Strange, Delightful, and Slightly Unnerving: Why Both Ezra Klein and Pope Leo XIV Warn That AI Challenges Human Values

Two thoughtful voices from different worlds—a liberal New York Times podcaster and a newly elected pope—arrive at a strikingly similar warning: artificial intelligence poses a profound challenge to human values. Their paths to this conclusion differ, but both detect an unsettling risk at the heart of AI’s rise.

The Podcaster Who Can’t Figure Out His Own Tools

Ezra Klein has never claimed to have AI figured out. On a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, he admitted something familiar to many: even though he sees AI as powerful—able to reshape the economy, disrupt creative fields, and alter how we value work—he struggles to use it effectively in daily life.

To work through this, Klein invited Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, co-author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with A.I. Mollick argues AI is less a calculator or search engine, and more a collaborator. This shift matters. It means choosing the right tool, learning how to prompt, and accepting that even creators of these systems lack a manual for every use.

Klein also pushes these talks past practical advice. At the Center for American Progress IDEAS conference, he questioned whether “artificial intelligence” is accurate, suggesting we are building distributed human-machine collaboration more than independent machine intelligence. It’s a subtle distinction that raises larger questions about our creations.

The Pope Who Called for AI to Be “Disarmed”

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas arrives at a similar destination from a very different starting point. Where Klein describes and interprets AI’s societal implications through pragmatic, secular questioning, Leo approaches with clear moral prescriptions rooted in religious doctrine. The encyclical is explicit that AI is not morally neutral — it cannot be treated as just another tool — and that its development must be ordered toward human dignity and the common good rather than efficiency, profit, or the concentration of power.

Leo is urgent on points Klein often leaves open. The encyclical warns against giving machines the power to make irreversible or lethal decisions and calls for AI to be “disarmed”—free of domination, exclusion, and death in automated systems. This is a stronger stance than most secular commentators, grounded in the Catholic tradition of asking not just what technology can do, but who it serves and at what cost.

Where They Meet

The overlap is real and worth naming. Klein’s instinct that AI must be understood as a relationship — something co-created, not merely operated — closely aligns with Leo’s insistence that AI must serve the human person rather than replace human judgment or sideline human responsibility. Both are worried about the same gravitational pull: the tendency for economic logic or institutional inertia to let efficiency override human goods.

Klein’s phrase “strange, delightful, and slightly unnerving” echoes Leo’s concern that technological progress can dazzle people, leading them to lose sight of what it means to be fully human.

Where They Diverge

The real difference is not in what they observe, but in what they bring to it. Klein is a gifted diagnostician — he maps the terrain, names the tensions, and asks the right questions. Leo offers a moral criterion for answering them. The encyclical asks not just how humans and machines will co-create the future, but also what kind of humanity that future serves, and whether it protects or erodes the person made in the image of God.

This is a different claim. It is more than an ethical guideline; it’s the argument that some uses of AI clash with human dignity.

Why Both Voices Matter

It would be easy to treat these two perspectives as ships passing in the night — secular pragmatism on one side, religious moral framework on the other. But that would be a mistake. Klein helps us understand the experience of living inside this technological moment: the confusion, the possibility, the sense that something enormous is happening, and nobody quite has a map. Leo helps us ask what we owe each other as that moment unfolds, and where the hard limits should be.

Read together, they make a stronger case than either alone: AI is not just a productivity or policy question. It’s a question about what we value, and whether our institutions — technological, political, and moral — are up to the task of protecting it.

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Ezra Klein’s episode “How Should I Be Using A.I. Right Now?” is available on The Ezra Klein Show. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas was issued on 25 May 2026.