Taylor Black Sees Endless Possibilities in AI — but Not Without Well-Formed Humans

Originally published by the National Catholic Register on 22 April 2026

Catholic philosopher and scholar of human cognition helps his Big Tech colleagues think through timely questions — with the aim of making AI safe and helping humanity flourish.

Taylor Black, a senior figure at Microsoft, is a rather unique personality in Silicon Valley circles.  

A devout Catholic and a huge fan of philosophy, he’s nearing the end of four years of formation as a deacon candidate with the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Phoenix. His long beard — a hallmark of Eastern Catholic clergy — gives him an air of being versed in ancient wisdom, even as he transitions breezily from philosophy into highly technical discussions of the most powerful modern technologies man has ever devised.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will soon be far smarter than humans, Black confidently asserts, but we need not fear — that’s a fact to be “enjoyed, applauded, utilized.” 

Perhaps more than most Catholics, Black is highly optimistic about the ways he believes AI will help humanity flourish, both today and in the future. 

Black, 40, sat down with the Register on a recent rainy spring day on the campus of The Catholic University of America (Catholic University) in Washington, D.C., in the building where he is leading a newly created research institute that aims to form students to compete, innovate, and make a real impact in an increasingly AI-augmented world. He explained the reason he’s optimistic about AI is quite simple: As a tech guru, he understands how AI works; and as a Catholic, he knows how humans work, too. 

“What our culture really needs here is well-formed people, particularly when using these tools, because of the way in which these tools can quietly take over your judgment, quietly take over your thinking, unless you’re circumspect about your use of it,” he said. 

He’s soft-spoken and listens intently. His eyes light up when he considers big ideas — which is essentially his job in a nutshell. At Seattle-based Microsoft, as director of AI and Venture Ecosystems, the entrepreneurial-minded Black is tasked with spinning up ideas into mini-companies within the larger organization. He also runs a monthly conference for the company focused on AI and related topics and oversees the team that aims to ensure Microsoft’s AI products are safe. 

AI is a tool, Black stresses, incapable of becoming sentient, and there’s nothing wrong with putting its superhuman abilities to work to make the world a better place. Already, he’s enhanced his own productivity threefold by deploying AI “agents” that do tasks on his behalf online — like coordinating calendars or sending reminder emails — freeing up his time for leisure, study or family. The possibilities for scientific discovery and for research using AI — including for Catholic purposes, such as finding sources for homilies — are virtually endless, he notes. 

“Once understood, you're able to see [AI] as an incredibly powerful tool for a variety of incredible purposes. … It’s just a matter of applying our God-given co-creative capacity to understand the best way of shaping them,” he said. 

But Black knows that AI differs from other kinds of human tools that came before it because of its ability to imitate the marks of human intelligence and personality — it “wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell,” he said, quoting the poem God’s Grandeur by Jesuit Father Gerard Manley Hopkins. Members of Black’s team, in fact, have the rather disturbing task of creatively goading unreleased AI products into saying or doing terrible things — like drawing up plans for synthesizing and releasing a deadly virus, for instance — in the interest of proactively building safeguards around those behaviors.  

The need to make AI safe is personal for Black. Up to now, he hasn’t let his kids — he has four, the oldest 15 — near it because he knows that they simply do not yet have the intellectual and spiritual formation necessary to rebuff the technology’s more seductive and dangerous qualities, which include the temptation to outsource intellectual energy and growth to AI tools. 

Taylor Black, who is studying to be a Byzantine Rite deacon, is on a mission to ensure that humanity will benefit well from the AI revolution.

Looking back over his career, Black says he can now see that the entry-level “drudge work” that he did as a young man — the kinds of tasks that AI can now do quite handily — was integral to forming him into who he is today. Preserving exactly those kinds of formative experiences, rather than simply letting AI handle them, is essential if humanity is to truly benefit from the AI revolution, he said.

Above all, Black believes that the present and future AI revolution’s benefits for Catholics depend on the continued development of moral character and discernment — both on the part of the users of AI and the creators. Black aims to offer that kind of formation to students at the Catholic University institute, and he is hopeful that tech founders will continue to heed Pope Leo’s words about AI and accept the Pontiff’s offers of dialogue. 

AI has no inherent moral tilt, he stresses, so it’s up to us as humans to shape it. 

“The only moral agent that we’ve ever had any control over, of course, is ourselves,” he said. 

‘Mighty, Joyful Faith’

Black was born and raised in Seattle, the eldest of 11 children. When he was 10 years old, his family converted to Catholicism, having previously been Free Methodists. His experience of Catholicism growing up was a mix of Western and Eastern Catholic traditions, and he says he grew to feel just as comfortable at a Novus Ordo daily Mass as he was at a Byzantine Divine Liturgy with its hallmark “smells and bells.” 

Black described his upbringing as being marked by “mighty, joyful faith” that stuck with him and his siblings, as all 11 remain practicing Catholics today — one of his brothers, in fact, is a seminarian for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Spokane. Black and his family worship today in the Byzantine Rite, and when his pastor asked him a couple of years ago if he would consider becoming a deacon, he and his wife gladly accepted the idea after discernment and prayer.

In terms of his career path, Black is much more of an “ideas guy” than a champion specifically of AI. He has undergraduate degrees in classics and philosophy from Gonzaga University and a master’s degree in philosophy from Boston College, where his studies focused on human cognition. He also finished a law degree, though he took a headfirst dive into entrepreneurship before ever practicing law. 

He joined Microsoft at a time when tech giants were preparing to launch the first real wave of massively powerful AI products. Even before the release of products like ChatGPT, which broke AI into the mainstream consciousness beginning in late 2022, debates were already raging within tech companies about the philosophical nature of their AI creations: Had they created something that was actually alive? Something with a soul? 

Black, as a Catholic philosopher and scholar of human cognition, quickly found he was uniquely positioned to help his colleagues think through these big questions — and address the existential dread many of them feel at the sheer power of the programs they’ve created. The Big Tech companies desperately needed, and still need, a robust moral framework to assess and govern the tools that they are creating, and some are seeking out the guidance of the Catholic Church, Black said. 

Already, Black has been asked to put together presentations for his colleagues at Microsoft on what it means to think and to be alive. Black constantly encourages his fellow tech workers to “think about our thinking,” which is an activity he acknowledges can sound a little philosophical and esoteric but is actually crucial to the work they’re doing. He counts as his major influences the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and the writings of Canadian Jesuit Father Bernard Lonergan, both of whom wrote volumes on these topics. 

Drawing on these and other Catholic luminaries, Black has sought to provide his colleagues with an anthropological framework for understanding AI, distinguishing between the way humans think through the processes of experience, understanding and judgment versus the way a computer “thinks” by stringing words together using statistical probability. 

The Institute Takes Shape

Black was appointed in September 2025 as the founding director of what has since been named the Leonum Institute for AI and Emerging Technologies, a new interdisciplinary institute within The Catholic University of America. Black will retain his position at Microsoft while traveling to Washington, D.C., regularly for his work at the institute, which will include — as Black says with clear enthusiasm — lots of teaching, something he already does plenty of at his parish through adult-education classes. 

Taylor Black, shown this spring on the campus of The Catholic University of America, is the founding director of the Leonum Institute for AI and Emerging Technologies, a new interdisciplinary institute within Catholic University.

The institute will draw on numerous disciplines within the university to research and develop ways to teach and use AI that enhance rather than erode human judgment, drawing on Catholic teaching. In addition, Black said he hopes to bring his entrepreneurship expertise to the school to help incubate and commercialize Catholic University students’ great ideas.

Paul Camacho, a professor of philosophy at Villanova University and a close friend of Black’s, said he believes Black to be uniquely qualified to bring the kinds of discussions he’s been having with his tech colleagues to students in a university setting. 

“Taylor never ceases to wonder about the world and our place in it — the mystery of God’s creation, but also the dignity and incredible depth of what it means to be made in the image of God,” Camacho told the Register. 

“He’s going to invite students to use this occasion to think about what it means to be a human being in this time when our society is telling us that humans are so replaceable.”

From Camacho’s perspective, Black’s Catholic faith and worldview have opened doors for him in the tech world, rather than closed them, because of how clearly he can articulate the truth about human beings in a way that appeals to people of various faith backgrounds in the frontier that is Silicon Valley. Black has been able to do this because his views on what it means to be human are born out of the very heart of his Catholic faith, Camacho said.

“I cannot think of someone who is more well-suited to think about artificial intelligence [and] the future of technology ... the challenges and the possibilities for human beings,” he said. 

“The Catholic Church, with its long tradition, has been sitting here waiting with a robust answer to the questions ‘What is a human being?’ ‘What is our destiny?’ ‘Where do we find meaning in our lives?’ — and now is an incredible opportunity to tap into that.”

Safeguarding Humanity

Pope Leo XIV has been calling for strong ethical safeguards around AI almost since the moment of his election last year, especially as reports have rolled in of young men and women, and some not so young, who have found their lives ruined — or tragically ended — amid delusional notions of AI products being sentient companions. 

Partly in response to these and other issues, every major U.S. AI developer has teams of people working to create what are often described as “guardrails” around the large language models (LLMs) that underpin AI models. Because LLMs are trained on millions of pieces of human creativity, they can be persuaded to easily create things that are wrong, harmful or disturbing unless constrained by robust ethical parameters and other safeguards. 

At the same time, the very nature of certain AI products is changing for the better, Black asserts, as many AI creators move away from products with human-sounding names, personalities and even robotic bodies and toward what he calls “ambient AI” — devices that dwell in your home as an assistant that enhances human abilities while not bearing any resemblance to a person. But people still need to be ready to handle humanlike AI. 

“Unless you’re formed well, unless you have understood the tool well … you can be used by the tool, rather than the appropriate other way around,” he reiterated. 

Pope Leo is widely expected to issue his first encyclical in the coming months, which is almost certain to address AI. Black said he hopes for a continued emphasis on the centrality of the Church’s teaching on the resurrection and the dignity and worth that teaching gives to our physical bodies — something AI, as a fundamentally disembodied creation, can never truly possess.

In the meantime, Black is excited to continue forming the next generation of young Catholics to be as adept — and as discerning — at using AI as he is. 

After all, Black said, “we [as Catholics] have a fantastic anthropology that answers all of the questions one might have with regard to our relationship to this technology.”