What happens to the poor when machines can do the work? That was the question put to a roundtable at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross on 11 September 2026, where Longbeard CEO Matthew Harvey Sanders spoke to journalists covering the Church as part of its seminar, The Church Up Close. His answer was that the end of material poverty won't be the end of poverty.

I. The most under-reported story of two centuries

Here's a question for any editor in this room. What's the most under-reported story of the last 200 years?

I'd nominate the retreat of extreme poverty. In 1820, by the estimate historians of the world economy still rely on, about 84% of the human race lived in extreme poverty. The World Bank puts the figure near 60% in 1950 and roughly 10% today. Four in five, then three in five, now one in ten. That's still 847 million people as of 2024. And 4.9 million children died before their fifth birthday in 2024, an outrage, and, by UNICEF's count, less than half the toll of the year 2000.

No one ever filed that story, because there was never a day on which it happened. Good news that arrives one family at a time, over two centuries, has no date. And a story with no date never makes a deadline.

I raise it for two reasons. First, the encyclical you've been hearing about concedes the point in its opening pages. In Magnifica Humanitas, at section 4, Leo XIV writes that "Over the centuries, technological development has significantly improved the living conditions of humanity." Second, and this is my subject, the next chapter of that story won't be slow. It'll likely happen inside your careers, and I want to persuade you that it's a Rome story.

A word about where I stand, so you can weigh what follows. I run a company that builds this kind of technology for the Church. I'm not a neutral observer and I won't pretend to be one. But the numbers I've just given you aren't mine, and neither is the encyclical, and those are what I'm asking you to look at.

II. The claim of abundance, and how credible it is

Here's the claim. For most of economic history, the scarce thing was another skilled pair of hands. That's the wall every economy has been built against. The people building artificial intelligence and humanoid robots say the wall is coming down. When intelligence can be copied and bodies can be manufactured, the cost of almost everything people make and do begins to fall toward the cost of the energy and the machines that produce it.

Take it from the men shipping the product.

Sam Altman of OpenAI wrote last year that "Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp." Dario Amodei of Anthropic has written of a "compressed 21st century" in medicine and biology, and of a dream scenario of "20% annual GDP growth rate in the developing world." Demis Hassabis, founder of Google DeepMind, Nobel laureate, and since August Alphabet's chief scientist, told The Guardian that what's coming will be "10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and maybe 10 times faster." And Elon Musk, whose companies build both the models and the robots, told Davos in January that "by 2030 or 2031, call it five years from now, AI will be smarter than all of humanity collectively," and posted at the end of August that AI will do anything digital "at a superhuman level by the end of next year." Weigh Mr Musk as you like. The point is that every one of those dates falls inside your careers.

How credible is that? I build with these systems every day, so let me answer.

Watch who's speaking. Watch which way the dates have moved. And watch what already exists.

Who's speaking: producers, not prophets. That should make you sceptical of their motives and attentive to their timelines, because they're the ones who'll be proven wrong first, in public, with other people's money. A vague futurist is hard to prove wrong. These men have put dates on it.

Which way the dates have moved: I know this industry has cried wolf before. Self-driving cars were "two years away" for a decade. But watch the direction. Year after year these forecasts have moved closer, not further off. Hassabis, the most cautious of them, put even odds at Davos this January on artificial general intelligence, AGI, by 2030. AGI, in plain terms, is a machine that can do essentially any thinking job a competent human professional can do.

What already exists: software agents that hold a task for hours and finish it. Humanoid robots working in a BMW plant in South Carolina and sorting packages in warehouses around the clock. Of the humanoid robots delivered worldwide in the first six months of this year, roughly 97% came out of Chinese factories. The bodies are being built. And unlike steam or electricity, this transformation doesn't need a generation to lay cable and pour concrete. It ships over wires already in every building.

So here's my forecast, held the way any honest forecast should be held: firmly enough to act on, loosely enough to be wrong. In the next two to five years you'll see the first unmistakable movements: a fall in the price of professional services, a fall in the price of manufactured goods, a department's work done by one person. Over ten years, the pattern of the last two centuries accelerates. Material poverty, as our grandparents understood it, becomes something this civilisation can actually finish.

Now the other side of the ledger, because I wouldn't trust anyone who left it out. The floor I described isn't fixed. Energy is the thing everyone is now racing to build, and China is pouring concrete faster than the West. And the gains don't spread by themselves. The Pope says so plainly, at section 161: "To think that new technologies will automatically benefit everyone is to ignore the evidence." At section 153 he describes rich societies automating "rapidly and chaotically" while vast regions stay trapped in economies where cheap labour and half-finished technology coexist.

III. What abundance cannot buy

Now slow down with me. This is the part the technology press keeps missing.

Suppose the optimists are right. Suppose the machines do provide. Then, for the first time since Adam, the question "how will you eat?" stops being answered with "I will work," and a second question surfaces underneath it: what's a human being for, once the economy can do without him?

The Church has a name for that condition. It's poverty too. Not material poverty but spiritual poverty, and the encyclical treats it as the graver of the two. Section 154 could have been written for this panel. A society "that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment." And then this: "This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace."

At section 113 he goes further. Disorder, he writes, "does not arise only from scarcity; even unchecked growth can give rise to impoverishment."

The Pope is saying that abundance isn't the finish line. It's a new terrain, with its own casualties. Look at the wealthy countries: loneliness at a scale that governments appoint ministers to address, young men with everything to consume and nothing asked of them, birth rates collapsing in the richest societies on earth. Full shelves, empty churches, and a rising number of people who can't tell you why they got up this morning. These are the symptoms of societies that are already rich by any historical measure. Now imagine that condition once nobody has to work at all.

And here's the strange advantage the Catholic Church holds. She's the only global institution that has spent 2,000 years thinking about human beings who don't work for their bread. The infant. The dying. The contemplative in his cell. The Sabbath itself, one day in seven when production is forbidden and the person is declared worth more than his output. The Church has been slow to bless a new machine before. But on the question of what's owed to a human being who's no longer useful, her record isn't defensive. It's founding. The hospital for the poor, the almshouse, the hospice, the university: she built them before anyone asked her to. A civilisation about to inherit unimaginable free time will need people who know what free time is for. Rome has been keeping those records for a very long while.

IV. Evidence that the hunger is real

I want to give you one piece of evidence that this hunger isn't a theologian's projection.

We built Magisterium AI to answer one problem: 2,000 years of the Church's written patrimony, the Fathers, the Doctors, the councils and the popes, sat in libraries where almost no one could reach it. So we made it answerable. Today it's used in more than 190 countries and in 75 languages, and it's the most used Catholic AI in the world. Take those not as marketing but as a census of a need. Every day, in the small hours, people who may never walk into a rectory are asking a machine about suffering, meaning, forgiveness and God, and they want the answer to come from somewhere older and steadier than the internet's average opinion.

The same need drives our Alexandria Digitization Hub here in Rome, where robotic scanners are turning the Church's paper memory into something a machine can read and anyone can search: this technology serving the Church's mission, rather than the reverse.

V. Why the Pope's voice is a story, and what to do with it

Which brings me to the case I most want to make to this room.

There's exactly one figure on earth who speaks to more than 1.4 billion people, who has been thinking about the machine question in an unbroken line since 1891, and who has nothing to sell you and no quarterly earnings to defend. Leo XIV writes at section 110: "To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern." That isn't a man lobbying for a licence or a valuation.

In the age I've described, that voice isn't a religion story. It's the economics story, the technology story and the politics story, seen from the only vantage point that isn't for sale. You know how to find a story better than I do. I'm only asking you to point that instinct at Rome, in three ways.

First, read the encyclical before your next AI story, sections 102 to 111 and 148 to 156 at minimum, and then put the Pope's questions to the companies. Who owns the data? Who's accountable when the algorithm decides? What happens to the young person whose first job never existed?

Second, move the Vatican out of the religion column. When a pope publishes on labour in the age of automation, the natural home for the story is the business section, next to the earnings report of the company he's describing.

Third, cover the second poverty as seriously as the first. Count the jobs, yes. But when the price of everything falls and people still can't find a reason to live, ask a parish priest, not only an economist, what walks through his door, and ask who's offering one.

VI. A reporter who decided what was news

Let me close with a name the Pope himself puts in this encyclical. At section 124, among the women whose commitment, he says, has helped to make history more humane, Leo XIV names Dorothy Day.

Dorothy Day was one of you. At 18 she was a reporter for The Call, a socialist daily in New York, covering the working poor, and then for The Masses. On the first of May 1933, at the bottom of the Depression, she and three companions walked into Union Square with an eight-page paper and sold it for a penny a copy. It was called The Catholic Worker. Its first editorial said it was printed for the men on the park benches and in the bread lines, to tell them "that the Catholic Church has a social program." It still costs a penny. And in the year 2000 the Church opened her cause for canonisation, so that the reporter who sold papers in Union Square is now Servant of God Dorothy Day.

She had no bigger press than the papers around her, only a different judgment about what counted as news. The papers of 1933 covered the market. She covered the men the market had finished with, and she covered the doctrine that said they still mattered.

The greatest story of two centuries went unreported because it moved too slowly to see. Dorothy Day's story is the opposite. She saw the poverty in front of her and decided it was news, and 93 years later a pope put her name in an encyclical about machines.

You're about to cover an age in which the machines will provide more than any generation has ever had, and in which the deeper poverty may grow while the shelves fill. There's a voice in this city that has been speaking about exactly that since before the first factory whistle. It doesn't need your protection. It only needs you to decide that it's news.

That decision is yours.

Thank you.