In 1633, Galileo Galilei stood in the convent of the Santa Maria sopra Minerva church in Rome, where a tribunal of Catholic authorities forced him to “abjure, curse, and detest” his belief that the sun—not Earth—was the center of the universe.Almost four centuries later, in 2016, the Vatican invited a group of the world’s most prominent technologists to the same church to discuss AI ethics. That was the start of the Minerva Dialogues, annual closed-door conferences in Rome that have become the centerpiece of a decade-long exchange between Silicon Valley and the Catholic Church.The Valley and the Vatican seem like strange bedfellows: The oldest institution in the world meets secular upstarts bent on creating godlike technology.
When the venture capitalist Reid Hoffman first attended the dialogues, he told me he was struck by the portraits lining the walls that depicted Catholic inquisitors like those who persecuted Galileo. “It feels a little bit weird to be walking in voluntarily past these,” he remembers thinking.Despite this weirdness, however, and some mutual skepticism, Big Tech and the Catholic Church each has something to gain from the other. For Silicon Valley leaders, the exchange could help rehabilitate their dismal reputation by signaling that they’re taking ethical concerns seriously. (There’s a reason that photo ops with the late Pope Francis were a rite of passage for tech CEOs.) The Church, meanwhile, has its own public-image problem.
Scandal and secularism have drained Catholicism’s moral authority, and it now seems irrelevant to many in the West. By providing counsel to Silicon Valley, the Church has an opportunity to claw back influence and make its case that the secular world needs Catholicism to address the moral and existential questions raised by AI.Whether the Church or Big Tech can rebuild its global standing is an open question. But their discussions have already made one thing apparent: Catholic thinkers seem to be exerting real influence on some of the world’s most prominent AI developers, causing them to reconsider their ethical assumptions and reframe technological challenges as theological ones.
In this way, at least, their partnership could have consequences that spread far beyond Silicon Valley and Rome.Reid Hoffman is not a Christian. He calls himself a “mystical atheist,” and told me that the few times he’s gone to Catholic Mass were “strange, dude.” But the weirdness he sees in Catholicism—the gulf between its teachings and the prevailing ideologies in Silicon Valley—is why he finds the faith so valuable. Over the years, he’s recruited other top AI executives to join him at the Minerva Dialogues.
Part of his pitch to them is that the Catholic leaders he speaks with don’t proselytize. Often they simply ask questions.During one meeting, Hoffman remembers discussing whether AI could eventually be trusted to mete out criminal sentencing. If one could work out the technological kinks, he thought, AI might make better judges than humans do.
Then a Catholic participant interrupted: “Don’t we as humans have a right to be judged by humans?”[Elizabeth Bruenig: Can Silicon Valley find Christianity?]This isn’t the kind of concern that many tech leaders take seriously. Éric Salobir, a French priest who helped found the Minerva Dialogues, told me that clergy and technologists come from “two different operating systems.” Silicon Valley tends to weigh ethical problems by focusing on measurable consequences. But Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago and a key adviser to the pope, told me that something is lost when we “reduce ethics and morality to a mathematical equation.” Christian ethics considers “not only an action’s outcomes but also the values at stake and the duties that derive from those values,” as Pope Francis said in a 2024 address on AI.
Many of those values are grounded in the idea—axiomatic for Christians—that human beings have a unique dignity and worth. Certain figures in the tech world seem to disagree, including Elon Musk, who has described humanity as a mere prerequisite to AI: the “minimal bit of code necessary” for “digital super-intelligence” to take over.By emphasizing intelligence over all else, some in Silicon Valley have come to see the body as secondary to the mind. The so-called transhumanists dream of doing away with the body altogether by uploading their consciousness into a computer.
“I’d love that,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said. Catholics offer a countervailing view, arguing that the body is essential to the human person. Without engaging the Church’s perspective on these and other issues, Hoffman told me, technologists risk becoming “solipsistic and narcissistic.”Being out of touch with widely shared moral intuitions could be a problem for Silicon Valley, which is already hemorrhaging public trust.
AI is now less popular than ICE. Last year, a Reuters poll found that 71 percent of Americans are concerned about AI displacing workers, an