SCU AI Collaborate and the Jesuit Tradition

Introduction

I am a senior at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit university in Silicon Valley, studying Management Information Systems, and this year I became President of SCU AI Collaborate (AIC). AIC is a student organization that helps Santa Clara students participate in AI through jobs, industry exposure, technical and professional projects, hackathons, workshops, company events, startup support and funding, company projects and consulting, and the broader intellectual discussion about how AI should be developed and used.

Taking on that role has made me think more carefully about what principles should guide an organization like ours. AI is developing quickly, I am still a student, and I do not claim to know where the technology is going or to have a complete philosophy for how it should be handled. What has helped me is turning to ancient wisdom, meaning ideas that have survived castles, cities, and empires. I have frequently sought clarity from Santa Clara's Jesuit tradition and from older religious and philosophical traditions that have lasted a very long time. This article describes what I have taken from them and how it has shaped the first two weeks of AIC's school year.

Religion, Wisdom, and the Lindy Effect

Part of my interest began with Santa Clara's requirement that students take at least three religion courses. Two of mine were life changing for me: The Meaning of Life, taught by Professor Kevin Chaves, where we explored the meaning of faith through the works of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and Jesus Across Cultures, taught by Professor Thao Nguyen. I am nowhere near an expert on Christianity, and I have not read the entire Bible, but these courses led me to keep reading and learning on my own. They also led me to take the religious ideas around me at Santa Clara much more seriously and to apply them to my own life, following the Jesuit value of finding God in all things, which is at the core of the university's educational mission.

The usefulness I have found in these Christian and Jesuit ideas relates to the Lindy effect, which my favorite author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an essayist and former options trader who writes about risk and uncertainty, wrote about in his book Antifragile. The term comes from Lindy's, a delicatessen on Broadway in New York where comedians and other entertainers gathered. In 1964, the writer Albert Goldman published an article titled "Lindy's Law" in The New Republic about the conversations among the deli's regulars on how long Broadway shows and entertainers' careers last. The longer a show or a career has already lasted, the longer it can be expected to keep going, and the shorter it has lasted, the shorter it is likely to last. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot later gave this pattern a mathematical form, and Taleb extended it to anything nonperishable, such as a book, an idea, an institution, or a tradition. In simple terms, an idea that keeps surviving gives us more reason to think it contains something true or useful. Something that has survived centuries of different societies, crises, political orders, technologies, and generations should not be dismissed quickly.

This may be one reason such ideas are held sacred: they keep working and do not die out, and over a long enough time they reveal themselves to be true. In Professor Chaves's class, he taught us the Greek word for truth, aletheia, which is formed from a prefix meaning "not" and a root related to concealment and forgetting, and is often translated as "unconcealment." In this original sense, truth is that which reveals itself.

Because truth reveals itself over time, time is what filters out what is not true, and this matters most when dealing with complexity, uncertainty, and rare high-impact events. Taleb calls such events black swans, and the September 11 attacks and the 2008 financial crisis are commonly cited examples of events that shattered forecasts, models, and expectations.

Black swans are no doubt proof of the complexity and uncertainty of life and the human condition. AI, the subject of my school's club, is also proof of the complexity and uncertainty of life and people, seen in something as everyday as language.

Earlier language software, such as rules-based translation programs built on hand-written grammar rules and dictionaries, performed poorly on ordinary human language. Modern language models rely on the transformer architecture, introduced in 2017 by Google, which lets a model weigh the relationship of every word in a text to every other word, and that is the reason these systems are good at language at all. Even so, they need enormous amounts of data and still do not reliably capture social nuance (hence why AI is cringe). The amount of interconnection needed just to handle ordinary language shows how much complexity there is in everything, and how much of it is invisible to us.

The idea of the Black Swan is that anything within that complexity can stay hidden until it disrupts our assumptions, theories, and forecasts. For that reason, ideas that time has already tested are a reasonable place to look for guidance.

My Favorite Jesuit Values

Several Jesuit ideas are present throughout the university, and I have started spending more time reading about them and visiting the Mission Church when I want to think and gain clarity. Each has a spiritual meaning and a practical one, and the five below are the ones I return to most often.

Human dignity: 

Each person has value that does not depend on a résumé or a title, because everyone has future potential. The Jesuit educational term for this is cura personalis, Latin for "care for the person," and its biblical source is Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him." The Letter to the Hebrews adds that "some have entertained angels unawares" (Hebrews 13:2), a reference to Abraham, who welcomed and provided hospitality to three strangers who turned out to be messengers of God (Genesis 18). Everyone's abilities and perspective are worth taking seriously, because no one can see in advance what a person will become when believed in.

Humility: 

The word comes from the Latin humus, meaning earth or ground, and it refers to the accurate sense of how little any one person can know and control. Humility ties in well with the points Taleb makes about complexity and rare events: there are always things that lie beyond our forecasts and our current philosophies and solutions, lying somewhere in the hidden complexities of the world. Proverbs 11:2 says, "When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom." Intellectual arrogance is when one believes that their own philosophy or solution already covers the complexity of the world. This leaves the prideful exposed to black swans.

Service:

The Jesuit educational ideal is often summarized as "men and women for others," a phrase associated with Pedro Arrupe, who led the Jesuits from 1965 to 1983. First Peter 4:10 (New Revised Standard Version) says, "Serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received." These values create communities of reciprocity, in which members invest in one another and each person's gift makes the others more capable. Serving others and believing in others, and investing in others create abundance, because there is then more tomorrow than there is today.

Discernment:

The word comes from the Latin discernere, meaning to separate or sift. First Thessalonians 5:21 says, "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." I think that in practice, it means asking whether a decision comes from ego, pride, or vanity, whether it offers only a temporary dopamine hit or what seems right in the moment, or whether it has worked across time and is supported by ancient, sacred wisdom (e.g. from the Bible).

The greater and more universal good:

The Latin word magis, meaning "more," appears often in Jesuit writing, and the Jesuit motto ad maiorem Dei gloriam means "for the greater glory of God." In the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, which St. Ignatius of Loyola wrote to govern the Jesuits, he gave a rule for choosing among possible missions: "The more universal the good is, the more is it divine" (Part VII, chapter 2). An older principle from Roman law says: what touches all should be approved by all. This seems to me like a principle of symmetry: the people who live with the consequences of a decision should have a voice in making it. I believe it is more important than ever to seek the greater and more universal good when dealing with powerful AI models that can, due to their versatility, have enormous effects on society, and do great damage if acting against people's interests. We do not fully understand the human condition, which is why companies employ so many product teams and research methods to find out what people want. There are enormous resources available to build things; the difficulty is knowing what people want. That takes the perspectives and experience of many people. An AI shaped by many people, whose opinions and work are treated with dignity, is more appropriate to serve many humans because many humans made it.

AI Collaborate

When I became President of SCU AI Collaborate, I began bringing some of those ideas into how I thought about and steered the organization. I decided that AIC's explicit mission should be to help students gain skills, meet people in industry, work on projects, have their value seen, and get jobs. Ultimately, we want as many SCU students as possible to be involved in shaping and rolling out AI and to be compensated for that work. We believe every student has a valuable perspective, set of skills, and body of experience to bring to the rollout of AI, so we offer opportunities to any student who knocks on our door. In Matthew 7:7, Jesus says, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you."

The job market is difficult right now because of uncertain markets and companies that are wary of risk. I have heard students describe how hard it is to get an entry-level job or internship, because even those roles, which are supposed to build experience for a full-time position, require experience. This has very real effects on students. I have seen it cause deep depression, frustration, hopelessness, a loss of faith in oneself, and doubt about whether anything matters, even in extremely talented people. It is a shame and it should not be this way, because it is a loss for both sides: companies miss the chance to invest in people with potential, and students go without the opportunity to develop themselves and contribute their value to the world. AIC tries to give students an opportunity before they have had the chance to prove themselves.

AIC's First Two Weeks of the School Year

We began with the School of Engineering club fair and the SCU involvement fair, where we brought robot arms with help from Sean Wu, our former president and the founder of Synphony, a robotics startup in Santa Clara, as well as Sayan Jain, Theo, and the rest of the Synphony team. The robot arms helped get students' attention at the busy, crowded fair, which gave the board members at our tables the chance to introduce the programs available through AIC and to show how accessible those programs and our support are. That Friday, we held our kickoff meeting with Chick-fil-A catering. Two days later, we held our first AIC Sunday, an open work session where students can study, meet other students, develop their own projects, participate in AIC Incubator, or work through AIC Consulting.

At that first AIC Sunday, three AIC members, all SCU juniors, shared what they are creating. Ian Rodgers presented Gleam Eats, his personalized restaurant discovery platform, which is live at gleameats.com. Mason McGriff discussed an affordable financial data and trading platform, and Christopher Lane shared an idea inspired and informed by his private equity experience about company valuation and inconsistent private-market data, a problem I also saw repeatedly during my internship at FactSet. Other students asked questions, offered feedback, and helped them think through what they were building.

During the second week, we held the largest tabling event in AIC history with Norton Neo. Carina Ji and Lyn Zhang from Norton joined us with more than 200 boba drinks and swag. Norton is a consumer cybersecurity brand owned by Gen Digital, and Neo is its free AI browser, which includes a built-in AI assistant, ad blocking that extends to YouTube, a built-in VPN, and Norton Web Shield, which blocks shady sites and phishing attempts. Carina and Lyn introduced students to Neo and helped us promote the event that AIC and Norton Neo are hosting together on Tuesday, October 6 in Bergin 116. That event includes career insights on product and go-to-market roles at Gen Digital, industry networking, and a Formula 1 design competition in which the winner receives a free ticket to Gen Digital's Mountain View car meet. One of our members connected with the Norton team through the tabling event and visited their offices only a few days later. I was incredibly happy to hear this.

We ended the second week with a career panel organized with the SCU Sikh Student Association, and I am especially grateful to SSA President Tejbir Sandhu and Vice President Gursimran Singh Dhindsa for working with us on it. The panelists each offered a different perspective:

Harneet Dhillon, software engineer at Tesla was invited to give a perspective closer to where students are now, at the entry level of a career.

Pritpal Bhullar, Customer Success Manager at Crusoe, gave a manager's perspective. Crusoe designs, builds, and operates data centers and cloud computing infrastructure for AI. Many people with different skills are needed to build, deploy, and manage that infrastructure and to handle the complexity that comes with it, so there are many opportunities in this area.

Vijay Chattha, founder of VSC Ventures, gave a founder's and investor's view from a higher level. VSC Ventures is an early-stage investment firm, and its investments have included Nanit and b8ta. His perspective was intended for the students in AIC Incubator who are building startups.

The panelists spoke with students about careers, finding opportunities, making their abilities visible, and remaining economically valuable as technology and the labor market change. Several students stayed after the formal event to continue those conversations, and some later told us that the advice changed their lives. One student with a startup idea also came away with a coffee chat scheduled with Vijay!

Before the panel, Tejbir gave a short introduction to Sikhi for people in the room who were unfamiliar with it. He explained that the word "Sikh" translates to "learner," so being Sikh means being a lifelong student who is always trying to become a better person. Sikhi was founded about 500 years ago in Punjab by Guru Nanak Dev Ji, who was followed by nine more Gurus, and today the scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, is treated as the living Guru. Its first lesson, Ik Onkar, is that there is one Creator, and therefore everyone is equal regardless of caste, gender, race, or religion. He described the main practices as remembering God in everything one does, earning an honest living, sharing with others, and seva, which means selfless service. He also described langar, the free community kitchen at a gurdwara, the Sikh place of worship, where anyone can sit side by side and share a meal. This seemed to me another perfect example of the Lindy effect, especially considering the ginormous overlap with the Christian and Jesuit values that I've been learning about and trying to apply recently. Practices like these have kept communities functioning for centuries, and the fact that two traditions with different origins arrived at similar ones is a perfect example of the Lindy effect at work.

"The more universal the good, the more it is divine"

While walking around campus one day, I finally read what is written on the open book of the statue of St. Ignatius of Loyola in the garden behind Kenna Hall. The inscription reads, "The more universal the good, the more it is divine," a shortened form of the sentence from the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus that I quoted above. I think that sentence basically summarized what I had been learning from the university's Jesuit tradition: when something is intended to serve a population, it should be built on the knowledge, experience, and interests of each member of that population.

My work at FactSet showed me how difficult it can be to understand what users need, because different people use the same product in different ways and notice different problems depending on their jobs, workflows, incentives, knowledge, and experience. I expect that problem to become considerably more salient with AI, because AI models can affect a very wide range of people, professions, and institutions, given the technology's versatility and scalability. The value of gathering diverse perspectives has been widely discussed in companies over the past decade, and most believe this has been an incredibly positive thing for the market and for society at large. It would be inconsistent to praise diverse perspectives like this and proceed to fire a large chunk of your workforce to rely on the thinking of a handful of people and one or two AI models to run a company.

When I ran into Santa Clara's president, Julie Sullivan, at our university's library, we very briefly talked about Magnifica Humanitas, a recent document from Pope Leo XIV about AI. It is his first encyclical, which is a formal teaching letter from the pope addressed to Catholics and to all people of goodwill. Its title is Latin for "Magnificent Humanity," its subtitle is On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, and it was published on May 25, 2026. The pope signed it on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, an 1891 encyclical by Pope Leo XIII about the rights of workers during the Industrial Revolution. Magnifica Humanitas does not describe technology as inherently evil, and it reinforces the Jesuit values of human dignity. It also says that technologies should not be concentrated in the hands of a few, and that a 'more moral' AI is not truly moral by definition if that morality is determined by only a few people. This is exactly what AIC is all about.

Strangers and Angels

A passage in the Letter to the Hebrews has had a large effect on how I run AIC: "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares" (Hebrews 13:2). The verse is commonly read as an allusion to Genesis 18, where Abraham receives three strangers at his tent, offers them water to wash their feet, rest, and a meal, and then learns that they carry a message from God. I am still learning the Bible and would not claim that my own application of this passage is its definitive meaning, but it has made me think more carefully about how little we usually know about the person standing in front of us. A student with a short résumé today may have incredible abilities that have not yet had enough opportunity to become visible.

AIC's model is to invest in everyone regardless of who they are, because all people equally have the transcendent quality of being able to become the best version of themselves and contribute immense value to the world.

Everyone has infinite potential, and that is why, regardless of who you are dealing with, it is in your best interest to treat them with the same dignity, honesty, and respect that you would give yourself. In Matthew 25:40, Jesus says, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Ancient Greek culture practiced xenia, hospitality toward guests and strangers, from xenos, the Greek word for a stranger or guest, and Zeus was worshiped as Zeus Xenios, the protector of guests. In the Odyssey, strangers and beggars are described as coming from Zeus, and in Book 17 one character warns that gods sometimes visit cities disguised as strangers to see how people behave. According to the Talmud, when a man asked the Jewish teacher Hillel to explain the whole Torah while the man stood on one foot, Hillel answered that what is hateful to you should not be done to another person, and that the rest is just commentary on that simple rule. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives a similar instruction: "all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them" (Matthew 7:12).

Other people have information, skills, and potential that are not visible from the outside, and we have incomplete information about what any person will become. The word transcend comes from the Latin transcendere, meaning to climb over or beyond, and a person's capacities extend beyond what a résumé or a current job title can show. Treating a stranger as someone who may have more to offer than is apparent is a quick, easy, dependable, and surefire way to reason under uncertainty.

This is AIC's approach in a nutshell. When someone comes to us willing to learn and contribute, AIC gives that person access to support, projects, teammates, information, and opportunities, and it lets their work show what they can do. Because we have incomplete information about another person's future abilities, it would be premature to reject people based on their current experience. We invest in them, they grow, and they invest back in us, and the cycle repeats, and in the end there are more capable and empowered people who contribute more to AIC, to SCU, and to the world.

"What touches all should be approved by all"

Because AI may affect everyone, it logically should be shaped with input from everyone. An old principle from Roman law is: quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari debet, which means "what touches all should be approved by all."

The Soviet Union was intended to serve everyone, but a relatively small number of officials set prices and made other economic and political decisions on behalf of the whole country, and the state dissolved in 1991 after about seven decades that included the Gulag, a system of forced labor camps in which millions of people were imprisoned and many died. In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was himself imprisoned in the camps, documented the system, and I was horrified when I started reading the book. I am still making my way through the book. The Gulag shows what happens when a system is built out of the intellectual arrogance of a few, and the people are expected to fit it, and not the other way around. Millions were sent to the camps because they were people who did not fit the narrow and artificial centrally planned system required of them, when the system should have been fitted to the people. This is the principle that what touches all should be approved by all, applied in reverse: decisions that affected everyone were made by a few, without the approval of the people they affected. Planning from a few cannot account for how complex people are and how much they know about their own circumstances that no one else can see.

This history is also personal to me. My mother is from Kyiv, which was then part of the Soviet Union, and she was discriminated against for being Jewish in the 1970s. The system the state provided did not fit her family, and the lifestyle it offered was incompatible with what they needed. They left because they needed more freedom to make the best choices for their family. The system should have been fitted to them, not the other way around.

The Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11 describes the same error:

People who share one language settle in the land of Shinar and decide to build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, so that they can "make us a name" and avoid being scattered across the earth. God does not like this; he confuses their language so that they can no longer understand one another and scatters them across the earth, and they stop building the city. The Book of Jubilees, written in the second century BCE, says that the Lord sent a wind that tipped the tower to the ground, and the Talmud contains a teaching that one third of the tower was burned, one third was swallowed into the earth, and one third remained standing. In my reading, the lesson is that some new system or solution built in one's own lifetime can seem promising, but it has not been tested by time, it lacks the Lindy effect, it is unlikely to survive black swans, and it probably cannot scale to meet the complexity of human society. Humility is the appropriate response; the intellect should not fall in love with itself and should be aware of its fundamental limitations. Proverbs 16:18 says, "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." The Soviet Union and communism were man-made systems of this kind, and an AI model is another, and none of them, when created and controlled by a relative few, can fully deal with the complexity of the human condition and of human society. Pope Leo XIV's encyclical opens with a choice between building a new Tower of Babel and building a city where God and humanity live together. In my understanding, living together with God includes living by the time-tested moral rules mentioned throughout this article that all people share and that keep a community in harmony.

I strongly believe the same fate that happened to Babel will happen to AI models if they end up in the hands of a few. AI models have their power because they are based on so much human-made data, and because the brilliant teams at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other labs are able to turn that data into a brilliant model and user experience suitable for everyone, which is why AI is successful in the first place. The models' abilities to deal with human complexity, which rule-based software lacks, are why they work so well in the first place. Because AI gets its power from the support and contribution of others, through their data and usage, it loses its power without that support. This will be bad for society, for consumers, and for companies, and it will take time, during which a lot of damage can happen; in the same manner, much damage was done in the Soviet Union's slow and painful collapse. I love AI, I use it all the time, and I run my school's AI club. I think it is great because it is built with the complexity of people in mind and, more than rule-based code, fits people rather than the other way around. But there is a prophetic element to the story of the Tower of Babel regarding how to treat such powerful man-made solutions, and avoiding that outcome is in the best interest of everyone.

Rhetoric about AI 'replacing people' assumes that the relative few who own the technology know what end users want and how to direct some of the most powerful technology ever created for the world's benefit. I think this kind of certainty is intellectual arrogance, a form of pride, which Christian tradition regards as the root of the most deadly sins. If a small group builds and directs AI without input from the people it affects, those people have no say in how it is deployed, and the result is unlikely to serve them.

The alternative is an approach in which all people are treated as capable of contributing, and in which the people building AI collaborate (as the name of our organization suggests), consider diverse points of view, and make the good as universal as possible. Some people describe a future with AI in utopian terms, and I think such a future is plausible only if the technology is built with the participation of the people it affects. This is the Jesuit idea that the more universal the good, the more it is divine. AI is the great test of this idea, because the technology is built on dealing with human complexity, and it was made possible by the participation of a great many people who contributed the many works on which AI was trained. The question is whether humans will collaborate and participate so that AI serves everyone, or whether a few, out of intellectual arrogance and an inability to share toys in the playground, will try to take what was built from that participation and take it top down. If they do, I expect the result to resemble the Soviet Union's result: a system run by a relative few that declines slowly, with a great deal of damage along the way, while those who draw on the participation of many overtake it. The Christian tradition would call this judgment.

Conclusion

AIC is still developing, and I am still learning how to lead it. Much of what has happened already has depended on Bella Fiola, Krish Jajoo, Aidan Miranda, Abhinav Raghavendra, Mia Carr, Perkin Yang, Aayush Kumbhare, Malia Aquino, Sera Baang, Aditya Sanghani, Shreya S., Ayan Chowdhary, Samhita Vanga, Jayden Magnin, Arun Tiwari, Tiffany Chang, William Norden, and many other students who have volunteered, presented ideas, made introductions, helped organize events, and helped one another.

The organization has also benefited from companies, speakers, professors, administrators, and student organizations that have been willing to spend their time and resources on our members.

Information about AIC Sundays, AIC Incubator, AIC Consulting, and upcoming events (including our big upcoming AIC x CrowdStrike hackathon) is available here on this website, scuaic.com.