Stewards of Creation

Pope Leo XIV has been returning to a single, insistent theme recently: our technological and economic lives are not morally neutral. They are places of vocation and discernment. I’ve been weighing this for a while.

“Technological innovation,” he writes, “can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation.”¹ Every choice, every word, every line of code, “expresses a vision of humanity”. Builders of AI, he insists, are called to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work, so that what we create reflects a genuine reverence for life.

In parallel, he has been speaking about business and leadership in similarly charged terms. “Business is business” is not good enough. No one should be absorbed into an organisation as a mere cog or function; we need people in all their glory. And the world, he says, needs entrepreneurs and communicators who care for the common good and who are willing to ask uncomfortable questions: Where are we going? For whom and for what are we working? How are we repairing a broken world?²

Behind these appeals lies a deeper conviction about the human person. Technological development has brought and continues to bring immense benefits, but for it to count as true progress, human dignity and the common good must remain resolute priorities. (Who would disagree?) The Pope reminds us of the “ontological dignity that belongs to the person as such simply because he or she exists and is willed, created, and loved by God”.³ (We hold these truths self-evident …)

Strikingly, he talks about holiness blossoming precisely where the high(est)-stakes decisions are made — where the lives of millions of families are affected.⁴ It is possible, apparently, and surely with tremendous difficulty, to be both entrepreneur and saint. In other words: there is no outer zone in which power and technology are cut loose from the demands of love.

As a Christian, a moral philosopher, and an engineer, all of this has been on my mind. One imagines that a doctoral researcher, such as myself, with my background, has duties to make the world go well in the light of AI and innovation generally. I agree.

Just like my teenage self — but much less angsty and I hope at least half as cringe — I still spend much of my days thinking about intelligence, systems, and incentives, and many of my nights thinking about meaning, virtue, and grace. If we are participating, however imperfectly, in the divine act of creation, what kind of future are we creating? What vision of humanity are our tools, institutions, and stories authoring? What does it mean to build as an act of love?

I hold to an ever-expanding wave of human flourishing: locally, globally, and universally. I know few ends as large or as worthy.

My reasoning is simple.

(i) Life, and human life in particular, is good in itself. The world is broken and we are fallible, but the human animal is a healer. Other creatures build; we also mend. We bring habitable order to the world around us and fashion it into something more pleasing, but we are set apart by our ability to heal and restore. We have a deep causal understanding of the world and visions of its ideal state, which makes us uniquely empowered. To multiply people and to multiply life is an intrinsic good. To turn away from avoidable loss and needless decay is moral abdication.

(ii) We have a role to play as stewards of the universe. Call it noblesse oblige; call it the Mantle of Responsibility; call it a divine right, God’s grace, or dumb luck: we happen to be first. We are a forerunner species, born so early in the history of the universe, and I believe we are called to do something with that opportunity. Our impulse is to create and to nurture; we ought to follow it to its proper conclusion — that life is abundant, even among the stars.

I am unlikely to settle another planet or live for ever. That’s not the point. Why speak of it, then? Because civilisations are not propelled by inevitability; they are steered by the sum of personal preferences, investments, and stories. A culture that narrates itself in narrow, fearful, and fleeting terms bequeaths a brittle and impoverished future. A culture that places boundless life at its centre becomes an engine of prosperity.

We are in desperate need of better stories; perhaps even a renewed mythology for our past, our place, and our role in the future. Yet prevailing moods hold us back.

Fearful and narrow stories have led to a shying away from life and possibility. The fearful stories have made us downtrodden and proud ‘realists’: if ruin does not come by AI, it will come by climate, by economy, by war, by plague, or by some calamity of our own making. Counselled by these stories we have learned to distrust ourselves and doubt our goodness. We prefer not to try lest we fail, not to have lest we lose, and, it seems, even to outwit death by denying ourselves life. This saddens me.

Pessimism is a necessary pinch of salt, and we need salt, but we also need light. We need positive visions. Communities built around fear become destructive, even predatory, in spirit.

Among the bold and risk-tolerant — perhaps including many reading this — there is another hazard: a stoic indifference, in which progress is abstracted from persons. It is a kind of predestination; a belief that the arc of innovation is fixed in advance and our only choice is whether to accelerate or be left behind. On this technoscientific view, humanity is a fleeting instrument of ever-accelerating progress as an end in itself. I fear this is the unfortunate marriage of digital and consequentialist thinking.

For pragmatic reasons, our modern lives have been sliced into measurable components — sampled, quantised, encoded as utility functions. Moral sensibility and character have been reduced to discrete value calculations: ‘What maximises benefit?’ ‘What minimises harm?’ Yet life and morality are continuous journeys into richer possibilities of the good, even amid trade-offs. There is scope for technomoral progress hand-in-hand with technoscientific progress. The same is true of AI: every system we design expresses a judgement about which futures, which lives, and which virtues we choose to serve. Neither individuals nor societies should be reduced to mere expedience; progress without purpose is a soulless habit.

And we must resist seeing progress as purely technological. Most of our greatest problems have been social, and most of our greatest solutions have been social too. Technology is not a substitute for good governance or wise policy. Peace and prosperity will not come from endlessly producing and consuming new tools. Material progress matters only insofar as it drives human progress. In this, social technology comes first.

Progress, then, should not be reduced to maximising narrow metrics. It should be a process of cultivating a prosperous, self-sustaining, and self-enriching future — anchored in human dignity, life, and moral possibility. Our ambitions should be cosmic in scale and human to the core.

That is why we need habits of discernment about the things we build. Does this mend more than it risks breaking? Does it deepen human agency rather than hollowing it out? Does it widen the space for love and truth? Where we cannot honestly answer “yes”, perhaps we should think twice. “The incentives made me do it” may be no more an excuse for engineers than “following orders” was for soldiers. Progress with a soul must sometimes say, “No, not like this.”