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Work Your Values is a podcast that explores the deeper meaning behind our professional lives, where everyday work becomes a path to purpose and our true calling. Through candid conversations and storytelling, Sunday to Sunday's Frank Connelly reveals how values like dignity, justice, and service shape the way we lead, live—and inspire others.
Hey, everybody. This is Frank Connelly, the chief marketing officer at Sunday to Sunday Productions. Thanks for joining us on the Work Your Values podcast, the podcast that helps you take your faith into that space, space that many of us during our waking hours are doing most of the time, which is working. So today's episode is one that I've been waiting to do for some time. To be completely transparent, I have recorded it and scrapped it exactly three times.
Frank (Host):So maybe four is a charm here. We'll see. If you're hearing this, then you know that it was that it that it reached the standard that I was hoping it to do. Now I will have guests that will come on the show to talk about these issues. But for now, I'm the guest.
Frank (Host):And that sounds kinda arrogant, but I've been writing about this for quite some time. The type of media technology that I'm involved in, both with Sunday to Sunday and outside, has to do a lot with sort of a different track. The track that you listen to when you're hearing sort of the tech bros, the big four or five on stages around the world are all talking about this inevitability, seeming inevitability, that AI is just going to take everything. It's just going to eat everything. And trust me when I say, we've kind of been through this before.
Frank (Host):And we've also been through this sort of rhetoric before. And I've lived through some of it professionally when I was a lawyer, a communications lawyer, when the next big thing was BPOs, which was we were basically going to outsource all our work to people in other countries. Now we're seemingly looking to outsource all our work to bots. And that's a scary proposition, and there's a lot of things that can come of that, but help is on the way. And I was really excited when Pope Leo released Covetus, which we're going get into today, which is this amazing manifesto on the role of AI in the world.
Frank (Host):And why I was so excited about that is that from about 2022, 2023, I've been writing about this coming issue that rather than designing AI number one, rather than designing AI to be replacing us, we should be designing AI that is empowering us. We, the human in the middle, not just in the loop, which you hear that a lot, which is sort of a way that the tech industry or big tech has been trying to placate governance and government and people and industry that they're not out to replace us all. Somewhere, we'll be in the loop somewhere, and you find out very quickly that the human becomes very tangential to the amount of investment that's being put into these tools. And they are tools, and they can be used for anything. A hammer can be used to build.
Frank (Host):A hammer can be used to destroy. I've been writing about this since 2022. The hammer that we've been building has been one that builds capability around the human, that the human is not in the loop. The human's in the middle. And that's what I want to talk about today.
Frank (Host):That's why I've invited myself on as a guest today because I feel like there are not a whole lot of people that have a voice right now. I'm going to be very persistent in putting myself in the ring, in arena, on this issue, rather unpopular. And to add insult to injury, I'm actually going to say to the world that your only chance of survival of what's coming next in the AI field is Catholicism. By that, I mean this amazing body of work that starts all the way from St. Augustine to present, and so many different authors through the centuries of Catholic social teachings.
Frank (Host):And I'm going to tell you this kind of anecdotal story in a minute, but I kind of want to get to what it is that the beef this topic, and then I'm going to give you a very interesting story about how I arrived at that fact that some morality engine needs to be built into technology because it doesn't have one. It doesn't know what it's doing. Some speakers have said, Listen, if you give it a problem, you give it all power, and you get presented a problem and it says, How do you best solve the climate crisis? And it decides that the best long term strategy is to just eliminate the human race, and then the planet will heal itself eventually, then that is probably the action it would take because it has no moral. And if you're trying to bake morals into it, you have one tech company that shall remain nameless who's inviting Catholic priests to come in and talk about this, but even that is the wrong approach.
Frank (Host):But I'm getting ahead of myself. Okay, so let's start with this. Why is the Vatican's latest warning about AI matter so much to business leaders, to every business leader, whether you are Catholic or not? And that's a wonderful thing about Pope Leo. He is so appealing to not just Catholics.
Frank (Host):Not that Francis wasn't a rock star in his own right, but Leo hits different, particularly here in The US, and he's hitting different with people that are not even Catholics. As part of my job, I have to follow Catholic social media across all channels, and I see it every day. So here's where we start. Whether you're a Catholic listening to this channel, if you want to be a Catholic listening to this channel, if you're not a Catholic and you have no interest, if you're a business leader, you need to listen to this next part, okay? Because a quiet but profound document came out of the Vatican this year.
Frank (Host):It wasn't about liturgy, it wasn't about doctrine or internal church affairs, it was about the future of humanity itself, okay? Listen, the theological treatise Q U O V A D I S, it's in the show notes complete, meaning I'm sorry, Q U V A I that's the most important word. Where are you going, humanity? And there's a scriptural parallel to that, but it addresses the moral questions raised by artificial intelligence, the rise of transhumanism, and the theological reshaping of society. At first glance, may seem like a document for theologians.
Frank (Host):It is definitely not. But if you work in technology, corporate leadership, AI governance, public policy, If you're a state governor, it might be one of the most important texts you're going to read this decade. And that is not an understatement or an overstatement. Because at its core, the document is asking a question that every company implementing AI should be asking right now. And if you've been following this, AI adoption in the workplace has been a complete failure, and this may be the reason why.
Frank (Host):Okay, so the question that we have to ask ourselves is what kind of humanity are we building toward? Because if we listen to many of the tech bros, let's just call them what they are, the tech bros are about five dudes who come from a heavy tech industry, and some of them don't even come from a tech industry, they just come from a marketing background. They speak about AI as if it's this inevitability that's coming that we just have to get prepared for. Like if you believe that climate change is going to suddenly make you have to turn into a prepper and building bunkers or whatever the case may be. That's kind of the way they've been positioning is that there is just nothing we can do about it, that they are somehow not in control of it and not profiting from it.
Frank (Host):So the answer to that question is the future of work, and this is what I write about a lot, the future of work is now a theological question. For all human history from the time of the Industrial Revolution and the most recent iteration of the future of work, the issue has always been a question that can be solved by an economist, can be solved by policy, can be solved by stakeholder or shareholder capitalism in the cases that we've had in the Supreme Court for decades. But today, it's changed because the tool could replace us. And therefore, it's a question of should we allow it as human beings with dignity, God given right to industry, solidarity, subsidiarity, all these themes are theological questions of the tool that is being unleashed on us. As I said, for most of modern history, the ethics of business has been focused on fairness, on transparency, responsibility.
Frank (Host):I myself come from a background of communication in these regards, but artificial intelligence has raised a much deeper issue. Technology no longer changes how we work. It's increasingly determining whether humans are needed to work at all. I think one of the worst things that happened at the end of the year last year went completely, completely without outrage. We were outraging on social media over the smallest things, but Amazon comes out and says, We're laying off 30,000 employees because of AI.
Frank (Host):And the memo continues to read that if you weren't basically cut, lean into AI, quote unquote. That's scary. If the auto industry had laid off that many people or pretty much any other industry, there would be outrage. There would be picketing in the streets, and unions would be going crazy. And this barely even made the headline, made a headline for a day.
Frank (Host):So in Quivatus Humanitas, where are we going humanity, the International Theological Commission warned that technological systems can subtly be reshaping how we understand the human person. If we look at the world in general, and the nature of war, and the sort of new, as Pope Leo says, war is fashionable, violence is fashionable, and this idea that humans have less value is sadly becoming fashionable, that we need to understand that the human has a specific value that needs to be protected above all. So the document argues that modern technological ideologies from transhumanism to posthumanism are risk reducing the human being to something programmable or replaceable. So the human is the risk factor inside capitalism, which is absurd because without that three legged stool of the capital, the machine resource, and the human, you no longer have capitalism. You have feudalism.
Frank (Host):I'll get into that. Okay, so the document states, Human identity is discovered in relationship and vocation, not manufactured through technological intervention. That idea has enormous implications on the future of work. Because if human beings are understood merely as productive units, replaceable by a machine, then the economic logic of AI will inevitably push toward removing humans from the equation entirely, which is where we're heading. That's why they just keep calling it human in the loop, The human just keeps getting layered and layered and layered further and further away from that loop until it's almost an absurdity that they actually even use the terminology.
Frank (Host):I know I've been seeing it. Okay, so that brings us to an uncomfortable question that companies are facing, particularly those who have tried AI and have lost. If AI can perform more tasks faster and cheaper than humans, what's the role of the human worker? And this is where we start getting into this realm of this dystopian version of the future of work, which is techno feudalism. Now in the show notes, I have an article about that.
Frank (Host):We can go into a lot about what that means, and you can read that article. It's on my medium. In that article I quote the economist Ioannis Varoukaris, who described the emerging digital economy as techno feudalism. He was sort of the first one, canary in the coal mine. In this model, the infrastructure of the economy is data platforms, cloud systems, algorithmic decision engines, which Apop just spoke about yesterday.
Frank (Host):If you're listening to this, he is just flying back from Africa to Rome. And it's controlled by a very small number of technological firms, I and would even say CEOs within those firms and billionaire hedging on trillionaires, which seems to be their whole goal in life. These companies are increasingly functioning like a feudal landlord. They own the land of the digital economy, which is the data, the platforms, the algorithms, and everyone else must operate within their own territory. Workers do not simply compete in a market anymore.
Frank (Host):There's no competition. They operate inside an ecosystem controlled by the handful of platforms. In order to do anything, you need to basically be signed into the platform. And this dynamic becomes particularly stark when you just have what Amazon did, which is layoffs justified by AI efficiency. That's what all the capital that has been raised and government racing to create data centers from coast to coast are all being baited into is this idea of this age of productivity.
Frank (Host):And this age of productivity is in the industry economy, but not humanity. So recent large scale layoffs in technology corporate sectors illustrate how quickly entire populations of workers can be displaced when algorithmic optimization becomes the dominant logic. That moment, that is where we see the ethical fault line. For me, when I saw that Amazon headline, that was my wake up call that the things that I'd been writing about for the last two years are just simply not going to happen on their own. I've got to take a thought leadership position in it.
Frank (Host):This is me working my values within the industry that I am. There's no question AI is very efficient. It's lost a lot of its shine because they oversold it into businesses as to it's going to be able to take care of a lot of things, but they understood that they Interestingly, they understood that AI does not understand what it's actually doing. It's sort of a mirage that it's thinking. It doesn't really understand the world and that humans can do even the most basic tasks much better because you know, we grew up in this world.
Frank (Host):So it's very clear that it's not human. And that's where Catholic social teachings come in. This is the missing framework in AI ethics. And that AI ethics is going to be the topic for the next year's year, years, and probably decades. And that's why the Vatican's document was so important, because it reinforces something that Catholic social teachings has been emphasizing for more than a century.
Frank (Host):Good old Catholicism proving itself right decade after decade, century after century, millennia after millennia. This economy exists for the human person, not the other way around. If you take anything away from this podcast, if you stop right now, just remember that. The economy exists for the human person, not the stock exchange, not the federal government, not the GDP, nobody. It exists for the human person.
Frank (Host):This goes back Pope John Paul II wrote, Laborum Exorcens. My Latin's terrible, by the way. I'll be butchering it. I'm also going to put that into the show notes. His quote was, Work is a key, probably the essential key to the whole social question.
Frank (Host):Okay. Now, JP II is directly responsible, along with Ronald Reagan, for taking down the entire Soviet empire on little words like that, that kindled the heart of solidarity and people to understand that they were individuals. They were not cogs in a wheel. Right? So why was that so important?
Frank (Host):Because work is not just an economic activity. It is one of the primary ways human beings participate in creation. God gave us the ability to create. Read the Siuseppe of Saint Ignatius Loyola. He's saying, God, you've given me all these gifts, amazing gifts.
Frank (Host):I'm going to give them all back to you because all I need is your love. And then once you recognize that, tell me what you want me to do with your gifts. They are yours. That is Work Your Values. Right?
Frank (Host):So that's why this issue is probably the most important issue in this episode, is the most important episode and why I had to record it four times. When people work, they create and they build relationships, they exercise responsibility, and contribute to the common good. In other words, work is not just simply about income, it's about human flourishing. Pope Francis, moving on to the next, Pope Francis has put it even more directly, quote, The door to the dignity of a person is work. Dignity.
Frank (Host):Hold on to that word. The insight becomes critical when we begin implementing AI in the workplace, because that's the first thing to go, dignity. Because the question is no longer about efficiency, it's about whether our systems preserve the conditions for human dignity and vocation. Do they? Are they?
Frank (Host):They're not heading that way right now, but they can. And that's where the decision comes back to us. Whether it be at the ballot box or a choice of tools that we use and how we use those tools, there has to be an AI ethic that's built into those. Because right now, strategy is not an ethical strategy. In most organizations today, AI implementation is treated as a technical project.
Frank (Host):I've seen it. The type of guardrails that they put up for misuse only have to do with legal liability. The conversation usually revolves around automation, cost savings, productivity, and competitive advantage. If those tools can be used to do those things, the human is not even in the equation, not even in the room, not even in the loop, no subsidiarity, no concern for the person who actually does that job and has done it very well. But the most recent Vatican document suggests something much deeper.
Frank (Host):AI strategy is no longer merely operational, it's anthropological. Yeah, it reflects what we believe about the human person. Are humans simply replaceable components in an efficiency machine? Or are they center of enterprise itself, The human centered design. It used to be human centered design was, hey, can you operate your smartphone with one hand, with your opposable thumb?
Frank (Host):Well, now human centered design has moved to the actual whole body and the whole person. Right? The Vatican document argues that technological systems must always remain subordinate to human vocation and relational life. Now, that's going to sound to you like pulling all the profit out of the AI model and the entire AI industry. Myself, I have stocks in Nvidia, and I enjoy watching how that's been creeping up.
Frank (Host):But the reality is that there is a far better way and it goes to one of the core components of the company that my wife and I founded Herobridge, which is that you put the person in the middle and you wrap around the technology around the person, and then all of a sudden they become super powered. There's the idea of the hero in Hero Bridge is that you can wrap around like a utility belt, like Batman's utility belt, that had all these specialized components that were necessary for what Batman was going to get himself into on that particular episode. Same as in life, and be able to have these highly advanced technologies to support the individual. And the individual gets to use his brain rather than computer trying to imitate a human brain, which seems to be this destination to nowhere goal that they all seem to be trying to move towards. So this means businesses must ask new questions when deploying AI.
Frank (Host):One would be, does the system augment human creativity or eliminate it? Does it deepen relationships or isolate workers? Isolation is a huge issue right now socially, worldwide. Check out Japan. Does it support meaningful work or reduce humans to passive operators, which is the human in the loop?
Frank (Host):The human becomes the last little component that the computer needs because it really doesn't understand the world or it can't adapt. These are not theological questions alone. They're the next generation of stakeholder ethics. And this is one thing that I have had been able to get on stage and talk about is the evolution of business ethics as we moved from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution and so forth. You always see that there are these epochs of change in ethics, and this is that next one.
Frank (Host):Our laws are really just not designed for what we have coming right now. None of the laws that we have on the books right now are addressing the issues that we're going to need to. And therefore And I don't know if the legal system can catch up fast enough. So really what it has to be is the ethics has to be built into the actual hardware, software, and mindset of companies. In other words, business needs to take the lead.
Frank (Host):Business needs to be working their values for human beings. And that's the emerging discipline, human centered AI for workplaces. In recent years, a movement has begun to emerge in technological ethics called human centered AI. That idea is pretty simple. Technology should enhance capability, not replace human dignity.
Frank (Host):This approach aligns remarkably well with Catholic social teachings, which is a story that I promised I would tell you and I'm going to tell you right now just very briefly. Okay. Before we get to that story, let's take a quick break to give thanks to our sponsor of the Work Your Values podcast, Sunday to Sunday Productions. Okay. Give me a fade out on the end of what I say there and then fade in with a different soundtrack that that stays underneath this entire voice over for this interstitial.
Frank (Host):Okay? Here we go. Hey. Are you a Catholic media influencer? Large or small, big audience, small audience.
Frank (Host):You have your own distinct voice, and people are compelled to listen to you. It's authentic. It's well formed. And you have an audience that you're seeking to reach. We're here to help you.
Frank (Host):At Sunday to Sunday Productions, we're a media ministry that was founded by the late Father Mike Russo, and our mission now is to help support and grow Catholic digital missionaries of all kinds, not just podcasters. Maybe you're a writer. Maybe you are a really good artist. Whatever the case may be, if you have an audience that you're seeking to reach, and you're trying to move that audience to be closer to their faith and their formation and activation and building something called an attentive heart, that giving people the opportunity to find Christ in the world today through their every interaction. Last week we had the gospel of the road to Emmaus.
Frank (Host):Meeting the stranger on the road is Christ. So if this is you and we can be supporting you, I invite you to reach out. I want you to email me directly, Frank@SundaytoSunday.com. That's Frank@SundaytoSunday.com. We look forward to talking to you and seeing how we can support you.
Frank (Host):Alright. God bless, and back to the show. Okay, and thank you. Welcome back to the Work Your Values podcast. Okay, so let me give you this quick story.
Frank (Host):I wrote a book on brand storytelling, secular book, for the SIE, Social Impact Entertainment Society. That book was designed to explain how to do brand storytelling, how to make an effective story for a brand that is not a commercial, but in some way supports or elevates a brand's place in the world, in the conversation, or in some way that they want to make an impact. There were three chapters to that book. The first chapter was for film producers to help them understand the constraints and the guardrails of doing brand storytelling, because it's not just creative storytelling. Has certain functions, and developers and producers know how to do that.
Frank (Host):The second chapter was for cause media marketing agencies to understand how to take those stories and leverage them into the marketplace. And then there was the third chapter. And if you look at that book, that chapter was the leanest of the three that I wrote because I had an idea. That third chapter was for corporate leadership because in order for brand storytelling to actually work, corporate leaders needed to understand what the capabilities of these stories have on their business, but also that they had to lead with leadership that matched whatever the brand persona was. Because at the end of the day, there's no such thing as a corporation.
Frank (Host):Even in law, we call those legal fictions. A corporation is nothing more than a group of people working together for some common endeavor. So if the leadership does not match the brand persona, that's seen as being highly inauthentic, and we've seen lots of pretty explosive and public displays of how CEOs can say something in the public forum through what they think is their own personal social media presence, only to realize that there is no longer a differentiation between the professional and their brand. So guess what? That's where Work Your Values originally came from, because the idea was to write a second book that was just for corporate leaders to help them understand how to be working the values and being able to have the ethics as well as match whatever brand value system that they're imparting to the world so that your actions meet and match what you're essentially saying to the world.
Frank (Host):Here's where things got interesting, because I was really trying to figure out what universal platform could I use, values platform could I use, to help introduce this kind of thinking into corporate leadership. And this is somebody I mean, before I was into corporate communications, I was in communications as a general counsel for corporations, large and small, ones that were growing, ones that were finding their voice, ones that are realizing that suddenly their company got very big and very visible, and now people are looking. So my job, in fact, was to help corporations as general counsel make sure that their values met the world in a congruent way with their shareholders, with stakeholders, within their teams, and leadership. So having that knowledge, I knew that they would need a framework, because they always do. They always need to have some framework and some reference, and that when writing this book, what better reference could I possibly use than Catholic social teachings, with its deep, rich history, very well formed morality, ethics that are in fact universal.
Frank (Host):It doesn't require you to be a Catholic, just like I was saying in the trailer. You don't have to be a Hindu to do yoga or Zen master or a Buddhist monk to do Zen meditation. These are things that are available to everyone. So in doing so, I did not write the book. Still am rewriting the book.
Frank (Host):It'll come eventually, but this is really the impetus of this podcast. But more so, it was the impetus of the framework that I decided that Work Your Values needed to be around and responding to that little voice that was telling me, why are you hiding the source of this wisdom? And that voice was absolutely right. And surfacing that for this podcast, and just like I say in the trailer again, not just for Catholics, for anybody that are listening and wanting to feel like they have a better foundation in what they do in their daily lives, this is it. So the long and the short of it is that everything that Work Your Values was supposed to be about as a book, what Work Your Values is supposed to be for this podcast, and now what the Vatican is saying is that these Catholic social teachings is what is required as we enter into this next age of AI.
Frank (Host):That's why I was so excited about this episode. That's why I was so excited that the Vatican released something so incredible. Let's pick up where we left off. How do we apply Catholic social teachings into the workplace to avoid this dystopian future of work that I've just described. Okay.
Frank (Host):So let's start with some of the basics. We already kind of went through the original idea that technology should enhance human capability, not replace human dignity. Got to prioritize human agency. Relational intelligence, which is a whole subject in itself, And we are really in a world where relation poverty is hitting an all time high. Through social media, which is actually parasocial media I'm going to put an article in there about the toxicity of social media as something that's parasocial.
Frank (Host):It gives us the illusion that we're having relationships. It does not satisfy our restless hearts for community, as the threefold rule of St. Augustine recommends. So there's that. There's relational intelligence.
Frank (Host):We're going to get into that a little bit more. Meaningful participation. I mean, people need to have industry. They need to feel part of something that's part of the dignity. It goes back to human agency.
Frank (Host):A workplace culture, which is something that we're actually building into a program that we've called Hero 111. And Hero 111 is this culture of building, and it can go into any organization. It can go into a school or a company, but it has these foundations built into it as a layer on top of whatever existing technology they're using. Then long term human flourishing. We've been talking about the future of work.
Frank (Host):Think it's UN. I did a lot of work with UNEP and UN Global Compact years ago. And at least a decade or more ago, they were talking about Future of Work 2030 as being this big pivot point for humanity. So Future of Work has been on the radar as something that is, what is our long term human flourishing for us in the industrialized world and people that are in the transitioning world or the people that are just completely cut off from sort of abundance, a life of abundance and living a life of scarcity. Okay, so in practical terms, what this means is that we need to start designing systems where AI supports Catholic social teaching.
Frank (Host):So in other words, AI for AI. If you wanted to hashtag everything I'm talking about, it would be AI, the number four, and AI. Because the only thing that's going to be able to, say, keep pace with the growth and the reach of AI in the workplace in our lives is another AI that sort of can run at the same speed. But that AI that's chasing alongside is the one that's built with these codes, this moral code, literally. Two kind of codes there, right?
Frank (Host):Moral codes that are built in as a layer that acts as a buffer between the AI and the human agent. Okay. That might be a lot to kind of try to get your head around, but essentially the AI would need to support mentoring and collaboration and human development rather than simply automating the tasks. One of the AIs is working toward replacing you. The other AI is actually defending you in helping you utilize the tools wisely to build around the person.
Frank (Host):If enough people do this, okay, and I've seen this in business, this is why as a former lawyer, it's a little helpful, especially in corporations, is that the things that work stay, the things that don't leave. You don't have productivity if they say this program on its own will create productivity. It doesn't, it's gone. That's what happened in the last round of AI in the workplace. The only productivity it was creating was for the AI companies.
Frank (Host):The other option is to have productivity that is you look at your existing culture and how can we be improving that culture and having the support around your human workforce to create this idea of abundance, this idea of human super performance. Actually, I was writing about this. McKinsey was writing about this in 2023. That, in my opinion, was the pivot point. That's where we lost our way, but we can regain this.
Frank (Host):So the goal is to not eliminate work. It is to elevate it. And if we elevate work, guess what? Corporations get extremely happy because you know what? People are more productive, they're happier, less sick days, and these are things that are not just pie in the sky nuance.
Frank (Host):I've actually lived in this world. I lived in India, working in India and in Asia for over five years and in Central America, for over five years creating healthy workforces and cultures that people want to stay and you feel like their families and their communities are being taken care of. These are not pretend ideas. These actually work and they happen, and it makes companies prosperous as well as the people, including the CEOs, including all the people all the way down in the order of subsidiarity to each person's value. So why this matters for the next generation of business ethics for the next decades is that corporate ethics focuses on compliance.
Frank (Host):More recently, the conversation has evolved into corporate social responsibility, which has been given its own sort of shine and tarnish at the same time because it got melded in with a whole lot of other stuff and social issues that really it should never have. Corporate social responsibility was just the basic tenet of law that had led us to this point where if a company is having impacts, positive and negative, on the world, it should know what those are. That's basically it. And they should be considered responsible for that and doesn't get passed on to government, which gets passed on to taxpayers and so forth. But in the age of AI, it's going to demand something deeper.
Frank (Host):So forget about what you know about corporate social responsibility. Forget about what you know about corporate ethics. I'm not saying throw those out the window, but I'm just saying that the new ethical framework, the demands of the new ethical framework are going to be grounded in a robust understanding of the human person. It's the human in the middle. This is the age of humanity.
Frank (Host):This is going to be the age of hyperlocalism. Okay, that's going to be for another episode. We're going to interview some folks around the area where I live, which is Hollywood, Las Feliz in Los Angeles, and we're going see why are record stores opening up? Why are bookstores opening up? Why are flea markets so incredibly popular right now?
Frank (Host):Hyperlocalism. People are yearning for human connection. It's not about the product, it's about the community. We'll get to that. Sorry.
Frank (Host):Go down another rabbit hole. This, what I'm talking about, this yearning to be in communion with one another, is precisely where Catholic social teaching and the Vatican's latest reflection provide us the powerful contribution that we need. They remind us that economic systems exist to serve people, technology must respect human dignity, in parentheses, and serve people, Work is a form of vocation that is God given. Say that one more time. Work is a form of vocation.
Frank (Host):If you work, that is your vocation. And your vocation is in service to Christ who died for our sins, who died for us and gave us the mandatum. Communities matter more than algorithms. Human communities work really, really well. And yes, algorithms can predict and create the patterns, but those are not the decision makers of the future.
Frank (Host):These principles are not religious ideas. These are practical safeguards for building healthy organizations. So the question we have to ask is, one, the Vatican document asks us a very profound Where are you going, humanity? Where are you going? For those of us working at the intersection of technology and the future of work, the question becomes even more specific.
Frank (Host):Where is human work going in the age of AI? Apparently away from us, all of us, even the people who are sitting on the stage talking about how it's going to replace all their jobs. Mean, given five more years, it's just going to be a bot sitting there saying, I just replaced fill in the blank. That's not the future we want. It's not the future that is inevitable.
Frank (Host):This is in our power. We cannot allow the distraction of so many different things that are going on to take our eye off this ball. This ball is more important than any ball that you have in the air. This impacts your family. It impacts your relationships.
Frank (Host):It impacts your community. It impacts everything. Listen, you are listening right now to a son of the Rust Belt. I grew up when the steel industry was flourishing. I also was growing up and coming into my formative years when all of that was taken away.
Frank (Host):I know what it looks like. It is cataclysmic. And now I'm talking about this happening on a global scale. Okay? That's why I'm a little passionate about this, I guess.
Frank (Host):But the answer is not going to be determined by technology alone. It's going to be determined by values we choose to embed into the systems we build and how those get applied into our workplace, into our lives. The tools we create will shape the culture of work for generations. My son is 19 in college. He's thinking about this a lot, and so are this entire generation, as they should be.
Frank (Host):But they need to have control, which means the most important decision companies make about AI may not be technical at all. It may be moral. And that may be not necessarily new territory. With corporate social responsibility and the growth of that and how it grew and how responsive companies became once they realized that many of these morality layers are actually good for business, they create something called goodwill, which actually in law school you learn about as having a company may have $1 in asset value and $10,000,000,000 in goodwill. It actually has a value because people associate the brand with certain feelings, with certain ideals, and those ideals are the things that are going to govern what the future looks like for companies and how they operate.
Frank (Host):And here's the best news of all. My belief is that when they start adopting Catholic social responsibility technology as a layer on top of the technology they're already using, they are going to be more successful, they are going to be more sustainable, they're going to be more profitable. Shareholders and stakeholders alike are all going to appreciate the work that these companies are doing because they're going to learn that humans are still valuable, and that it is very good to be aligning yourself with the dignity and the virtue of work and industry and all the things that companies ought to be doing. Okay, so final thought from St. Augustine.
Frank (Host):He wrote, You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. Restlessness is a defining feature of our technological age. It is what is making us so terribly uncomfortable right now. We build faster systems, smarter machines, more powerful networks, but the deeper human question remains unchanged. What are we building all this for?
Frank (Host):Why are we having guys who are in technology, have absolutely no background whatsoever, and they can hire consultants out the wazoo because I know as a lawyer, you can hire your own expert to say whatever you want them to say or her to say. What they are hiring their experts to say is that we are all going to be in this land of good and plenty. When everybody has their own universal basic income, you can take it and shove it, because that is not what God created me for. It's not what God created you for. It is not what God allows corporate leaders to create industry in the world that is pleasing to God.
Frank (Host):We are built for better. In the future of work, for it to remain truly human, the answer must begin with dignity. Unfortunately, we're living in a world where everything and every time we turn on media, we're seeing how people can be treated with less than dignity because they're seen as less valuable. The immigrant, illegal or not, must be dignified. The protester who doesn't agree with the way law enforcement is happening in The United States or elsewhere in the world must have the dignity of being able to do that and not suffer horrible consequences, even death.
Frank (Host):Stepping outside the world, the wars that we're seeing right now are being fought with such impunity and destruction, utilizing bombs that are designed to blow up military installations being used on civilian populations. Come on. And we're sitting here being desensitized every time we see one of these horrible actions, that we are living in a down spiral of the word human dignity, that only so far in the world one person is speaking out to that who has truly found his voice, Pope Leo XIV and the Vatican. And they are speaking to power, and they're speaking in such a way that has attracted more than just the Catholics. And that's why Catholic social teachings, this is the moment.
Frank (Host):This is the moment that we've been building this for thousands of years, ready, equipped. This is where Christ will meet the world today. Because a workplace that forgets the dignity of the worker eventually forgets the dignity of the work itself. And once that happens, no amount of technological progress can restore what was lost. And that is the dystopia that we need to avoid.
Frank (Host):Okay. That's it. That's a wrap. I think this one works. If you're listening to it, it did.
Frank (Host):And I really want comments. I want feedback on this. I want you to express your fears, your concerns. I want you to express what you envision the future of work to look like. Hey, you may totally disagree with everything I'm saying and convince me that AI is actually going to lead us to a land of prosperity and good and plenty, and that I'm going to be able to pursue every hobby, and that somehow that hobby is going to satisfy my everything.
Frank (Host):There is a real power to AI. Don't get me wrong. I use it myself. It has given me superpowers because I stay in control of it. I do not allow it to guide me off my mark, not one inch.
Frank (Host):And I would encourage everybody that use AI to think of it in that sense. You're not going to allow the power tool to basically take over control of you. You stay in control with all the safeguards that go in with it. These are important conversations, and I want to have the conversation with people. I want to be challenged here because I need that to further form my thought leadership in this so I can continue to advocate effectively and know all the questions.
Frank (Host):And if you're supportive of this, please let me know. Okay, so if you've enjoyed this or you've enjoyed any of the episodes, please subscribe and follow this series. It's going to be about everything that you can think of that relates to pretty much any of the professions that you can think of. Next, we're going to have another episode. Okay, that's all the time we have for this episode, and I look forward to our next episode.
Frank (Host):I'm gonna have a very special guest. I'm gonna hold back on who that is, but I think you're gonna find it very interesting, and I look forward to being back with you next week right here at Work Your Values. God bless everyone. Thanks so much.