When the head of the world’s largest church teams up with an AI company co-founder to sound the alarm, it’s worth asking: what do they know that we don’t?
The leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV has got himself into a major geopolitical war aligning with those who insist AI must be disarmed. And he has gone public, officially decrying the threat of AI to humanity. And he did this accompanied by supportive experts, including Chris Olah, co-founder of US AI giant Anthropic.
Anthropic is a five-year old company with some 2,500 employees and valued at $380 billion. From its early days, the co-founders of Anthropic have sounded the warning about how AI has threats that need to be managed and not left in the hands of asleep-at-the-wheel politicians and opportunists.
Anthropic gave ‘birth’ to Claude, which is a family of AI models that can handle complex tasks and workflows.
This anti-AI stance from the Pope has serious economic and political consequences as this new technology has driven Wall Street stock market indexes to all-time highs and underpinned the most recent great returns for the overall US corporate sector.
AI promises to be the ‘magic pudding’ for what all economies need to be beat inflation, namely productivity, that boosts production while reducing costs. However, it comes with the threat that it might kill more jobs than it creates. And while that’s a potential humanity issue that the Pope and others are worried about, there are other concerns that even AI company creators are spooked about.
So, let’s see what Pope Leo XIV is arguing against AI and the Pontiff is supported by the likes of Chris Olah. Here goes:
- AI needs to be “disarmed”.
- AI has the potential to be a new age slave trade via normalising the exploitation of people, referring to it as “new digital slaveries”.
- Olah explained AI labs operate “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.”
- He effectively said computer scientists like him should not operate without controls that respect what society holds as more important than efficiency and technological advancement.
- The Pope especially condemned the use of AI in warfare and feared an AI arms race was likely. “No algorithm can make war morally acceptable,” the Pope wrote in his encyclical to the faithful, which has been made public.
- The Pope slammed the use of AI to create images and videos to manipulate and mislead people for both political and economic advantage.
The Pope’s encyclical, entitled “Magnifica Humanitas” or “The Magnificence of Humanity”, expressed concerns that if wars are conducted by AI robotics, the basic considerations of a political leader about endangering human beings — soldiers and civilians — could be ignored. Wars could be too easily triggered in the hands of the wrong people.
These are not just words, as the BBC reports that the Pope has convened a commission “to take his work forward, but there are huge questions as to how effective all this will be in the face of rapid technological advances.”
Not only do the anti-AI-unchecked forces have big influential corporations driving and loving this technology for profits, but the world is also dominated by sociopathic national leaders who are unlikely to do as the Pope asks, if only because they couldn’t trust their rivals to place controls on AI.
I know Woody Allen has become an unpopular figure nowadays for what looks like understandable reasons, but he did have some astute takes on humanity. This one seems very appropriate as the AI threatens job losses and war: “More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
