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It was weird to see the Pope allied with Anthropic. I imagined when Sam got that text and tried to swoop in with a counter through a nuncio he’s cultivated.
The pope invited Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah to the Vatican for the publication of Magnifica Humanitis, the long-awaited “AI encyclical” that is Leo’s attempt to put the church (and himself) in the middle of the AI power struggle with a point of view beyond tokenmaxxing.
Unsurprisingly the woke pope came out in favor of the human “with cries of the poor and the earth in his heart.” He advocated for AI “disarmament” and putting the human not just in the loop but at the center. Magnifica Humanitas is hardly an anti-tech jeremiad, but it uses the metaphor of Babel vs Jerusalem to point to a time for choosing.
Do we wish to slip the surly bonds of humanity for the benefit of a select few or take a path of solidarity and cooperation for mutual benefit of all? I don’t think this will get much of a serious hearing in Silicon Valley and in the Trump administration. I expect champion debater David Sacks to delegitimize the pope’s standing to even weigh in on tech: shut up and pray.
Keep in mind this is happening at a time when graduates are booing AI. As Troy said on PvA, why wouldn’t they when there’s nothing in it for them? It massively benefits capital holders and churns jobs in an already precarious economy for workers, not to mention the environmental and existential risks. The counter to the time-for-choosing message is: If we don’t go full throttle, China will win. We can’t let the bad guys win. Side note: Did we find out yet who blew up that girls school in Iran?
Magnifica Humanitas moves issues like interiority into the mix. I read it as another periodic attempt by the church to make peace with capitalism, which is in many ways a rival religion. Underlying capitalism is the commodification of whatever it touches. See how youth sports is now a $40 billion “asset class” when I played Little League with local car wash logos on jerseys. The Industrial Revolution commodified labor. Social media commodified human attention. The idea of that commodifying intelligence is a threat to interiority that is simply inimical to human flourishing.
“Capitalism is the only religion without taboos humans have ever invented,” noted Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe.
It stands to reason the AI battle would involve religion. Transhumanism is taken seriously in tech circles. SpaceX’s valuation is only justified by extreme faith. And Sam Altman was unable to explain what he believed in a Tucker Carlson interview that hinted Sam maybe killed a whistleblower, not that Tucker would ever suggest that.
The rollout of Magnifica Humanitas was very modern. The Vatican produced a series of infographics and an EWTN hype video. The Vatican is after all a media organization first and foremost with a bigger membership program than Costco. This kind of soft power has long been dismissed. “How many divisions has he got?” Stalin once asked of an earlier pope.
Silicon Valley elites are obsessed with the idea that anti-AI sentiment is being whipped up by the CCP. This is ludicrous, of course. You do not need an anti-AI disinformation campaign when you have Sam Altman calculating the energy use of unproductive babies to compute. That is the kind of messaging that will get a pope’s attention.
Marc Andreessen went on Joe Rogan to extol the benefits of agents over workers. One reason: They don’t complain to HR. This is a recurring theme. Ryan Breslow, CEO of Bolt, bragging about firing his HR team and then miraculously the “problems went away.” I got flashbacks to Trump’s idea to stop testing for a Covid, the numbers would go down.
HR is a handy boogiewoman of the as yet undefined strand of anti-woke ideology that weirdly unites a lot of incompatible groups of the New Right. Years from now, we might find the Gen Z Boss in a a Mini ladies were critical figures in the wokelash.
HR is a handy symbol of what Cloudflare CEO called the “measurers” in companies that don’t make the thing or sell the thing. It’s also a handy way to divide workers into camps.
The pope called work “a requirement of the human condition.” It’s important to note that he also highlighted how suffering is also a prerequisite of the human experience.
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