.[1]

Pope Francis understood early on that the development of artificial intelligence could not be guided solely by economic competition or by whatever was technically possible. In his address to the 2024 G7 summit, he endorsed the Rome Call as a global, plural platform for “algor-ethics”: an ethics applied to the design and use of algorithms. He also insisted that a meaningful space of human control over automated decisions must be preserved, because human dignity is at stake.[2]

For those of us who hold leadership responsibilities, understanding this framework is essential. A leader does not need to know how to code, but must be able to ask what a system does, what data it works with, who benefits from it, who might be harmed by it, and who will be accountable when something goes wrong. The six principles of the Rome Call turn these concerns into a practical guide.

• Transparency: Can we understand, explain, and question what the system does?
• Inclusion: Who participates, who is left out, and whose voice are we not hearing?
• Accountability: Who answers for it when an automated decision causes harm?
• Impartiality: Does the system reproduce bias, or does it treat people fairly?
• Reliability: Does the tool function consistently and safely?
• Security and privacy: How do we protect people’s identity, data, and privacy?

These principles speak of systems, but above all they speak of truth, justice, trust, power, and the protection of people. This table is not meant to offer automatic answers. Its purpose is to force us to pause before adopting a tool or delegating a decision, and to remember that behind every data point there is a human life.

What Does Women’s Leadership Bring?

The ethics of artificial intelligence requires the full participation of women in the spaces where products are designed, projects are funded, policies are set, content is created, and priorities are defined. It is not enough for women simply to use the tools that others develop. We need to be present where it is decided what these tools will exist for, what limits they will have, and what idea of the person they will express.

Women have historically sustained a fundamental part of the care of life, of children, of families, and of communities. That experience must not become an exclusive burden, nor a stereotype. Nor does it mean that all women live in the same way or bring an identical sensibility. It means, rather, that many of our experiences allow us to raise questions that technological enthusiasm tends to forget: What happens to the most vulnerable person? What invisible work is going unrecognized? How does a given decision affect daily life, autonomy, trust, and relationships?

Women’s leadership can enrich technological transformation when it integrates competence and conscience, innovation and care, ambition and responsibility. Its contribution does not lie in slowing progress, but in broadening the definition of success. A solution is not truly successful if it saves money but destroys trust; if it increases productivity but excludes; if it personalizes an experience but manipulates; or if it connects millions of people while leaving them more alone.

That is why the presence of women should not be limited to occupying a seat at the table. It must help change the questions asked at that table. Leading in this era means helping technology understand —through the human decisions that guide it— that efficiency is not the only value, and that no innovation can be considered good if it weakens human dignity.

Five Tensions for Leading with Discernment

Artificial intelligence does not simply force us to choose between using it or rejecting it. That would be too easy a debate. The real challenge arises when a tool offers a concrete advantage —speed, convenience, reach, or personalization— while at the same time it can weaken something we also value: our own judgment, creativity, justice, freedom, or the quality of our relationships.

We need discernment not to distrust every advance, but to look beyond the immediate benefit. Many technological decisions seem small or purely practical, yet they end up shaping the way we learn, work, care, educate, and lead. The five tensions that follow raise a single question: how can we make use of technology without letting it replace what forms us and makes us truly human?

Artificial intelligence can save time, reduce repetitive tasks, and simplify processes. That is a genuine opportunity. But not every difficulty is useless, nor should every effort disappear. There are processes that build patience, judgment, discipline, creativity, and maturity. A leader must distinguish between automating what wears people down without adding value, and unknowingly eliminating the very experiences that help a person grow.

The leadership question is concrete: Does this tool free up time to think and serve better, or is it replacing the effort needed to learn, create, and take responsibility?

Artificial intelligence can be a great ally for exploring ideas, researching, organizing information, or preparing a first draft. But creating is not simply producing something new. It also involves authorship, effort, responsibility, and recognition. Presenting content that does not express our own thinking as if it were our own, or using the work of others without giving credit, weakens our integrity and ultimately impoverishes our own voice.

The leadership question is: Are we using technology to amplify an authentic human voice, or to conceal the fact that voice is no longer present?

And this brings us, finally, to another significant event of our era that took place this year: the presentation of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, in May 2026, Magnifica Humanitas. For many of us who research artificial intelligence, it was especially moving to discover how Pope Leo, much like his predecessor Leo XIII did at the close of the nineteenth century, was calling all of us to reflect on how we are protagonists of transcendental events — of a new revolution in the midst of the twenty-first century.

The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas invites us to measure progress not only by the speed of machines or the number of tasks that can be automated, but by their contribution to a more human and fraternal society.[5] This measure becomes especially urgent in the face of the spread of synthetic content. Generative artificial intelligence can produce convincing text, images, voices, and video in a matter of seconds. That capacity expands creativity, but it also makes trust more fragile.

When a falsehood is cheaper and faster to produce than it is to verify, truth becomes inconvenient. When a claim can be presented with the appearance of evidence, when a photograph can be fabricated and a voice can be cloned, “seeing is believing” is no longer enough. Fake news, doctored images, and manipulated videos do more than confuse. They can destroy reputations, deepen divisions, influence elections, damage families, and cause a society to lose trust in every source of information — even the truthful ones.

At this point, the contribution of women becomes decisive once again. Those of us who lead, educate, communicate, accompany families, or sustain communities are called to protect not only accurate information, but the relationships of trust that allow us to live together. Caring for humanity also means caring for truth: resisting the impulse to share what merely confirms our biases, interrupting a chain of outrage, and considering the harm a piece of content might cause before amplifying it.

Pope Leo XIV’s message for the 2026 World Day of Social Communications sums up this discipline with a direct invitation: “Do not surrender your own thinking.” The Pope warns that the challenge is not only technological but anthropological, because in delegating the effort of thinking, we risk becoming passive consumers of content that others produce and select on our behalf.[4]

A basic discipline before sharing any questionable content:

• Pause: do not react on impulse, out of fear or outrage.
• Verify: look for the original source and cross-check it against reliable media or documents.
• Contextualize: confirm the date, place, edit, and purpose of the content.
• Weigh the harm: ask who could be hurt by a hasty share.
• Decide responsibly: do not share when there isn’t enough basis to trust it.

In a world of instant responses, discernment can feel slow. Precisely for that reason, it becomes a form of resistance and of leadership. Thinking requires pausing, cross-checking, recognizing limits, and taking responsibility. It is not a defensive posture toward technology. It is the condition for using it without surrendering our freedom.

Conclusion: An Agenda for Women Who Lead

Artificial intelligence is not a conversation about some distant future. It is already present in classrooms, hospitals, companies, governments, homes, and personal relationships. It is changing the way we work, learn, inform ourselves, hire, educate, and make decisions. Although many of these decisions are presented as purely technical, in reality they are defining what we understand by progress, what place we give to the person, and what we are willing to sacrifice in the name of speed or efficiency.

For this reason, women cannot remain mere spectators of this transformation. Nor is it enough to learn how to use new tools or adapt to changes designed by others. We need to be present where its goals, rules, and limits are decided. Building an artificial intelligence that serves humanity requires women capable of building bridges between technology and everyday life — between business, politics, education, communication, family, and community.

This agenda can begin with seven concrete commitments:

1. Educate ourselves. Understand the basic concepts of data, training, bias, probability, privacy, and the limits of models. There is no need to become a specialist, but we must acquire enough knowledge not to delegate important decisions to those who master the technical language.
2. Preserve the human core. Use technology to expand our capacities, not to replace judgment, our own voice, responsibility, creativity, or personal encounter. Some tasks can be automated; but there are decisions that, because of their impact on people’s lives, must remain deeply human.
3. Practice transparency. Explain when, how, and for what purpose artificial intelligence is being used, especially when it factors into content, evaluations, or decisions that affect other people. Trust is not built by hiding technology, but by using it honestly.
4. Protect people. Avoid unnecessary exposure of data, defend privacy, and anticipate harm, especially for those with fewer resources or less capacity to defend themselves. Privacy is not a technical detail: it is part of human freedom and dignity.
5. Demand accountability. Ask who is overseeing a system, who can correct a decision, and what mechanism exists to file a complaint when a system gets it wrong. Behind every algorithm there must be people and institutions willing to take responsibility.
6. Design with justice. Incorporate diverse experiences, realities, and perspectives from the outset. Assess who benefits from a tool, who might be harmed, and what unintended consequences it could produce. Efficiency cannot be the only measure of success.
7. Build community. Strengthen real bonds, conversation, listening, and support networks. Faced with technologies capable of simulating closeness, attention, and even affection, we need to protect what no machine can offer: presence, reciprocity, commitment, and genuine care.

Artificial intelligence is one of the great moral tests of our generation, because it amplifies tensions that already existed among us: inequality, manipulation, disinformation, isolation, the erosion of trust, and the concentration of power. But it can also expand access to knowledge, improve services, free up time, and help us find answers to concrete human problems. The task is not to fear it or to idealize it. The task is to guide it.

The outcome has not yet been written. It will depend on those who design, fund, regulate, teach, and use these tools. It will also depend on those willing to pause a decision, raise an uncomfortable question, or remember that not everything technically possible is humanly acceptable. In this process, women must not limit ourselves to occupying a place within technological transformation: we must help give it meaning.

Our task will be to innovate without losing our soul, to use artificial intelligence without giving up human intelligence, to exercise power without abandoning care, and to pursue efficiency without forgetting justice. It will mean defending truth when it is easier to fabricate a lie, protecting dignity when people are reduced to data, and preserving human bonds when a simulation seems to be enough.

References

1. Pontifical Academy for Life. Rome Call for AI Ethics. Rome, February 28, 2020. Official text.
2. Francis. “Address at the G7 Session on Artificial Intelligence.” Borgo Egnazia, Italy, June 14, 2024. Official text.
3. Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education. Antiqua et nova. Note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. Rome, January 28, 2025. Official text.
4. Leo XIV. “Safeguarding Human Voices and Faces.” Message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications. Vatican, January 24, 2026. Official text.
5. Leo XIV. Magnifica Humanitas. Encyclical letter on the safeguarding of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. Vatican, May 15, 2026. Official text.