Cristo Rey Network
Published in Forbes by Cristo Rey Network President & CEO, Kelby Woodard
A recent New York Times profile of a Silicon Valley group house should worry anyone who employs young people or who cares about the kind of future we will share with them. One well-connected figure from the A.G.I. House in Silicon Valley said he and his peers see artificial intelligence as a more real, more powerful alternative to the God they grew up disbelieving in. Another in his circle put it more bluntly. People are now literally saying they want to build a machine God and they mean it. No wonder AI executives are being ‘booed’ at commencement ceremonies across the country this summer.
When Pope Leo XIV published an encyclical warning about this exact dynamic, the same well-connected figure waved it off as the kind of policy paper that regularly circulates among think tanks, adding that the Church could not possibly have an informed view on AI because they do not understand it.
Maybe The Real Risk Isn't The Technology
I have spent the last three decades in education, public service, and business, most recently as president and CEO of the Cristo Rey Network. None of that makes me an AI expert. But it has taught me something about what young people need to become capable, grounded adults, and it is not a faster model release.
The Pope's actual argument is narrower and more useful than the headlines suggest. AI, he wrote, cannot feel joy or pain, cannot mature through relationships, and does not know from the inside what love or responsibility mean. He also warned that an economy offering steady, meaningful work to only a fraction of the world’s population creates a paradox where material progress happens only on paper.
That is not a critique simply of the tech. It is a people problem that sits squarely on the desks of the executives who decide how the next generation of employees gets trained and treated.
Maybe A First Job Matters More Than We Care To Admit
Young employees starting out today may find half the tasks an entry-level hire used to do already automated. They are coming of age in a culture where some of the most influential people in the country are telling them that the meaning they are searching for in their lives is but a few product launches away.
Company leaders cannot solve that with a mission statement. They can solve it in the unglamorous daily choices a manager makes. Those choices include whether junior employees' mistakes get honest feedback or are conveniently avoided and whether their first year is spent being formed into becoming the kind of leaders who will build a better future or who are simply graded against a quota.
I have watched this up close. Every Cristo Rey student earns part of her own tuition through a real corporate job, one day a week, starting at age fourteen. The companies that get the most out of that partnership are the ones whose executives treat a fourteen-year-old's presence in the office as worth taking seriously with real assignments and a few honest minutes about what good work looks like. It is a small, repeatable decision. It is also exactly the kind of formation young people need when the loudest voices are offering them a very different answer to the question of what human dignity looks like in practice.
Maybe This Is A Leadership Problem, Not Just A Theology Problem
You do not need to take a position on the metaphysics of machine consciousness to act. You need to decide that your primary role as a leader is to develop people and not simply see them as a cost input.
Three decades of running schools and businesses have convinced me this pays off in ordinary and measurable ways. Employees mentored early become stronger leaders later. Staff who are trusted to grow stay longer and work harder. None of that work requires a degree in theology. It requires asking what the next generation needs from us to build the future and getting them there before someone else answers that question for them.
Some in Silicon Valley are placing a very large bet that artificial intelligence can substitute for meaning. Business leaders do not have to take the other side of that bet by writing op-eds. We can take it by how we run our companies, who we decide to take seriously, and what we model for the people just starting to figure things out.