OSV Talks: AI and the Work That Remains

OSV Talks, from the OSV Institute for Catholic Innovation, released Matthew Harvey Sanders' talk on Tuesday 3 November 2026. The real crisis of artificial intelligence won't be that machines take our work, he tells the audience: it's that they'll hand us back our time, and no one has taught us what time is for. In "AI and the Work That Remains" he sets that out in three movements: anxiety, purpose, and communion, and ends with the work machines will never do. Read the full talk below.

Let’s imagine the morning the work runs out.

You wake up, and there's nowhere you have to be.

No shift. No commute. No inbox. The machines have it handled.

At first, it feels like vacation. But vacations end. This doesn't.

All your life you wished for more time. Now it's all you have.

Is that a dream, or a nightmare?

I build artificial intelligence for the Catholic Church, and I believe that morning is coming.

For ten years, I've watched machines learn the things we were promised only human beings could do. Read. Reason. Write. Diagnose. Comfort.

Everywhere I go, people ask me the same question: is it coming for my job?

The honest answer is, yes. Many jobs. And sooner than we think.

Demis Hassabis, who leads one of the world's great AI labs called Google DeepMind, says the change AI is bringing could be ten times the size of the Industrial Revolution, and come ten times faster.

He’s not wrong. Think about what that means.

The Industrial Revolution remade work, family, cities, and daily life, and it took more than a century.

Now imagine something bigger, compressed into a decade.

A warehouse worker is training the robot that will replace him, just by doing his shift.

A bookkeeper watches software do in minutes what took her twenty years to master.

A student wonders if the degree she's still paying for has already expired.

But the fear underneath isn't really that machines will become smarter than us. It's that a world full of brilliant machines might have no room left for us at all.

Will I still be needed?

The real crisis of artificial intelligence won't be that machines take our work. It's that they'll hand us back our time, and no one has taught us what time is for.

The Church has been answering that question for two thousand years. Which means she's about to become more necessary, not less.

Permit me to show you how in three movements: anxiety, purpose, and communion.

First: anxiety.

The anxiety about the AI and Robotics age isn't foolish.

For most of history, need gave life its rhythm. Hunger sent us on the hunt. Weather forced us to build shelters. Safety demanded we build high walls.

And because work was necessary, it became more than survival. It became identity: the answer we gave when someone asked, "Who are you?"

Now the machines are loosening that ancient bond between labor and survival. We are entering the first post-scarcity age.

So the deepest danger isn't unemployment. It's millions of people handed empty hours, in a culture that trained them to fill every silence with a screen.

Ask any pastor about the man who retired after forty-five years, healthy, free, and finally rested, and a year later was a stranger to himself, because no one needed him at seven in the morning anymore.

Give people time without purpose, and they don't ascend upward. They often drift toward whatever is easiest, loudest, and closest at hand.

Distraction first. Then isolation. Then addiction. Then despair.

That's why the Church can't treat AI as a topic for specialists. The fallout won't land in the labs. It will land in the pews.

But thankfully, anxiety isn't the final word.

Second: purpose.

For centuries, work told us where to go, what to do, and why we mattered.

If work stops answering those questions, the Church has to recover an older truth: human beings weren't made merely to produce. We were made to receive life as a gift, and to give it back in love.

When God became man, he could have arrived in power at the center of an empire. Instead he spent thirty years in a village workshop, making things with his hands. And the Gospel gives those hidden years a single sentence: Jesus grew in wisdom, and in favor with God and men.

If a human life were measured in output, those years were seemingly wasted. God knows they weren't.

Josef Pieper, the great Catholic philosopher of leisure, left us a warning. Free time by itself doesn't restore us.

Everyone who has lost an evening to a phone knows that.

Time restores us when we give it to something higher than ourselves: to worship, to friendship, to contemplation.

Even pop culture knows this. Star Trek gave us Data, an android who can outthink, out produce, every human on the ship. And nobody remembers him for that. We remember him because he spends his whole life reaching for the things that come only with being human: a joke, a friendship, a daughter, a cat, a sacrifice. What he wants is a life.

We built machines to free us from toil. Now the Church has to form people who know what freedom is for.

That's the work that remains.

I've spent years building tools like Magisterium AI, placing the Church's treasury, wisdom once locked in archives and ancient languages, within reach of anyone in the world. Because some of the questions people type into a machine are really prayers. And a prayer deserves a truer answer than a chatbot's statistical best guess.

I believe in that work. And it has taught me a sobering lesson.

Information isn't formation.

A tool can hand you Augustine. It can't make you Augustine.

A civilization about to inherit more free time than it has ever known doesn't need a bigger feed. It needs a deeper well.

And the Church is the wellspring of life: twenty centuries of men and women who learned and witnessed what time is for.

The fear, the loneliness, the longing to be useful and loved and forgiven: none of it’s new.

The saints have lived it.

The Church has prayed through it.

Christ has entered it.

Third: communion.

Remember that lesson: information isn't formation.

AI can bring a person to the threshold of the Church's wisdom. It can't carry him across.

It can't pray with him. It can't absolve him. It can’t love him. And it can't offer him a sacrifice.

Christianity has never believed you can save someone from a distance.

The Word became flesh.

God's answer to the human race wasn't information. It was a person.

So the answer to AI can't only be better technology, not even better Catholic technology. It has to be a place. A people. A parish strong enough to pull us back into the real.

A parish, I know how small that word can sound. We've let it shrink to an hour a week and a building we maintain.

But for most of Christian history, the parish was where the human race learned to be human. It's where infants were named, brides were blessed, sins were forgiven, bread was broken, prayers were offered, charity was shared, and the dead were carried to their rest.

Not one of those acts will ever belong to a machine.

That's what it must become again. A place where time is ordered to God. A place where someone who feels useless is looked in the eye and told the truth: you're needed, and God has given you something special to offer to others.

We weren't made to sit alone in comfortable rooms, entertained until we die.

We were made for a place at the table, a hand in ours, a name that's known, and work that blesses someone besides ourselves.

That's what the Church means by communion.

And this spring, the Church spoke. Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical for the age of artificial intelligence, one hundred and thirty-five years to the day after Rerum Novarum met the first machine age. In it he names our choice with two cities from the Bible: Babel and Jerusalem.

Babel is man building up: a tower to reach heaven on our own, to make our own name great.

God scattered its builders into a thousand languages, and we've been talking past each other ever since.

Jerusalem is God coming down to dwell among his people. At Pentecost, in Jerusalem, every nation heard the same Gospel, each in his own tongue.

What Babel scattered, Jerusalem gathered.

The question of our age isn't whether we'll build powerful things. We will. The question is what we’re going to build and why: another tower for our own name, or a cathedral built for His glory.

The Pope hands us our task in a single phrase: "ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human."

Human dignity, he reminds us, doesn't depend on abilities, wealth, or position. If our worth depends on productivity, the machine humiliates us. If our worth comes from God, no machine can diminish it.

But dignity alone doesn't fill a day. A person needs a calling.

The tragedy of a post-work world wouldn't be running out of work to do. It would be people who were never taught the difference between passing time and offering it.

So here is the task.

The first thing God ever called holy wasn't a temple or a mountain. It was a day.

And ever since, the Church has been doing the same with time: turning days into feasts, weeks into seasons, hours into prayer.

Now the parish must become a school of time, teaching us to do with our hours what God did with that day.

And holy doesn't mean solemn. A holy hour is an hour with love in it: someone known, someone helped, something given, someone prayed for. Hours like that don't feel empty. They're the hours we actually want.

So open the churches. Keep a confessional lit. Let adoration teach us silence again. Give families back their Sunday. Put the phones away at supper. Send the young to sit with the old. Notice the lonely before they disappear.

Build even our technology as a doorway, not a destination, so the measure of a Catholic AI is never how long you stay, but where you go once you’ve got your answer.

And ask every household two questions. What has God given you to offer? What burden are you carrying that we can help you bear?

That's how a parish stops being a place people attend, and becomes a place where people are needed.

That isn't a program. That's what evangelization looks like when it becomes a way of life.

The AI and Robotics Age is forcing into the open the question the Church was built to answer: what is a human life for?

And her answer hasn't changed.

A human life isn't for producing, or consuming, or being entertained.

It's for holiness, for communion, for gift.

So I don't look at what's coming with dread. The Church has stood at the end of a world before. When Rome fell, she answered with monasteries. When the factories rose, she answered with Rerum Novarum.

Whenever an age has asked what a human being is for, the Church’s answer has outlived the age that asked.

If machines take up more of the toil, then we are free to take up the work machines will never do.

If humanity is about to be given its time back, then the Church must do with it what she has always done: make it holy.

That's the work that remains.

Will I still be needed?

Yes.

Not as a unit of production. Not as a cog in the machine. Not as a consumer waiting to be entertained.

You are needed as a son, a daughter, a friend, a neighbor, a disciple.

You are needed because love still needs hands. Mercy still needs a face. The Gospel still needs witnesses.

And God still calls human beings, not machines, to become saints.

The answer to the AI and Robotics Age is a simple prayer: Lord, I will serve, help me be of service.