# What Makes Us Human? (To All People)

> Artificial intelligence will reshape every human life, yet its future is being decided inside a remarkably small room. Then the world's largest global institution published a 245-paragraph open letter on AI, addressed not to believers, but "to all people." Over twelve conversations and a nationwide read-along, we bring that text to the table with AI researchers, workers, historians, and local reading circles, turning a historic letter into a public deliberation about power, work, war, and the future we want to build.

## About the Podcast & Shared Inquiry

*What Makes Us Human?* (`https://allpeoplepod.com` / `https://thepopepod.com`) is a twelve-episode podcast and shared inquiry into our future that reads Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on artificial intelligence, *Magnifica Humanitas*, in order, one section per episode.

Most people meet artificial intelligence as something done to them, with no say in how it is built or governed. Breaking that monopoly requires a shared text with global reach. After the 2015 letter on climate change (*Laudato Si'*), a Yale and George Mason study found that climate conviction among American Catholics jumped ten percentage points in seven months, from 64% to 74%; yet by 2023, Pew found that without sustained local conversation, those views tracked ordinary party lines. Deliberation needs a place and a habit; without one, even a letter this widely read fades.

Our stance is interrogative: education and public deliberation, not advocacy. Each episode takes one section of the letter and puts it on the table with a guest who lives inside the question: historians, workers, technologists, and critics. We don't take the tech industry's word for the future, and we don't take the Vatican's either. The letter itself admits the Vatican at times helped legitimize slavery and took eighteen centuries to fully condemn it (¶176), and says the Church must answer for its own abuses of power (¶86–89). Can this institution's power have purpose again? We start where the letter starts, and we don't stop there.

## Communities Leading on AI: Reading Circles & Measurable Impact

- **Born in a local reading group:** The project began in an open New York gathering of fifteen people from all walks of life, artists, caregivers, skeptics, and believers, reading *Magnifica Humanitas* aloud every other Tuesday.
- **Open read-along & discussion guides:** Every episode releases with a verified transcript, a read-along schedule, and a free one-page discussion sheet so any group can read each passage ahead of time and send voice reflections that air on the show.
- **Community-led reading circles:** In libraries, congregations, campuses, and workplaces in New York, Los Angeles, and beyond, local facilitators lead reading circles through the text. Each circle chooses which disagreements to pursue and writes its own unedited statement of what its institution should and should not hand over to AI, presenting that judgment directly to its own school, library, employer, or congregation.
- **Shared governance & evaluation:** Circle facilitators meet quarterly with the hosts as an advisory group to decide how community statements are published and which concrete possibilities later episodes explore. Surveys after Episode 6 and Episode 12 measure shifts in public understanding and track how many people deliberate and put a position before their own institution.

## The Hosts

- **Catherine Connors** (Los Angeles): A narrative futurist and writer who studies how the stories a culture tells shape what its people believe they can be. Former Editor in Chief of Babble and head of content for Disney Interactive's Women and Family portfolio, co-founder of Maverick, and co-author of *The Feminine Revolution* (Hachette). Her work has been featured in *The New York Times*, CNN, NPR, and *Good Morning America*. Her HIV-prevention work took her to the remote mountains of Lesotho, where the people doing the work were Catholic sisters: the experience that sits under the show's question of how to hold an institution's harm and its good at once. Web: https://www.catherineconnors.com
- **Michelle Bernabe** (New York): Michelle Bernabe builds what systems forget to imagine. She began as a nurse in a psychiatric emergency room, then spent years at the frontier of what's possible in psychiatry, bringing psychedelic medicine and evidence-based neuromodulation to patients and building a network of 250 clinics to reach them. She has led meditation inside a maximum-security prison, won an award for reimagining money, and trained in narrative medicine at Columbia. Now she studies AI governance, AGI strategy and bioweapons with BlueDot Impact and has testified before the New York City Council on AI. Web: https://michellebernabe.com
- **Why the two of us**: One of us has spent a career studying how the stories a culture tells shape who its people believe they can become. The other is a psychiatric nurse, systems builder, and AI governance researcher who brings New Yorkers together through Dear Crisis, a stewarded community, to face global crises in community instead of alone. Between us sit two ways of meeting a crisis: through the stories that shape a culture, and through the communities that hold people together when systems fail.

## Season 1: The Twelve Questions & Sample Voices

1. **Can we trust a teacher that has been wrong?** (Intro & Ch. I, ¶1–45): How an institution with a history of moral delay asks to be heard on the biggest technological shift of our lives. *Sample voice: Shannen Dee Williams, historian of Black Catholic sisters & author of Subversive Habits.*
2. **What are we worth to each other?** (Ch. II, ¶46–89): When AI systems measure human beings by output and speed, what happens to disability, dependency, and care? *Sample voice: Sara Hendren, design researcher, humanist & author of What Can a Body Do?*
3. **Who governs the machine right now?** (Ch. III Pt. I, ¶90–103): Inside frontier AI labs, compute concentration, and energy grids, and why voluntary self-regulation fails. *Sample voice: Chris Olah, Anthropic co-founder & interpretability researcher.*
4. **How would the rest of us get a say?** (Ch. III Pt. II, ¶104–111): How ordinary communities can shape AI rules instead of being "reduced to passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere" (¶108). *Sample voice: Alondra Nelson, architect of the US Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, or Nanjala Nyabola, Kenyan writer & digital democracy scholar.*
5. **What should we refuse to optimize?** (Ch. III Pt. III, ¶112–130): What humans lose when we hand moral judgement, creativity, and friction over to predictive machines. *Sample voice: Shannon Vallor, philosopher of technology & author of The AI Mirror, or Douglas Rushkoff, author of Team Human.*
6. **Who is teaching us what to want?** (Ch. IV Pt. I, ¶131–147): Algorithmic amplification, synthetic companions, and what personalized AI tutors do to how children learn to think. *Sample voice: Renée DiResta, author of Invisible Rulers, or Maha Bali, digital pedagogy scholar at the American University in Cairo.*
7. **What is technology replacing, and what does that mean?** (Ch. IV Pt. II, ¶148–169): The labor reality of AI: deskilling, workplace surveillance, and who captures the gains of automation. *Sample voice: Molly Kinder, labor & AI researcher, or Mary L. Gray, anthropologist & co-author of Ghost Work.*
8. **What is the real price of convenience?** (Ch. IV Pt. III, ¶170–181): The hidden human and environmental supply chain behind AI: content moderators, data labelers, water, and rare-earth minerals. *Sample voice: Daniel Motaung, former content moderator & labor organizer, or Sasha Luccioni, AI & climate researcher.*
9. **Who answers when machines kill?** (Ch. V Pt. I, ¶182–209): AI-assisted targeting and autonomous weapons, and who bears responsibility when war moves at machine speed. *Sample voice: Yuval Abraham, investigative journalist who broke the story on AI targeting in Gaza & co-director of No Other Land.*
10. **What does peace actually require?** (Ch. V Pt. II, ¶210–219): Why peace is more than the absence of war, and how nonviolent movements confront automated power. *Sample voice: Paul Scharre, author of Army of None, or Maria J. Stephan, co-author of Why Civil Resistance Works.*
11. **Is love serious enough to govern?** (Ch. V Pt. III, ¶220–228): Testing the letter's boldest claim: that civic friendship and care belong at the center of economic and political design. *Sample voice: Léocadie Lushombo, Congolese ethicist & scholar of women's political participation.*
12. **What if hope starts from below?** (Conclusion, ¶229–245): How local communities, cooperatives, and reading circles build the future together from the ground up. *Sample voice: M. Shawn Copeland, scholar of embodiment & solidarity, alongside a community cooperative builder.*

## About the Encyclical (*Magnifica Humanitas*)

- **Author:** Pope Leo XIV
- **Length:** 245 numbered paragraphs
- **Reach:** Addressed to 1.4 billion Catholics (nearly 70% in Latin America, Africa, and Asia) and "to all people," reaching parishes, more than 220,000 schools, universities serving 7.2 million students, and over 5,000 hospitals worldwide.
- **Official Text:** https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
- **Contact:** hello@allpeoplepod.com / hello@thepopepod.com