We have always governed power by striking a bargain. When we let a few hands hold something everyone depends on, the water, the grid, the rail line, we have asked something of them in return... These companies have taken our human data and built their systems from us. I do not see yet what they have given back... These are the questions, and the answers are owed by us, not to us.

I do not have the answers... No one can, alone. When Pope Leo wrote his encyclical on artificial intelligence this spring, the part that stayed with me was the insistence that the work of governing these technologies belongs to everyone... The questions worth asking are questions about what we owe each other, and those have never belonged to specialists.

What was done to Henrietta Lacks — the extraction without consent, the conversion of a person into a product, the accumulation of enormous wealth and power by institutions that acknowledged no obligation to the individual whose body made it possible — is not a historical anomaly. It is a template that is still running, at a scale and speed, but now to something even more intimate than cells.

Our data is being harvested. Our thoughts. Our languages. Our accumulated knowledge.