Co-Elevating AI and HI
Zakaria, Pope Leo XIV, and the Creatrepreneur — three voices, one week, one insight.
By Kevin J. Barrett • May 2026
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Three voices in one week. Two of them carried by the largest institutions on earth — CNN, the Vatican. The third one, mine, has been saying the same thing for thirty years from a much quieter corner.
On May 23, Fareed Zakaria stood at the Bard College commencement in upstate New York and reframed the AI panic by inviting graduates to become champions of HI — human intelligence, human imagination, human inspiration, and human interconnection.
Two days later, on May 25, Pope Leo XIV — the first American pope, elected just one year earlier — released his first encyclical: “Magnifica Humanitas,” Magnificent Humanity, subtitled “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” It was signed on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical that addressed workers’ rights during the first industrial revolution. The current Pope chose his name to make the parallel inescapable: this is a new industrial revolution, and humanity needs new social teaching to meet it.
A journalist. A pope. And — for the record — a Creatrepreneur in Tampa Bay, Florida, who coined the word more than thirty years ago and has been writing about Co-Creation through Co-Elevation, SOULutions, and Best for All Concerned since long before AI started showing up at commencement addresses and Vatican press conferences.
The world has caught up with the question. The answer is the part still being worked out.
The Three-Pound Brain and the Golden Crack
Zakaria’s reframing is worth pausing on. He didn’t ask “what will be left for humans to do?” He called that the wrong question. The right question, he said, is what does AI tell us about all the things we humans already do — and that are distinctive and irreplaceable?
That single rotation of the question changes everything. Instead of measuring humans against machines on machine terms, we get to ask what is actually astonishing about us.
He offered the answer in numbers first. The human brain weighs about three pounds and runs on roughly twenty watts of power — less than a laptop charger. The training runs of frontier AI systems require data centers spanning hundreds of acres, consuming enough electricity to power small cities. The three pounds at twenty watts can recognize a face in poor light, read sarcasm, detect insincerity in a smile, fall in love with the wrong person, write the blues, and design Venice — an absurdly impractical city built on stilts that endures because no algorithm would have ever proposed it.
Then Zakaria gave the speech its emotional gravitational center. He invoked the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi — the celebration of imperfection, asymmetry, transience. He named kintsugi, the practice of repairing broken pottery with veins of gold.
| The crack shines instead of being hidden. The repair becomes the most beautiful part of the object. |
That is the metaphor for the moment we are in.
The danger of the AI age is not that machines will become too human. The danger is that humans will start trying to become too much like machines. Zakaria named it plainly: students pressured to turn themselves into perfectly curated resumes, workers measured against algorithms that never tire or sleep, every dimension of life “optimized” until the soul gets quietly factored out of the equation.
Human greatness has never been about optimization. It has always been about struggle, repair, and the visible evidence of both.
What Zakaria Named — and the Three I’d Add
Zakaria’s HI list — intelligence, imagination, inspiration, interconnection — is gracefully composed. Four words that hang together. I would extend it by three more, because they are the engines that make the other four matter in practice — and, in the third case, the substance that makes any of the seven trustworthy.
Human Innovation. Imagination becomes innovation when it crosses from the inner world into the shared one. Innovation is the act of creation that makes the imagined real — the Creatrepreneur’s daily discipline. AI can recombine. Humans create.
Human Interdependency. Interconnection is the experience; interdependency is the structure. We are not merely connected — we are mutually responsible. The kintsugi cracks are most visible at the places where one life touches another. Best for All Concerned is a design principle, not a sentiment.
Human Integrity. This is the gold. Integrity is what makes the repair beautiful rather than merely functional — the substance the crack is filled with. Without integrity, the other six pieces of HI become performances of intelligence, theater of imagination, mimicry of inspiration. Co-Elevation without integrity is just collaboration. Best for All Concerned without integrity is just a slogan. Pope Leo’s observation that technology is never neutral is, at its core, an integrity statement: AI inherits the integrity of its makers. The upstream variable is always human.
Seven pieces of HI, then. Intelligence. Imagination. Inspiration. Interconnection. Innovation. Interdependency. Integrity. Each one a place where the human form does something the machine — even the magnificent one — cannot. And Integrity, sitting at the end of that list, is the substance that lets the other six be trusted — in ourselves, in our partnerships, and in the systems we build with AI alongside us.
The Pope’s Magnificent Humanity
If Zakaria framed the secular response, Pope Leo XIV framed the moral one.
Magnifica Humanitas opens with a sentence that will be quoted for a long time:
| Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. |
The encyclical’s core principle is sharper still: technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. Read that twice. The Pope is not arguing that AI is dangerous or that AI is good. He is arguing that AI carries the moral fingerprint of its makers, owners, and users — and that the human choices upstream of every model determine whether it becomes Babel or civilization.
One detail from the encyclical’s release deserves to be noticed by everyone working in this field: among the experts invited to the Vatican for the presentation was Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic. An AI lab co-founder, in the room when the Vatican unveiled an encyclical on AI. The frontier itself was at the table.
That is what the moment looks like when the conversation is real.
Co-Elevation: Beyond AI vs. HI
Both Zakaria and Pope Leo frame the question as one of human dignity in the face of AI. That framing is sound — but it is not yet complete.
The Creatrepreneur frame goes one step further: this is not AI versus HI, and not AI merely watched by HI. It is AI and HI in deliberate, designed partnership. I have called this Co-Elevation through Co-Creation for as long as I have been working with these ideas.
Co-Elevation is the principle that both parties rise — that neither is subordinated, neither extracted from, neither defended against. The student rises with the AI tutor. The leader rises with the AI strategist. The creator rises with the AI collaborator. None of them surrendered. None of them diminished. The gold in the crack between them is what they could not have made alone.
Pope Leo’s “city in which God and humanity dwell together” is, in our specific moment, the city in which AI and HI dwell together as partners. That city is not built by accident. It is designed.
The design discipline has a name. I have called it SOULutions for thirty years.
The Kintsugi Principle: SOULutions in Practice
SOULutions stands for Shared Humanity, Overcoming Trauma, Unified Purpose, and Long-Term Interdependence. In an AI-saturated era, each letter does specific work.
Shared Humanity is the design baseline. Before any system, any product, any platform — whose humanity does this honor, and whose does it diminish? AI built without this question becomes Babel quickly.
Overcoming Trauma is the recognition that the cracks are real, and that gold in the crack is the goal. Not perfection. Repair, made beautiful. Education built around overcoming, not around appearance. Business built around healing, not around brand.
Unified Purpose is the alignment between intellect and empathy, innovation and ethics. The most successful organizations of this decade will be the ones that move from transactional thinking to transformational thinking — and the AI tools that serve them will be the ones designed in coherence with that movement.
Long-Term Interdependence is the test. Does this system raise the floor for everyone it touches, over decades, or does it concentrate power on a shorter horizon? Best for All Concerned is not soft. It is the most rigorous engineering question we can ask.
This is the kintsugi discipline. The crack is the design site. The gold is the SOULution. The repaired object is more beautiful than the unbroken one would have been.
What This Means for the Work
For students: Zakaria’s line about perfectly curated resumes names exactly the trap the next generation is being pushed into. At Qoollege.com, where I serve on the Advisory Board, the entire premise is the opposite — students rediscover their why using AI and mentorship together, and choose colleges and futures that align with their authentic selves, not with the algorithm of admission committees. That is HI co-elevating with AI, in the place where it matters most.
For leaders: Pope Leo’s call is concrete. Ensure your AI serves your people. Ensure your AI does not concentrate power, displace dignity, or quietly automate the soul out of your work. At KJ Barrett & Associates, the leaders I see thriving in 2026 are the ones who shifted from transactional to transformational thinking before the encyclical arrived. They will not be surprised by what the Pope said. They were already living it.
For Creatrepreneurs everywhere: this is the moment we have been preparing for. The world is finally asking the question we have been answering for years. AI will not replace us. AI will, if we let it, become the partner that lets us be more fully what we already were.
The Invitation
Are you optimizing yourself, or unfolding yourself?
That is the real question this week’s two unlikely voices were both asking, in their different vocabularies. Zakaria asked it as a journalist. Pope Leo XIV asked it as a pope. The Creatrepreneur has been asking it as a coach, strategist, and creator for thirty years.
The optimized version of you is what AI can replicate. The unfolding version of you is what only HI can become — and what AI, partnered well, can co-elevate.
| The gold in the crack is what we are meant to build. AI is the tool. HI is the purpose. Integrity is the gold. The Creatrepreneur is the bridge. |
If this stirred something in you, welcome. You’re already thinking like a Creatrepreneur. You’re already practicing kintsugi. You’re already on the road from drift to design.
I’d love to hear from you. Where in your life or work are you co-elevating AI and HI? And where are you still being asked to optimize when you’d rather unfold?
Let’s start that conversation.
#Creatrepreneur #CoElevation #AIandHI #SOULutions #BestForAllConcerned #ConsciousLeadership #Kintsugi
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Kevin J. Barrett is a Global Business Consultant, Author of "The Rise of the Creatrepreneur," and Founder of The Creatrepreneur movement. With thirty-five years of international business experience across four continents — trained directly under Dr. W. Edwards Deming when at 3M — Kevin helps entrepreneurs build businesses that honor what matters most.
The Creatrepreneur Chronicles is published from KJ Barrett & Associates · Zephyrhills, Florida · © 2026 All Rights Reserved.
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