The Pope has notes on your roadmap

Welcome to Product Cocktail, where the takes are as polarizing as a shot of Fernet—but the insights come together like a perfectly crafted daiquiri.

Last week, Pope Leo XIV dropped a treatise ("encyclical" if we're being pedantic) on the "dangers of AI." Somehow amidst the Old Style Lagers, ballpark franks, and late night White Sox games, Da Chicago Pope wrote a 42,300 word policy paper warning against a technocratic society that prioritizes efficiency and control over the "mystery of the human person."

I read it using AI. The irony isn't lost on me.

Somewhere between the 23 minute NotebookLM Audio Overview and the simulated expert debate (among Amodei, Andreessen, Pope Leo, and others) using Claude Cowork, I started to think this might be the most Catholic thing I've ever done.

This is what I actually found. It's much more interesting than the cursory overviews granted by the religious press or the obvious "we interviewed a bunch of tech bros and they don't give a shit" angles by the tech set.

Ironically, Pope Leo managed to glaze AI and technology within the first 800 words. Rather than being a scathing takedown, his core thesis is:

Then, like any good Serious Business Executive, he invokes a metaphor: We can move toward "Tower of Babel" where ruthless efficiency tears down dignity and diversity, OR we can do the "Rebuilding of Jerusalem"-type beat where we consider local stakeholder input, build with shared responsibility, and consider the inherent diversity of our society.

This is a lot more nuanced than the "Pope Leo is taking up the mantle of the anti-AI insurrection" takes across the Internet. If anything, it's a little boring: we should work together and build this technology as a community. Not enough juice for the Internet rage machine, apparently.

The headline is boring, but the specifics are anything but.

The media coverage focused heavily on Pope Leo's call to "disarm" AI, but through my AI-led sojourn, I found the risks he explored to be much more nuanced and compelling.

Algorithmic management and the dignity of work. Though the "AI takes jobs" angle was covered extensively, the document actually leads with a much more interesting risk:

This probably isn't something white collar workers think much about, but how many of you out there are already just babysitting Claude Code and hitting "accept changes" 300 times a day?

Governance at the most local level possible. Pope Leo argues that decisions around conditions for access, rules of visibility, forms of interaction, and economic opportunities should be made at a local level, not from "above in an opaque and unilateral manner."

Here's where I diverge from Pope Leo. I'd maybe trust community-level bureaucracy with organizing the 4th of July hot dog eating contest, but setting nuanced AI policy? Stick to the hot dogs and fireworks.

The cannabis case paints a cautionary tale. In states where local opt-out is possible, small town councils routinely override majority-supported state policy for reasons that are... wait for it... opaque and unilateral. Same problem, local scale.

Human vulnerability isn't a defect to be engineered away. The encyclical doesn't say that technology-driven reduction of human limitations or suffering is wrong, but it critiques abandoning our humanity in the pursuit of this goal. The Pope is suggesting that when you frame human vulnerability as a defect to be engineered away, you're not just making a design choice, you're creating an implicit categorization for those that can't keep up as "defective hardware."

Anyone sitting out there hearing the trumpets of executives saying "adopt AI or you'll be PIPed" — or being forced to send that email by their board — should be buying Leo a drink for this call out.

Pope Leo speaks directly to product builders. He argues "every design choice reflects a vision of humanity... developers are called to embed values in their projects with due seriousness: with transparency, responsibility toward affective communities and careful attention to ensuring that what is being cultivated is a genuine good."

The implication is that choices like infinite scroll, engagement optimization, and algorithmic rage boosting are not neutral product decisions, they are moral acts. You aren't off the hook just because your Legal team waved away your decision in the terms of service.

It gets even more bizarre.

Anthropic effectively co-signed this document. Pope Leo presented the encyclical alongside AI experts, including Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic. While the media portrayed this as Leo "trying less to undermine AI than simply participate in the conversation around it," Olah's remarks go beyond a perfunctory ethics-washing photo op.

He admits that AI labs operate "inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing" and "we need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend." That's a one trillion dollar company standing next to the Pope and agreeing with large parts of his message, against a backdrop of controversy surrounding their model being used unwittingly to commit alleged war crimes.

Even after all of that, the most surprising thing I found in 245 paragraphs of papal doctrine: the Pope and I agree on a central principle to AI product development.

Sometimes friction is the feature.

The argument sounds familiar to me:

Leo makes the same argument from a different place. His take isn't PM-coded, it's anthropological. Limitation isn't a pain point to solve, it's where meaningful human experience lives: "when we face rejection, when we suffer the illness or loss of a loved one, when we encounter our own weakness or failure."

The product version of this is: build tools that treat the human in the loop as a feature, not a bug. Don't optimize for efficiency at the expense of a judgment call. That was never the bottleneck in the first place.

Leo's version goes further. When you frame human vulnerability as a defect to be engineered away, you're not just making a product decision. You're making a user segmentation choice. Whoever ends up in the planned obsolescence bucket because they can't keep up in an optimized society — that's on you.

Pope Leo makes the argument that every design choice is a moral act. If you're a product builder, this is the most important conclusion here.

Leo's worry goes one level up: "A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few." Your roadmap is a point of view on ethics, whether you intended it to be or not. You're not pouring a pre-mixed drink, you're dictating what goes into the cocktail.

Pope Leo didn't write a cautionary tale for legislators, he wrote a product spec.

The heuristic to take into your next product design review is "name your defective user" — who does your product implicitly classify as not keeping up? Can you live with that choice?

*If you thought I'd make it through an entire Catholic Catechism-coded column without nodding to the Carthusian monk-manufactured nectar of the gods, Chartreuse, you were wrong.

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