Waiting in the Digital Desert

How Advent Calls Tech Workers to Reclaim Human Dignity in the Age of Algorithmic Profiling

In the quiet spaces between our notifications, something stirs. A voice cries out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. These ancient words from Isaiah, proclaimed anew each Advent, echo with startling relevance for those who build and steward the digital systems that now shape human life. For many tech professionals, the wilderness is no longer a geographic reality but a spiritual one—a landscape of ethical ambiguity where the work of one’s hands can feel increasingly disconnected from the deepest convictions of one’s heart.biblehub

Perhaps you recognize this terrain. The algorithms you optimize, the systems you maintain, the platforms you develop—they accomplish remarkable things. Yet something troubles the soul. The people your products serve have become “users,” then “data points,” then predictive models in behavioral futures markets. Somewhere in that transformation, the sacred weight of encountering another human being—created in the image and likeness of God—has grown lighter, more abstract, easier to set aside.cortezaproject

This growing unease is not a failure of your vocation. It is an invitation.

Advent offers us the posture of those who wait in expectation—like Israel awaiting deliverance, like John the Baptist crying out for repentance and preparation. The season reminds us that God’s story begins not with conquest but with a child, not with domination but with humble entry into our humanity. The King of Kings comes not to override human freedom but to honor it, not to reduce persons to instruments of power but to dignify them through service. In Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, we see a Messiah who refuses the devil’s offer of authority over all the kingdoms of the world. He chooses moral limits over raw power. He respects human dignity even when it costs him everything.biblegateway+1

The Reduction of Persons to Profiles

Among the ethical concerns raised by artificial intelligence—labor displacement, surveillance, autonomous weapons—one quietly pervasive threat deserves particular attention: algorithmic profiling and the loss of individual personhood. This is the systematic reduction of unique, unrepeatable souls to data points, behavioral predictions, and consumer profiles.

Pope Francis has spoken directly to this concern, warning that “the concept of intrinsic human dignity requires us to recognize and respect the fact that a person’s fundamental value cannot be measured by data alone”. The Vatican’s 2025 document Antiqua et Nova affirmed that while AI can mimic the outputs of human intelligence, “it cannot replicate the fullness of the human person, created in the image of God”. The Church is not anti-technology—but it is profoundly anti-reduction. It refuses to reduce the human person to a sum of behaviors, morality to efficiency, or truth to whatever happens to be trending.catholicexchange+2

The architecture of what scholars call “surveillance capitalism” converts human experience itself into behavioral data for the purpose of predicting and influencing future behavior. Data brokers maintain thousands of data points on individuals—demographic information, lifestyle preferences, purchasing patterns, personal relationships—creating profiles that claim to know us better than we know ourselves. Workers under comprehensive AI surveillance report feeling “dehumanized and treated as data points rather than individuals”. This represents something more than a privacy violation; it is a spiritual assault on the imago Dei.cortezaproject

Saint John Paul II proclaimed that “the human being is single, unique, and unrepeatable, someone thought of and chosen from eternity, someone called and identified by name”. Every violation of this personal dignity, he wrote, “cries out in vengeance to God and is an offense against the Creator of the individual”. When our systems treat persons as predictable bundles of behavior rather than as mysteries to be encountered, we participate—however unwittingly—in this violation.ccgaction

Witnesses for Our Time

The Church offers us saints and prophets who illuminate the path forward. Consider Saint Carlo Acutis, canonized in September 2025 as the first millennial saint, a young man who embraced the internet and used his programming skills to create a website cataloging Eucharistic miracles around the world. The Church declared him “God’s influencer”—but what made his tech work holy was not merely its religious content. It was his profound interiority.pbs+1

Carlo spent hours daily in Eucharistic adoration, comparing his time before the Blessed Sacrament to Saint John leaning on the Lord’s breast at the Last Supper. “The Eucharist is my motorway to heaven,” he said. His favorite aphorism captures everything: “God and not me”—in Italian, Dio, non io. Despite his passion for technology, Carlo limited himself to an hour of video games weekly, intuitively valuing personal connections over virtual interactions long before the rise of platforms like TikTok. His self-discipline shows us that it is possible to work within digital systems without being consumed by them—that a deep prayer life can ground and direct our technical gifts toward genuinely human ends.wordonfire+1

Dorothy Day offers another essential witness. Born in 1897, Day spent her twenties as a radical journalist and activist before a profound conversion led her to found the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933. With Peter Maurin, she established houses of hospitality offering food for the hungry and shelter for the homeless. Her philosophy of Christian personalism—deeply influenced by Emmanuel Mounier—insisted on the personal responsibility each of us bears for the other. “Christ doesn’t call for the state to take care of the poor,” Day taught. “He calls us all to this responsibility”.wikipedia+4

Day’s radical hospitality was grounded in seeing Christ in each person she encountered. “The mystery of the poor is this: they are Christ,” she declared. Her vision directly counters the depersonalizing logic of algorithmic profiling. Where our systems see data points, Day saw the face of Jesus. Where behavioral prediction offers efficiency, Day offered presence. She called herself a “Christian personalist” and critiqued industrial systems that “debased work and the worker,” favoring instead work that was “creative and humanizing rather than mechanical and dehumanizing”.catholicworker+1

The Doctors of the Church speak to these themes across the centuries. Saint Catherine of Siena, writing in her Dialogue, taught that we cannot love God except by loving our neighbor: “Love of Me and of her neighbor are one and the same thing”. She understood that self-love—the root of treating others as instruments—”has poisoned the entire world”. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, with her “Little Way,” taught that heroic sanctity comes not through grand gestures but through “every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love”. She recognized “the dignity and value of those around her” and saw each life as part of the larger Body of Christ. And Saint Augustine articulated how the human person, as imago Dei, is characterized by “a responsive movement of love and praise toward God”—a dynamism that no algorithm can capture or replace.catholicspiritualdirector+3

Pope Benedict XVI grasped the meaning of technology’s proper place. “Technology is never merely technology,” he wrote. “It reveals man and his aspirations towards development”. But he insisted that “human freedom is authentic only when it responds to the fascination of technology with decisions that are the fruit of moral responsibility”. Like Augustine wrestling with philosophy, we must resist the delusion that our technical capacities grant us “total autonomy” or freedom that “seeks to prescind from the limits inherent in things”.firstthings+1

Serving the Least of These

The Gospel of Matthew presents the final judgment not as an accounting of productivity metrics but as an encounter with the King who identifies himself with “the least of these”. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”. This teaching subverts every system that evaluates persons by their economic utility or predictive value. The hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned—these are not edge cases to be optimized away. They are Christ himself, demanding our recognition.biblestudytools+1

Advent frames this teaching with particular urgency. The Messiah we await came not in power but in vulnerability—a child born to refugees, laid in a manger. God chose to enter the human story at its weakest point. This is the One who, in the wilderness, rejected the devil’s offer of dominion over all the kingdoms of the world. He would not achieve his purposes through manipulation or control. He would achieve them through love that honors human freedom and dignity at every turn.biblegateway

For tech workers wandering in their own wilderness of ethical uncertainty, this season offers hope. Your growing awareness of AI’s threat to human dignity is not a curse—it is a grace. It is the beginning of something new. Like John the Baptist, you are called to “prepare the way of the Lord” in your own context, to “make straight the paths” in the systems you build and maintain.intermountainministry

Practical Steps for Dignity-Honoring Work

How might you begin? Consider first the language of your workplace—the words we use shape how we see. Challenge the jargon that quietly dehumanizes:

Rather than “users,” try speaking of “people” or “the person using this.” A user is a abstraction; a person is made in God’s image. Rather than “engagement metrics,” consider “time we’ve asked of real lives.” This reframing reminds us that behind every data point is someone with finite hours, relationships, and responsibilities. Rather than “targets” or “impressions,” speak of “individuals we’re reaching.” Each impression represents a human being with hopes, fears, and an eternal destiny.

You might introduce this reflection in a team meeting—not as a moral lecture but as an exercise in empathy and user-centered design. Ask colleagues: “What if we described our work as if every data point had a name and a story?” or “How might our decisions change if we pictured the person behind each number?” Frame it as improving how you think about the humans you serve. You may be surprised how ready others are for this conversation.

A Daily Advent Examen for Tech Workers

During these remaining weeks of Advent, consider adopting a brief daily examen—an ancient practice of prayerful reflection adapted for your work in technology:

Begin with gratitude: Thank God for the day’s work, for the gifts of intellect and creativity He has given you, for colleagues and opportunities to serve.

Move to reflection: Where did I honor the dignity of persons today? In a meeting, a design decision, a line of code? Where might I have reduced someone to a data point, a problem to solve, or a means to an end?

Practice awareness: Where did I feel spiritually alive in my work today? Where did I feel adrift, disconnected from purpose, troubled in conscience? What was the Spirit saying to me in those moments?

Close with intention: How can I prepare the way for Christ’s presence in my workplace tomorrow? What one small act might honor the unrepeatable dignity of another person?

This simple practice—perhaps five minutes at the end of each workday—can become a threshold where your technical vocation and your faith meet, where the wilderness begins to bloom.

An Invitation, Not a Condemnation

The Church’s engagement with technology has never been one of wholesale rejection. Pope Benedict XVI encouraged Christians to be “digital witnesses rather than influencers,” to transform social media into “doors of truth and faith”. Saint Carlo Acutis proves that holiness flourishes even in—perhaps especially in—the digital age. The question is not whether to work in tech, but how: with what posture of soul, what habits of attention, what commitment to seeing Christ in every person our systems touch.vaticannews

You are not too late. You are not too compromised. You are not alone in the wilderness.

The prophet Isaiah proclaimed that “the wilderness and the desert will rejoice”—that God promises transformation, that no environment is too barren for His coming. This Advent, let your growing awareness of AI’s ethical challenges become what it truly is: a call to make straight the paths, to prepare the way for dignity-honoring work in your industry.biblehub

The King is coming. He comes not to condemn the tech worker but to transform the work. He comes not to abolish our tools but to consecrate them. And He comes, as always, in the unexpected places—in the poor, the overlooked, the ones our algorithms would dismiss.

May your wilderness become a highway for our God.vaticannews+3