For thirty-five years I helped build the systems I now ask questions about.
That is my whole qualification, and it is why my questions are not academic. I sat in the rooms where these decisions got made. I sold the platforms. I wrote the strategy decks. I gave the keynote addresses. I spent the last stretch of my career as a Chief Information Security Officer, which means I know precisely what an organization can learn about a person, and precisely how little stands between the knowing and the using.
I am not a professional academic. Rather, I am a public thinker and technology futurist, drawing on my roots in cultural history, society, and technology. Today, I explore how technology, society, and ethics come together to shape a future where People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity thrive for everyone.
And that is Wisdom Speaking.
The Four Questions
The autonomous revolution will not be stopped, and I have never argued that it should be. I argue it must answer four questions. Not four values, which are things you hold. Four tests, which are things you run.
- People. Who does this make larger, and at whose expense?
- Planet. What does it cost the ground we stand on, and who is sent the bill?
- Purpose. Does it enlarge what a person is for, or narrow it?
- Prosperity. For everyone, or for a few?
Everything I write here is filed under one of the four. Everything I teach ends up at all of them.
Thirty-Five Years, Four Vantage Points
I came into technology sideways. I trained in European history and philosophy at Saint Meinrad College, then pursued graduate work in theology at Saint Meinrad School of Theology, where I became immersed in history, culture, and ethics. I taught for a while and coached high school debate, married, and then found the industry that would occupy the rest of my working life.
Coopers & Lybrand
Emerging technology consulting, back when emerging still meant something you had to explain from first principles. The room where a company decided whether to buy a system before anyone in it could say what the system would do to the work.
Oracle
I helped build the industrial consulting and strategy practice, working with the database layer, applications, and machine learning on which a very large share of the world’s institutional memory still sits. In those rooms, we decided which facts about people an institution would keep, and for how long.
C-Bridge
Headquartered on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I served as Executive Vice President of Strategy and Marketing and Chief Revenue Officer. We built machine learning, early artificial intelligence, and internet systems for the Global 2000, grounded in pattern recognition, in partnership with the companies developing the underlying technology. Nobody called it AI then. It was pattern recognition, and it worked.
American National Insurance
I finished as Executive Chief Information Security Officer, responsible for defending the data of a company whose business is other people’s risk. That is where I learned the last thing on this page: how little stands between what an organization knows about a person and what it does with it.
Along The Way
Along the way, I studied with Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, author of The Goal (North River Press, 1984) and originator of the Theory of Constraints (TOC). We adapted his methods for emerging technology firms, banks, healthcare systems, and investment houses. After a month-long intensive in October 1998, the Goldratt Institute designated me a Jonah’s Jonah, the level qualified to teach and certify Jonahs. I am certified as a TOC Expert in Strategy by the Theory of Constraints International Certification Organization (TOCICO), and I was a founding member of the organization.
I served for twenty years on the board and for a stint as Chair of the Center for Parish Development before it merged with Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in 2025.
I have delivered more than five hundred keynotes and workshops across Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia.
Then Why the Monk?
Because the industry taught me what these systems do, but never what they are for.
It does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it, if we cannot make good use of it, and if, in fact, our technology becomes nothing more than an expensive and complicated way of cultural disintegration.
Thomas Merton
I read Thomas Merton for the same reason a structural engineer reads about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. He is the closest thing we have to a first-hand account of what happens to a human being inside a technological order, written by someone who watched it from a hermitage in Kentucky while the machinery was still being assembled.
And Merton was not observing from a distance. In October 1964 he read Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society and filled notebooks with it, calling it prophetic while judging Ellul too pessimistic. He reviewed it in Commonweal that December. He put technology on the agenda of the Spiritual Roots of Protest retreat he hosted in November 1964. He corresponded with Ivan Illich that same year. And his personal library, held at the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University, contains a copy of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964) with Merton’s marginalia in it.
He read McLuhan with a pencil in his hand. That is not a monk we are borrowing for a technology argument. That is a participant in the argument, and he has been left out of it for sixty years. I am a member of the International Thomas Merton Society, and putting Merton’s own technology reading in front of the artificial intelligence conversation is the particular work I have taken on.
Four Guides
Four people shape everything I write and teach. One of them more than the others.
I need them because of where we are. Every great revolution in how people work has amplified something. The Industrial Revolution amplified muscle and output, and it set off a long fight over the rights of the people who ran the machines. The Internet Revolution amplified communication and the exchange of information. The Autonomous Revolution, driven by artificial intelligence, amplifies something closer to home: us. Machines are no longer only tools that wait for a hand. They act on our behalf, carrying out our commands and anticipating our wishes, and every one of them raises the same question. On whose behalf, finally, and in whose interest?
I believe this is the deepest transformation in recent human history. These four are how I keep my bearings in it.
Thomas Merton is the first and the deepest. He gave me the distinction I use more than any other, between the false self that performs for an audience and the true self that does not need one. Every question I ask of a machine is finally his: what is happening to the human person?
Marshall McLuhan explains how it happens. A medium shapes the people who use it before anyone argues about its message. Merton read McLuhan’s Understanding Media with a pencil in his hand, and so do I.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer shows what conscience costs when a nation’s church blesses the wrong kingdom. In April 1933 he warned that bandaging the victims crushed under the wheel might not be enough, and that the church might have to jam a spoke in the wheel itself. He paid for the warning with his life on 9 April 1945.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest and paleontologist, offers a vision built on one verb: become. Evolution is not the scenery behind the human story; it is the story. The human person is not a finished thing set down in a changing world but the growing tip of a process that has always moved, through convergence, toward greater complexity and greater consciousness. Teilhard adds the question Merton’s needs beside it: not only what is happening to the human person, but what the human person is becoming.
How I Read Them
I borrow two words from the scholars who taught me to read scripture. Hermeneutics is the set of principles for reading a writer well: who wrote this, when, for whom, under what pressures, and what the writer could and could not have known. Exegesis is the practical work of drawing the meaning out of a particular passage, rather than reading our own wishes into it.
Both matter most with Merton. He wrote constantly for twenty-seven years, in journals, letters, poems, and essays, and he often argued with himself in public. Read without principles, he becomes whatever the reader already believes. Read with them, he becomes a witness who watched the technological order arrive and described what it would ask of us.
So the principles come first: each guide read in his own time and on his own terms. The exegesis follows: what a passage actually says, carried across sixty years into a life lived among artificial intelligence.
One Method for All Four
Joseph Cardijn is not a fifth guide so much as the way I walk with the other four. A Belgian priest who founded the Young Christian Workers in the 1920s, he taught working people three verbs.
- See. What is actually happening, and to whom, described plainly before anyone judges it.
- Judge. Measure it against something that does not move: the guides, read well, and the four tests of People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity.
- Act. Do what can be done at the scale you actually have, starting on Monday.
Hermeneutics and exegesis tell me what the guides mean. Cardijn’s method turns that meaning into a decision. It is how innovation, education, and collaboration become change for the greater good, and a more humane future.
Behind all of it stands Benedict of Nursia, whose monks taught me that prayer and work are one thing, not two, and whose Rule I still find the best guide to ordinary life ever written.
The Question I Actually Ask
Not what artificial intelligence can do. Not whether a given system is ethical, which is usually a question about compliance wearing better clothes.
The question is Merton’s: what is happening to the human person?
Merton spent his life on the difference between what he called the false self, the constructed and performing self that seeks confirmation from outside, and the true self, which is not constructed at all. A recommendation engine is a machine for finding and feeding the false self. It does this better than any institution in history, and at a scale Merton could only theorize.
That is not a metaphor. That describes the product.
What I Bring
A working knowledge of how these systems are actually built, sold, and secured. Training in cultural history and theology: seventy-eight graduate hours at Saint Meinrad School of Theology, half in history, and graduate work in comparative religion at Indiana University (IU). Sebastian Leonard, OSB, DPhil (Oxon), directed my college thesis. Cyprian Davis, OSB, PhD, directed my graduate work, and his The History of Black Catholics in the United States (Crossroad, 1990) remains the standard work in its field. And the See-Judge-Act method, which I borrow gratefully from Joseph Cardijn, is the most portable tool I know for turning conviction into a decision somebody can make on a Monday.
Coaching high school debate, where every student argues both sides of one resolution, taught me to build the strongest case against my own view before I judge. I still read history, and every new system, that way.
I have worked hands-on with new technology since the 1980s. My training in history and philosophy is what lets me read artificial intelligence ethically rather than only technically: as the latest in a long line of revolutions that each forced a society to say what it valued.
What Merton offers, and what the current conversation about artificial intelligence most conspicuously lacks, is an account of the human person substantial enough to be worth defending.
That is the work. It is a labor of love, and at this stage of life it is the labor I want.
Where You Will Find Me
I teach adults through the Forever Learning Institute in South Bend, Indiana, and offer keynotes, workshops, book clubs, and retreats, in person and by Zoom.
I am also a member of the International Thomas Merton Society and serve on the education committee, the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI, the Society for the History of Technology, the Cardijn Institute, and the Center for Humane Technology.
Ora et labora.
The Benedictines who taught me held that prayer and work are not two things; they are the same. Thirty-five years in industry did not persuade me otherwise.
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