Pope Leo XIV gives us the image himself. “Scientific discoveries are talents entrusted to humanity so that they may bear fruit,” he writes, pointing to the parable in Matthew (§9). I want to take him at his word, because the parable is more demanding than it sounds, and it answers a question the debate about AI keeps asking badly.
Three servants
A man going on a journey “entrusted his wealth” to three servants, “each according to his ability” (Mt 25:14–15, NIV). In the Greek the sums are talents, and the NIV’s note puts a single talent at about twenty years of a day laborer’s wage. Nobody in this story receives a little.
The first two servants put the money to work and double it. The third does something that looks prudent. “I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you” (25:25). He loses nothing. He returns exactly what he was given.
His master calls him “wicked” and “lazy” (25:26), and then says the sentence I find most useful today: “you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest” (25:27). The minimum was never to keep the gift intact. The minimum was to let it grow.
Three answers to AI
The parable maps almost exactly onto the three positions I hear about AI.
Bury it. Ban it, pause it, keep it out of the classroom and the office until we feel safe. That is the third servant’s choice, and his reason is the one I hear most often: fear. Fear is understandable. In the parable it is not an excuse. My own rule runs the other way: “Do not artificially truncate, limit, mutilate innovation. Be part of it, accompany it, and let’s see and be open to different directions when steering where it leads us.”
Keep it. Let it exist, but in a few safe hands, behind a few walls. The servant who hid the talent did not destroy it. He took it out of circulation. A technology held by a few actors who “effectively set the conditions for access” for everyone else (§95) is a talent in the ground with a better lock. The encyclical says it in its own terms: when patents, algorithms, digital platforms and data “remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods” (§67).
Make it thrive. Put it to work, now, with whatever each of us has. The two faithful servants did not receive the same amount and were not asked for the same return. Each was asked to multiply what he had, and each hears the same words: “Well done, good and faithful servant!” (25:21, 23).
The objection
The parable is not a lesson in economics. For most Christian readers the talents are the gifts of the Kingdom, and the master’s return is the judgement. I am not a theologian, and I do not read it as an investment manual. I read it the way the Pope invites us to in §9: as a test of what we do with what we were given.
There is a harder objection. “For whoever has will be given more” (25:29) sounds like the opposite of shared prosperity. But look at where the reward goes. The faithful servants are not told to keep their gains; they are invited to “share your master’s happiness” (25:21). What was multiplied goes back to the one it belongs to, and in the encyclical’s own reading these new goods belong to everyone (§67). The servants who are praised put the gift into circulation. The one who is punished took it out.
What the parable asks
If you are Christian, the parable leaves little room for doubt. Not burial out of fear. Not safekeeping in a few hands. Work, each according to his ability, so that the gift comes back larger than it left.
For me that work has a direction, and it is shared prosperity, which I hold to be both the moral position and the more effective economic model. A talent multiplied in one company’s vault has not been multiplied for humanity. Multiplied for everyone, it means engaging people where they are, enabling them with the tool, inspiring them with what it makes possible, empowering them to build their own uses, and connecting them so that no one depends on a single gatekeeper.
The encyclical itself says that “the primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology” (§9). I agree. The question the parable puts to us is the one I put to AI: not what it can do instead of us, but what we can do with it that we never could before. Then do it, and give it back multiplied.
Carlos Miranda Levy
Coordinator of Impact, Innovation and Intelligence