As a venture capitalist who has spent more than two decades investing in emerging innovations like quantum computing and artificial intelligence, the recently released encyclical by Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence), revealed something surprising to me: Technology leaders and the Vatican agree on AI more than many people would expect.
This certainly isn’t because the tech community spends its nights reading papal encyclicals. It is because good venture investing and successful entrepreneurship are fundamentally exercises in understanding history and humanity. As I often like to say, the most important technological innovations are those that fulfill a timeless human need.
For example, to achieve movement, the 19th-century horse-drawn carriage known as a hansom cab developed into Uber in the 2010s and is becoming a Waymo robotaxi today. The telegraph, then the telephone, then email evolved into social media like Facebook, which is now giving way to decentralized networks like Bluesky for communication. The corner grocer became the supermarket, which became Instacart, and is now evolving toward personalized nutrition platforms that help determine what food we eat. Technology changes constantly in service of human nature, but human nature itself will not change.
This is precisely why I found Magnifica Humanitas so compelling. While the encyclical centers on artificial intelligence, its core is focused on the very things tech investors and startup founders spend their entire careers trying to understand: how people make decisions, how institutions shape behavior, how incentives drive outcomes, and how technological disruption alters the fabric of society.
In that sense, Pope Leo and the tech community are not examining different fields. We are looking at the exact same human reality, just from our own patches of grass.
Innovation requires trust
The public debate around AI is frequently framed as a binary conflict between risk taking and risk aversion. In a simplistic image, technologists are racing selfishly ahead while ethicists, regulators, and religious leaders are cautiously stymying that progress.
However, that has not been my real experience. The tech founders and venture investors I work with spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about fraud, security, governance, accountability, and unintended consequences. We do this because we know a fundamental business truth: Transformative technologies only achieve true scale when they are trusted.
Every major technological wave creates both new capabilities and new vulnerabilities, which in turn spark entirely new industries. The rise of the internet created cybersecurity. The boom of e-commerce built fraud detection. The shift to cloud computing generated compliance platforms.
AI will be no different. It is already catalyzing its own massive ecosystem of guardrails such as auditing tools, monitoring systems, authentication protocols, governance frameworks, data provenance, and more. This is perhaps the biggest point of alignment between the church and the startup world. The pope is asking for safeguards around AI, and entrepreneurs are already building tools for just that.
Why great technology is never enough
A common misperception of the tech sector is that it believes innovation should steamroll ahead and ask for forgiveness later. But seasoned entrepreneurs know that great technology alone is never enough. Our history is filled with technically terrific innovations from the Betamax to the Segway and Google Glass which humbly showed that technical achievement alone doesn’t determine success. Public trust, regulatory support, institutional buy-in, and social acceptance matter just as much—if not more—than good engineering.
And while the pope’s encyclical is not legislation, it will likely influence policymakers, regulators, educators, and civic leaders, first throughout Europe and then globally. Those conversations will find their way into formal regulations, industry standards, corporate procurement decisions, and public expectations. Any experienced founder or investor understands that these forces will then actively shape the environment in which their emerging technologies will fail or succeed.
Ultimately, Magnifica Humanitas reveals that both the Vatican and Silicon Valley are grappling with the same reality: Powerful new technologies are reshaping human lives, institutions, and societies. As a result, that reality is bringing up the same questions. How do we fulfill human needs? How do we build trust in new innovation? How do we ensure that technology is a tool for people rather than the other way around? As we look ahead to that future, ideally all will come to understand that innovation and stewardship are not opposites. They are two sides of the same responsibility and possibility.
Image: Unsplash/This Is Engineering
