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In a recent New Yorker newsletter, editor Caroline Mimbs Nyce sat down with Stephen Witt to discuss the invisible skeleton of our digital world: the data center. These vast “barns” of computation, as Witt describes them, are the quiet heartbeats of the AI economy — humming, glowing, and consuming.
Inside them, racks of microchips stretch into infinity, drawing power at a scale that rivals entire cities. As Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, put it, “A lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.”
It’s an image that feels almost biblical — human ingenuity reaching Babel-like heights toward alleged omniscience, while the planet groans beneath the weight of our ambitions. Witt observes that each center represents “one of the largest movements of capital in human history.”
The cost is not only financial but ecological: these structures are energy-hungry, carbon-intensive, and — ironically — almost devoid of human presence. They are “places a human being shouldn’t be inside,” he notes, sterile and sealed, like shrines to a new god of computation.
If one listens carefully, there’s a haunting resonance between Witt’s observations and the social encyclicals of the Church, especially of Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891). Writing in an age defined by the hum of the factory rather than the server, Leo confronted the moral turbulence of industrial capitalism.
He insisted that technology and labor must always serve the dignity of the human person, not the other way around. “It is neither just nor human,” he wrote, “to demand so much labor that body and mind are overtaxed and the spirit is dulled.”
Prophetic
The principle remains prophetic: when production — whether of goods or intelligence — becomes an end in itself, we risk mistaking progress for purpose.
Applied to the age of AI, the late pope’s concern takes on new urgency. The “factories” of artificial intelligence run not on the sweat of laborers but on the silent extraction of energy, minerals, and attention. The workers now are algorithms and turbines, but the question remains the same: Who benefits? Who bears the cost? And most importantly, what vision of the human person underlies this enterprise?
Leo XIII would likely marvel at the ingenuity of neural networks but caution against what he might call the idolatry of mechanism — the belief that intelligence, stripped of moral direction, could ever replace the soul.
His theology saw the human mind as a mirror of divine creativity, not a competitor to it. The Catechism echoes this, reminding us that “man participates in the light and power of the divine Spirit” (CCC 1704). To create tools of thought, then, is part of our calling; but to surrender our moral discernment to them is to dim that divine light.
In the conversation, Witt jokes that perhaps we’ll all “go to clown school” when machines make us obsolete. But Pope Leo XIII might smile at that, too — because the clown, in his foolishness, remains fully human. The Church, after all, has always believed that human worth is not measured by productivity or processing power.
