When the Pope Takes on Silicon Valley: A Tech Worker's Unexpected Agreement
Well, here’s something I never thought I’d write: I find myself nodding along with the Pope. Pope Leo’s recent declaration that AI technology is “an empty, cold shell that will do great damage to what humanity is about” has been doing the rounds online, and frankly, it’s got me thinking about the uncomfortable parallels between tech evangelism and religious fervor.
The irony isn’t lost on me. Here I am, someone who’s spent decades in IT and DevOps, someone who generally leans towards science over religion, finding common ground with the Vatican. But when you strip away the religious context, what Pope Leo is essentially saying is that we’re creating false idols – and in the tech world, that hits uncomfortably close to home.
I’ve watched colleagues and industry leaders speak about AI with the kind of reverence usually reserved for deities. The language is telling: AI as omniscient, omnipresent, living “in the cloud” (quite literally, heaven-adjacent). We’re promised salvation through algorithms, eternal life through digital consciousness, and answers to all our problems through machine learning. Sound familiar?
The discussion threads around this story have been fascinating to watch unfold. There’s the usual tech skepticism, sure, but also something deeper – people recognizing that we might be crossing a line we’re not even fully aware of. Someone made the point that AI is essentially “regurgitation and plagiarism,” and while that might sound harsh, it captures something important about the gap between what AI actually does and what we’re told it represents.
What really strikes me is how this intersects with the current state of technology more broadly. We’ve built systems that are incredibly good at appearing intelligent while being fundamentally hollow. They can generate convincing text, create impressive images, even hold conversations – but there’s nothing really there. No understanding, no consciousness, no soul if you want to get poetic about it. Just very sophisticated pattern matching dressed up as wisdom.
The environmental angle bothers me too. These AI systems consume massive amounts of energy, contributing to climate change while promising to solve our problems. It’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that makes me want to throw my MacBook out the window – though I won’t, because I’m not a complete hypocrite and I still need to pay the bills.
What’s particularly interesting is watching how this plays out in different cultural contexts. The discussion about American Catholics versus the broader Catholic Church touches on something I see in tech circles too – this tension between the global perspective and the Silicon Valley bubble. The tech industry often assumes its values are universal, but maybe we need more voices pushing back, asking whether technological progress for its own sake is really progress at all.
I’m not about to start attending Mass anytime soon, but Pope Leo’s warning about AI doing “great damage to what humanity is about” deserves serious consideration from those of us working in the industry. We’re not just building tools anymore; we’re shaping how people think, communicate, and understand reality. That’s a responsibility that goes well beyond quarterly earnings and user engagement metrics.
The real question isn’t whether we should ban AI or embrace it wholesale – it’s whether we can develop and deploy these technologies in ways that enhance rather than diminish our humanity. Maybe that means slowing down, asking harder questions, and being more honest about what these systems can and can’t do. Maybe it means listening to voices from outside the tech echo chamber, even when they come from institutions we might not usually turn to for technological guidance.
Pope Leo might be onto something here. Not because he has divine insight into the future of technology, but because he’s asking the questions we should all be asking: What does it mean to be human? How do we preserve that in an age of artificial intelligence? And are we building a better world, or just a more automated one?
These aren’t easy questions, and they certainly don’t have algorithmic solutions. But they’re the conversations we need to be having – whether you’re sitting in a pew on Sunday morning or debugging code at 2 AM with a cold batch brew by your side.