• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, May 28, 2026

For most of us, dealing with AI is like drinking from a fire hose.

We know AI is fundamentally affecting almost everything we do in business. We know, or suspect, that it will dramatically impact so many areas of our lives, from how we consume media to how we communicate and how we make decisions. We know it will dramatically impact our careers and the careers of our friends, families and colleagues.

And while we know that big changes are coming, most of us find it hard to get past dealing with AI’s impact as it manifests in front of us, whether that means increasingly using Chat GPT or Gemini as a better answer machine, creating skills in Claude, or even creating autonomous agents to do things we might have tasked humans to do, like booking airline tickets or managing analytic tracking of employee progress against goals.

For sure, many ponder what this means in a greater way. It’s already hard to wrap one’s head around issues like AI-driven automation’s likely impact on the workforce or the potential to lose control of your identity and social relationships to near-perfect, AI-produced deep fakes. And these issues don’t even begin to scratch the surface of what’s coming.

Might we see consequences from AI that parallel the global upheavals of the late 1800s and early 1900s caused by the Industrial Revolution? We almost certainly will, and probably faster and more dramatically than the way things played out over many decades and quite a number of wars, both civil and global.

Maybe you feel powerless to do anything about it -- but you shouldn’t. There are roles to be played in how AI is used by society, whether as employees, executives, voters, elected officials, NGOs, students, teachers, religious leaders, congregants and so many others.

The best way to make a difference is to be informed. And one of the best ways to be better informed at this moment, I believe, is to read the Encyclical Letter that was just published by Pope Leo, inspired in part by a similar letter penned by an earlier Pope Leo in 1890 as the disruptive power of the Industrial Revolution loomed over humanity, and the battle between the paths of communism and capitalism was becoming manifest.

I am not Catholic, and not even that religious, so I'm not recommending you read this document for that reason. I find it a very powerful read that makes some relevant observations and arguments helpful for most of us to consider, whether or not we agree with them.

AI is going to change our lives, our world, and humanity -- and if you want any control over your destiny, you will certainly want to have an informed point of view on it. What do you think?