Catholic University launches new AI institute led by Microsoft's Taylor Black

(OSV News) -- On Sept. 12, The Catholic University of America, the national university founded by the U.S. bishops, announced that Taylor Black, director of AI & Venture Ecosystems in the Office of the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, has been named founding director of a new interdisciplinary institute on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.

The Catholic University institute will gather faculty from across disciplines for collaboration, and will globally engage in partnerships with other universities and outside organizations.

The university earlier in 2025 launched new undergraduate and graduate AI programs -- which debuted this fall -- incorporating both ethics and interdisciplinary problem solving.

Black is also a deacon candidate for the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Phoenix and will travel regularly to Catholic University's campus while continuing his work with Microsoft. OSV News spoke with him shortly after his appointment.

The interview has been edited for length.

OSV News: You're right at the center of "Big Tech" at Microsoft, and now you'll also be immersed in an academic environment. As you divide your time between Microsoft and The Catholic University of America, what kind of shift will that be for you?

Black: There is actually a great amount of good overlap between the two. One of the reasons for doing both is tech can move faster than the culture and the academy can really sustain. I'm excited to have a foot in both, where we can have the experience of the academy and the experience of the culture influence how tech goes about some of its work, and also feed the "cutting edge" into an ecosystem that is more contemplative, more thoughtful, than tech often can be -- because this is such a huge technological shift, with ramifications for the human person that I think are unprecedented.


OSV News: Can you share some of the plans you have for the institute?

Black: I see three main thrusts initially.

The first is, new college graduates and new knowledge workers are having a tough time when it comes to employment. Part of the reason for that, I think, is the advent of artificial intelligence technology. So the institute is intended to help -- in a holistic way -- new graduates understand how this technology works, how to utilize it in a human flourishing manner, and how to take advantage of all the great benefits artificial intelligence can provide when used well and intelligently.

Second, it can feel like AI is very tech-heavy -- something that might belong only in the computer science department, or maybe computer science and business. But if we take artificial intelligence as -- to riff off a (Apple co-founder) Steve Jobs quote -- a motorcycle for the mind, rather than a bicycle for the mind, it can be applied to any discipline within the university. So another aspect of this institute is to bring all the departments within the university together -- to enrich our understanding of the human person and what human flourishing means in light of this technology, and to understand ways in which it can be helpful and harmful to each of the disciplines, so we have a better understanding of how and where and when to use it as well-formed humans.

The third aspect of the institute ties into the way AI changes the nature of work; it also changes the nature of the university as (an) institution. We have some really interesting possibilities of understanding how this technology can be used in service of the university, how the university model may need to shift in certain ways to adapt to the profound nature of AI, and how it affects grading, being a student and how one learns. A lot of that can feed back into how we conceive new ways of providing different economic models for the university as well. And not just Catholic University -- but the university writ large, since universities across the United States are finding themselves in a challenging place.

OSV News: The AI degrees offered by Catholic University blend the Catholic intellectual tradition with every facet of study. What do you think this says about the longstanding, supposed conflict between the church and science and technology?

Black: There has never been any real tension between faith and reason. When understood the way the Catholic Church understands science and technology, all of these things are produced by human actors utilizing our God-given desire to follow our unrestricted desire to know. Like anything humans can create, technology can be used for good or for ill, and some technologies lend themselves to more bad applications than good applications. But it is in the end us who are determining how that technology should or shouldn't be used.

OSV News: Pope Leo XIV seems to be predicting a kind of second industrial revolution because of AI. What are your thoughts about that?

Black: There's going to be a transition period -- as there is with every major technological shift -- where old jobs are changing so much that they don't really exist in the same way anymore, and new jobs haven't been figured out yet. And it's in that place -- the messy middle that we're slowly entering -- where we need to be cognizant of that. There is going to be a big shift in the nature of work, and we need to be thinking -- as a culture and a society -- how we ameliorate the transitional effects of this large technology shift, while also being realistic that the ways in which artificial intelligence is currently being used, likely are not ways that are going to be the most disruptive.

OSV News: How should the church respond to advances in technology such as AI? There have been numerous Vatican conferences focusing on the topic, but how can the church avoid being sidelined by powerful interests?

Black: The church is us, right? We're the church. There's something like 1.4 billion of us in the Catholic Church around the world, building these technologies, part and parcel, with many of the interests that are being stood up by different governments, and different companies, and technology. It's important for us to remember ... we're the ones who are sitting on the boards of these companies. We're the shareholders. We ourselves are representative of the interests that need to be informed by Catholic thoughts, and by Catholic teaching, and by us, the faithful Catholics. That's how the Catholic Church can influence how this technology affects human flourishing -- because we're it.

OSV News: AI has been depicted both as an amazing tool and a literal threat to humanity. How do you assess it at this point?

Black: I think seeing AI as a threat to humanity takes kind of two different instantiations. One is it's going to be this super intelligence that is bigger and stronger and meaner than us and will take over the world, and we'll all be subservient to this master intelligence. ... Second, we as humans are good at anthropomorphizing things -- if it remotely resembles something we do, we assume it's us. And clearly, the technology -- because it can do things remotely that we thought were unique to us -- will get bigger and badder, and become a bigger, badder us.

But that's just not the nature of this technology. It doesn't want to do anything. It has no telos (Editor's note: the Greek word "telos" from philosophy is used to refer to the "final purpose" or "ultimate end/goal" of an object); it has no orientation towards anything other than what its programmers and what its developers and what its makers, as humans, have asked it to do ... I don't think that AI as a technology, by itself, is any concern whatsoever -- any more than a hammer.