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Tech News Weekly 439: Can Apple's New Siri Catch Up?
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iOS 27 Siri AI overhaul
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Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Dan Moran is here. We talk about Bloomberg's latest piece giving us what we should expect when it comes to iOS 27 at WWDC. Then a story out of London regarding phone theft and families being threatened by the thieves. After that, Jake Ward of the Rip Current joins us to give us a breakdown of the Vatican's indictment of AI. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.
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Podcasts you love from people you Trust.
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This is TWiT.
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This is Tech News Weekly, episode 439 with Dan Morin and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Thursday, May 28, 2026. Can Apple's new Siri catch up? Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Micah Sargent and joined this week by my dear pal, it is the east coast bureau chief of Six Colors, Dan Morin. Hello, Dan.
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C
Hello, Mike. I got my hammer ready to break some news. Let's do it.
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A
Yeah, because this morning I saw something fly through by way of a notification in Discord and then I said, that seems interesting. Let me go back to sleep.
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C
Then later, that's your standard operating procedure, I understand.
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A
Absolutely. Later I woke up and then read some more about it and I am looking forward to hearing your take. So let's get into our stories of the week first.
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C
I will go first. I was going to, I didn't want to be rude, but here we go.
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A
That was very kind of you.
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C
Yeah. So my story of this week is a story from Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg with another Apple scoop. You know, Gurman has been talking a lot about these features coming up at the Worldwide Developer Conference that might be unveiled as part of these 27 year updates. And he is back with some more information about the revamps to Siri, among other things in iOS27. Now we've taken it a step further this time because Bloomberg has also put together renders of what this supposed interface will look like based on, quote, information viewed by Bloomberg and people with knowledge of the company's plans who asked not to be identified because the software isn't public yet. Now, Bloomberg also caveats this heavily by saying things like, well, a lot of times they test lots of different designs internally. The final version could look different than this. This is based on what we've heard. So as always, take this with a bit of, you know, salt.
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A
Do we think really quickly before we get into things, if, if Gurman was operating independently, do you think there would be as Many caveats as there are in this article. You think that's, that's. I know this is complete speculation, but I am just curious sort of there's, there seems to be so many of these and we don't typically get this many if we're reading, you know, 9 to 5 Mac or, or Mac rumors or another one of these sort of more Apple focused sites where it's sort of, I would argue kind of built in that you just know it's very possible that this might not be the final version.
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C
Yeah, I mean Bloomberg has a reputation to upheld even though they themselves have taken some flack over the years for things like of course they had that famous big hack story from many years ago. They claimed that these computers motherboards had been tampered with and it was kind of denied and shot down. But they never retracted or corrected the story in any way. So it's not to say that they don't have their own challenges as well, but I think in this case it's also just an acknowledgement of the fact that lots can happen behind the scenes. And even before I had gone through and read the entire story, you know, I had some skepticism like these aren't screenshots, right? These are not screenshots of a phone running this a thing that other people have gotten in trouble for. These are descriptions that then were turned into rendered art. So even if they are broadly speaking close to what it might look like, the actual details may not be quite the same for a variety of reasons. So what exactly do we see here? Well, Siri has been relocated to the dynamic island in the latest iPhones. Basically you'll be able to summon it as you always do with the button or with a wake word. It will then sort of pop up and you will have the ability to ask it queries. One thing that he also reports is that you'll be able to swipe down from the top center of the iPhone anywhere in the system for a new interface which lets you search or ask. Which is not dissimilar from the visual intelligence feature that we saw Apple roll out both a couple years ago and then more recently with screenshots last year. Search generally being a pass through to your search engine of choice by default. Google ask generally being a way to kick it to an AI such as ChatGPT. Now this year we're expecting a little more built in support for intelligence, you know, via Apple's partnership with Google using the Gemini models. But it's also suggested from this that there will be the ability to Basically hook into various third party AI models, whether it's OpenAI or Claude or Gemini. So that's a part of this as well. There will also be the ability to like have a chatbot style conversation right inside the standalone Siri app. And that'll much like some of the other AI apps we've interacted with, will store your chats and you'll have sort of the ability to go back to a specific thread or topic that you were talking about. We've heard this in the past also described as kind of like a messages style interface. That's not quite what this looks like here, but it certainly has that sort of idea that it will be broken down into discrete sections rather than just sort of one long ongoing conversation. So, you know, there are a lot of things in this that we kind of get slight ideas for how stuff is shaping up. I think putting stuff in the dynamic island is probably really smart. Obviously Apple's put more and more stuff there over the years and it's a big part of what is going to, you know, be sort of front and front center for a big new feature like this. But you know, obviously the big question is still going to be how well does it work and how much will people end up using it? Because for example, Mark Gurman also talks about Siri being integrated directly into the camera with an interface that actually sounds very similar to what you get with visual intelligence right now, which is kind of siloed off into its own thing. And of course the camera is a super prominent app on iOS. This would potentially expose it to way more users. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll use it. And in fact some people may be annoyed if this thing is always there and isn't working well. So I think there's still some challenges to remain, you know, in terms of actually adopting all these things. And then one thing I was kind of struck by, I mean, and this is sort of a broader point about the how important is this to Apple, right? We've seen a narrative obviously that they're behind on AI. It's hard to deny that they have slipped up in the past. They've promised features they haven't been able to deliver. And of course you've seen a lot more development from, you know, the big AI companies. One thing I noticed they, they posted on Bloomberg a, you know, a video and during the part where they talk about, well, it's like, oh, you know, it's falling behind OpenAI and it's falling behind Claude and Gemini and I couldn't help but notice that both the like B roll it uses for talking about Claude and the B roll it uses for talking about OpenAI, I believe, show them running on iPhones and it's like, all right, so you know, those services are great, but you need a device to run them on because neither of them make phones yet. So.
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And so many of the agents are running on Mac hardware.
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Yeah.
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Like the meme that you see all over where it's showing now that ever. Not that a developer has their agent and it's a MacBook with its lid slightly open. Yeah, that. Wow. Yeah, that's a really good point.
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Yeah. So Apple, end of the day, you still need hardware to run this stuff. It can't all work necessarily in the cloud and everybody carries phones with them. Nobody's going to stop carrying phones. And if they are still carrying phones and want to use an AI, they're probably going to do it on the phones they already have. So I don't think, you know, there are challenges, there are concerns to be had about it, but I don't feel like it's an existential threat for Apple the way it is for some of these other companies, maybe like Google, their entire business model simply doesn't hinge on this use of AI. And if people use AI on their platform, even if it isn't Apple's AI, that's still good for Apple. So obviously we're still a week and a half out or so from wwdc, where we'll see how much of this stuff is. Is accurate. As always, the. The devil's in the details. Apple will have its own stories to spin and its own narratives to share about how and why these things work and why they've chosen to do things the way they have. And that's a big part. All that messaging is a big part of how those features are ultimately received.
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Do we think that this is the last bit of. Do we think that Tim Cook will be seen as sort of responsible for. Is this his last big thing before
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C
he's done his legacy?
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Or has it already? Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Or has he has it already moved on in terms of sort of the culture of, of Apple attention that. That we have?
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Yeah, I think this is a tricky one because it kind of bridges these two leadership trans. Like the two ends of the leadership transition. It's certainly a big part of the, the push that Tim Cook has made during his last couple years. Right. I mean, obviously we saw Apple intelligence roll out way back at WWC 2024, and here we are two years later, and I think the fact that it never quite managed to ship some of those features was a bit of a black mark on Tim Cook's time here. You know, a lot of that, again, gets washed away by the tremendous, tremendous financial success they've had. But I think it will also be a proving ground for incoming CEO John Turnus, because he's going to inherit it. He's going to have to talk about ramping it up. And when it comes to this year's iPhones, which I'm sure Apple intelligence will still be a centerpiece of because it's not going anywhere. You know, he's going to have to make arguments about those and defend the performance of those compared to its rivals. So, you know, there's never a clean break between these kinds of administrations of a company. You always have to deal somewhat with what's left over from the people before you. And so that is. I don't know if it's fair or not, but that is what John Turner has to deal with coming into this role is not only the tremendous success that Tim Cook has dealt with, but also the challenges that he's had.
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Yeah, I. I also am kind of curious as far as this goes. You know, they're talk. There's this talk about the standalone Siri app, right. That you would be able to interact with. And given that Apple is sort of letting you choose what agent you're using with these, between the, I think three big options of. Of anthropic. And I think it was, well, regardless, definitely choosing between Gemini or OpenAI.
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Do.
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How do you think the general public, the people who are not paying as close attention to it, will perceive it? Because think about. I think about super bowl and I think about where we have in the past seen a coach drawing some plays on the device in front of them, and people are calling it an iPad. And it's not an iPad. It's. It was a Microsoft product at the time.
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I think it's only an iPad if it's making Cupertino. Otherwise it's a sparkling tablet.
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Exactly. So do we think that this could reshape how the general public perceives Apple's sort of prowess in AI? If there's a standalone app, even though it's backed by like, Do. Do you think that that level of detail matters to the standard person? And again, I'm not going to hold it against you if you're wrong in the end. I'm just curious to hear your take on it.
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Well, here are my renders that I've know yes and no. Here's the thing. One, I think this is going to be far more attached to Siri as a brand name, quote unquote than Apple Intelligence. You know, people or even AI, right. Like people have been using Siri for years as an assistant and people are all too aware of its shortcomings. But like it's such a brand name that you see jokes about it. Right. I'm thinking about sitcoms where like people like hold up their phone and tell Siri to remind them about something later. Right. Or like, like punch lines where people complain about like well I was talking to Siri and it did this. It's like it's a household name. Right. And so there's a challenge there, but also an opportunity, I think. And I think that by linking it so closely to that they have this ability to change the narrative on Siri more than they have the ability to change the narrative on AI in some ways because a lot of the AI stuff a it's going to be sort of white label Gemini people aren't going to know that really. You know, the average person doesn't care who makes the model, they just care about the app on their phone. And I think at the same time you will see this idea of, you know, I'm curious about the AI implementation because the ability to switch maybe your, your agents for some of this. Anyway, it's unclear which parts of that that work with that may only work with this search interface via the, you know, home screen or the system, you know, where you drag down as opposed to within the app where it's just Siri that's backed by Google. And so I, I fully expect to see a situation where you'll see like Tick tock videos being like did you know you could change your thing so it talks to, you know, chat GPT and it's going to be way better for you. So go in here, change this setting. So when you ask questions, it doesn't ask Siri, it asks ChatGPT 100% expect to see that as a viral video sometime in the first year.
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Absolutely. I guess the last thing I would ask before we we head into a break. Any of the stuff that you saw renders for and reporting on this morning stick out to you as oh, I didn't, I didn't think that that was going to be this soon or oh, I didn't know about that at all. Or perhaps oh, they're actually doing that. Anything like that for you?
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Yeah, I'm not excited about there's a grammar checker built in, you know, which is kind of their attempt to take on Grammarly. And it's got a little like pop up pane there that explains things.
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And pop up pain is exactly, that
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is exactly how I would describe it. I'm currently in edits on a book which requires me to use Microsoft Word and go through and use both track changes. And it keeps using the grammar checker. And the grammar checker is just, it is one of the most just bananas conversations I always feel like I'm having because I'll see two sentences that look virtually the same. And it's like on this one you need to put a comment and this one you should take the comment out and like. But basically the same construction. Like, I get so annoyed as somebody who is into words that it's so frustrating and that it's so. It works so badly at times. That said, I understand that there are a lot of people who are not professional writers and feel like, you know, a system like this can help them write better. And I don't want to be a total snob about it, even though I am oftentimes a total snob. And so maybe some people will find this a beneficial feature. But I've been incredibly unimpressed with the writing tool stuff that currently exists in Apple Intelligence. I, I can't say that I've ever used any of it and I don't. I would be fascinated to know how much it's used, just broadly. Not that Apple ever tells us these things, but like, they're going to keep talking about how great it is. And I really don't know that I've ever run into anybody who's like, oh man, Apple writing tools. I love that stuff. I use it all the time. Never met a single person who says that.
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Yeah, same. I'm right there with you. So we'll have to, I guess, deal with the pain when it, when it arrives.
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Turn it off. You can always turn it off.
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Probably.
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Probably.
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Probably. Yeah. Hopefully. We'll have to wait till they announce it. We'll see. All right, let's take a quick break before we come back with my story of the week. This episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by Simply C X. When you think about the companies that are actually winning in tech right now, what do they have in common? Sure, great products. But more often than not, it comes down to how they make customers feel and how seamlessly everything works. Because customer experience is the ultimate strategy to scale companies. So stay ahead of the curve with simplycx the podcast produced by Microsoft and Hosted by Nicole McKinley, Microsoft's global customer experience leader, SimplyCX features conversations with executives from companies like T Mobile, CarMax and TD bank exploring how AI data and insights are reshaping the customer experience and driving business growth. In fact, their recent episode with Mark Chamberlain, the global managing director of customer experience at Kantar, is a masterclass in modern CX and the metrics you actually need to monitor. And that's really what makes Simply CX stand out. The conversations are grounded in real business challenges and full of practical takeaways for team leaders and brand builders. New episodes drop every other Tuesday. Find Simply CX wherever you get your podcasts and follow host Nicole McKinley on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going. All right, we are back from the break and it's time for my story of the week. This past week, as we record this on Thursday, May 28, the story from the New York Times by Amelia Nirenberg that takes a familiar urban headache and turns it into something a lot more unsettling. So we all know phones get stolen. Maybe yours has been stolen before. But in London, where a record number of devices are vanishing off the street, the theft is often just the opening move. After the phone is gone, the victim's family starts getting messages. Some pretend to be Apple, some pretend to be a friendly stranger who happened to buy the phone. And then when those don't work, the texts, well, they turn into death threats, graphic ones, sometimes with videos of people holding guns. All of it to get the victim to do one small thing, unlink their Apple id. It's a window into a global criminal supply chain, the limits of what police can do across borders, and the very real psychological toll on ordinary people. So let's get into it. Well, there's one example a when a Chicago visitor who is identified in the piece as Mr. Pula had his phone stolen in London. So originally from Chicago, stolen in London. Well, you know, he didn't really think about it at the time and honestly when it happened, thought that. But what the consequences would be afterward were his but unfortunately those consequences hit his 65 year old mother because he had set her number as the contact in the phone's lost mode. So when that happened, well then her number was the point of contact for the thieves. Started out as a text that was pretending to be Apple Pay. It was warning that the phone was being used in China and that the Apple ID had to be unlinked or else you'd have to pay. Then also a yo message from a number in the Philippines, claiming that the new owner could already see his messages, bank details and everything. And when that didn't work, well, that's when the video of a man wielding a gun who was threatening to slaughter the family appeared in the messages. As you can imagine. What was her name? Judy Picula said, quote, I was freaking out. And of course, her son doubted that the threats were real, but still said, look, I went ahead and wiped it, and luckily they never texted my mom again. This is obviously troubling, but it made me kind of wonder, Dan. I looked at the way that I have mine set up right now and my emergency contact numbers and all of that. Has any of the. Cause, I think you. I'm pretty sure you travel at least more than I do. And so have you thought about changing how your lost mode works? Or do you feel like your family is versed enough in tech to where if something like this happened, they'd go, I know this isn't real.
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C
I certainly hope they would. But I haven't made any deliberate changes to it, if only because I still feel like kind of the security best practices tend to be pretty solid, and making sure that your phone and data is inaccessible to me remains the most important thing. You know, certainly the idea that you can prevent somebody from reselling the phone is great, but deterrence doesn't really work on an individual level. Right. Like, the idea of deterrence by saying, like, okay, these phones will be useless to you if you steal them only works on a, like, statistical, broad level. But any individual case, it doesn't matter. Your phone's already been stolen. Deterrence has failed. So I do see the argument that maybe if you want to, like, be sure that, like, you know, you do want to just wipe your phone and give sort of call your losses at that point, I don't know that I have. I have to look and see if I have anything pop up. You know, I think I probably just have my own contact info, like alternate contact info. If a phone gets lost, I don't think. I certainly wouldn't put my mom or dad's phone number there just because I would be more worried about them getting these kinds of things and being frightened by or convinced by them. You know, if it were my wife or something, I think she'd probably be a little more savvy and on top of it. But I don't really want to put anybody else in the position of having to sort of navigate that. So, you know, if somebody wants to come at me because they sold my phone and wants to threaten me, to unlock it. I don't love it, but you know better than the alternative, I guess. So. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a tricky situation. I'm kind of in interested to see if there are more things that Apple can do to prevent this or to deal with this kind of situation if it is indeed this widespread.
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Yeah, this is, this is one of those things where sure it's, it's, it has the potential to be scary but as you said, those best practices following those kind of help when, when these situations arise. Now here's why these threats are having to, why the thieves are having to make these threats because it all has to do with that on link opt that stolen iPhone, you know, being tied to the Apple id. There was the criminologist Emmeline Taylor who said that honestly, these phones as we know, as we know are almost worthless, only good for spare parts. But a lot of those spare parts aren't very valuable on their own and resetting the phone to a new ID is what gives it the secondhand value. So it's a little bit like what is that, that thing. I think it was a president who said it about but we don't negotiate with terrorists. Like this is sort of the same. You know, if you don't give in then the thing is not very valuable to them. And the thought that a phone that at the most could be worth let's say $2,000 is by the. Can you imagine how expensive it would be to hire someone to do real threats to someone? Sure. And you know what I mean like that the, the, the, the pros and the cons and the having to put
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your own like you know, like face skin in the game as it were. Right. Like that, that's a challenge too because then you make the threats too real people start trying to track you down. Law enforcement gets involved and it gets messy. Right. The whole point of this is it's supposed to be a widespread operation that's sort of low hanging fruit, right. You steal 30 phones if you sell five of them, that's as you said, if they're $2,000 phones, $10,000, that's a pretty good net, right. Like even if, and somebody's got to get paid, right? Because the person who's stealing the phone is probably not the person selling the phone. They're probably being employed and those phones are probably making their way to a black market somewhere overseas. So there's a whole long food chain here. I liken it kind of similarly to you know, scams, online scams, right, where the idea is cast a wide net, you catch a couple thing, you know, people who are, you know, get tricked into giving up their information and maybe it justifies your net. And there, though it's much. The cost of the game is much cheaper for the scammers because if they're just sending text messages or emails, it basically doesn't cost them anything and they are unlikely to get tracked down. One of the challenges with this is like, you gotta send somebody out there to actually steal phones. That's a person that can be caught. That's a person that has to risk things by, you know, putting their, themselves into, you know, the, like the, the chances of getting, you know, arrested or what have you. So they want to avoid that. They want this to be clean and easy and, and effective and cheap most of all.
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Now there is something interesting. London's Mayor and Commissioner Rowley are actually pressuring Apple to do more, saying, why can't there be a kill switch? So a stolen phone is useless. Even going further to question why a stolen device can't simply be fully cut off from the cloud, Apple did say in a statement, well, in a statement it pointed to the security features that it already offers, like lost mode, remote erase, keeping the device on the Find my List list, and said it does sympathize with the victims, it will keep working to reduce the incentive to steal Apple devices, but says that honestly, the existing locks that, you know, we've talked about do make the phone pretty worthless. And that is the reason why these gangs are resorting to extortion in the first place, because it's the only way to make this thing valuable. Interestingly though, even when police want to act, oftentimes the geography defeats the ability for the police to act because in the uk, under British law, the threats could be prosecuted as malicious communications. This is an offense carrying up to two years in jail. But that only applies if the message was sent from British soil. So if a text is fired off from China, there wouldn't be an awful lot that. Yeah, that they could do. That's what, that's what Green Dan, Sergeant Dan Green said. So you kind of have a crime that it, while it began on a London sidewalk, ends up being routed through a phone in Shenzhen. And then that jurisdictional change is what makes it.
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C
And what I'll say about the, the idea of the kill switch, as you said, this is kind of what it does already.
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Yeah.
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And the, the challenge there is like, which cases are you optimizing for Are you optimizing for the cases where people steal their phones and get away with it? Are you optimizing for cases where people say lose their phones and then recover them and want to just be able to start using their phone again? And that involves its own challenge. If you totally kill the thing, how do you. In like somebody recovers their phone because they dropped it somewhere or a good Samaritan returns it, how do you then reactivate it and make that a frictionless process? And again, deterrents are tricky. I think about myself like I, I had a, I used to drive a Honda Accord and it had a kill switch in it where unless you, you know, unlocked it using the key fob job, the car wouldn't start. You turn the key and it just would like nothing would happen. That did not stop my car from being broken into twice and having people try to hotwire it by ripping out the ignition, which I then still had to go fix. So deterrence, again, great things. And, and on a widespread level, the idea that maybe you can quash people trying to do these things by, by making it known these exist, great. But it doesn't help anybody on an individual level because sooner or later somebody may decide to do this, this and they're obviously have already stopped thinking about the deterrence. Might stop them from getting away with your car, might not stop them from causing a lot of damage that you have to fix and pay for anyways.
- [28:56]
A
Yeah, well, I, you know, I ultimately suggest that people make use of the tools that Apple has enabled to be mindful, of course of where you are and, you know, what's around you. This is not again to say that if you have had your phone stolen, it's your fault or anything like that, but if you are looking for advice on how to protect yourself from something like this. Yeah. Turn on the features that keep your phone safe. They can be a little bit annoying. I have experienced trying to reset a phone and having to wait an hour for that to happen. But if it means that something like this doesn't happen, then I think that's a good.
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C
It's always a trade off.
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A
There's all. Exactly. There's always a trade off. Well, Dan, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Of course, folks can head over to 6colors.com to check out some of the work that you're doing. But where else should they go to keep up with you?
- [29:54]
C
Well, I'm on most social media as de Morin. You can search for me on your blue sky Your Instagram, your mastodon. You'll probably find me. But if you want to go to Mahome for everything I do, it's dmorin.com which has links to both my tech writing as well as the podcast, including Clockwise, which I do with Micah every week over on Relay and all the sci fi novels and fantasy novels that I write. And you should go buy them. Dmorin.com beautiful.
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A
Thank you, Dan. We appreciate it.
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C
Thanks, Micah.
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A
All righty folks, let's take a quick break so I can tell you about our club offering. It's called Club Twit at Twit TV Club Twit. And when you head there, you can become a member of the Club Twit TV Club Twit or use that QR code in the top corner there. Doing so will get you access to all of our shows ad free. Free. You'll also gain access to some special feeds. Our feed that has behind the scenes, moment before the show, after the show, we've got a feed that has our live coverage of tech news events, including the upcoming WWDC and our previously covered Google IE. We also have a feed that has our club shows like My Crafting Corner, Stacy's Book Club, the upcoming Media club. All of that is there as well. And and access to the members only Discord Server. A fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at twit. If that sounds interesting to you, well, we can't wait to have you in the Club Twit TV Club Twit.
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Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
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A
all right, we are back from the break. Look, every so often, a voice enters the big tech conversation from somewhere outside of that usual mix of engineers, executives, lawmakers, tech journalists and shifts. The terms of the whole debate this week. That voice came from the Vatican. And I don't think it was quite the voice of God. But it did weigh in on artificial intelligence in a way few people saw coming. What happens when one of the world's oldest institutions takes a hard look at one of its newest technologies? Here to break it all down is the rip currents. Jake Ward, welcome.
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B
What's up? Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
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A
Yeah, it's good to have you here. Even if it's not in our typical setting. I Saw your. You kind of introduced me to the anticipation of this, to be honest with you. Oh, cool. Yeah. The email came through saying, you know, that you were waiting for the Vatican to release this and that you were kind of up early, ready. So I think before we even get into the analysis, I was hoping that you could kind of set the stage for us. Tell us about what this encyclical is and why our latest Pope Leo. Excuse me, why did Pope Leo decide artificial intelligence was even worth an encyclical?
- [33:00]
B
Okay, so I love this. So I should just say here. First of all, I am not Catholic. I am not a Catholic. I'm not a Christian, I'm not particularly religious, and I come, in fact, from grandparents who came from a very terrible experience in the. In the Christian church and as a result, were very anti church throughout my upbringing. So I come to you as someone with no religious leanings here. And yet I was. I was really excited about this. And I think it was. I think it was a couple things set me up for it. One was I'd been in the Musk Altman trial, which we talked about last time I was on here with you and watching just the clear delusions of the heads of those companies about their, you know, the power they clearly feel they deserve to have over all of us. The ways in which people are. Are talking so clearly about human beings as, you know, worthless if they can't be as efficient as AI, such that they're losing their jobs left and right. Right. 8,000 people laid off at Meta. Was that last week? This week? Last week, I guess, you know, 6,000 jobs spiked forever, you know, so I've just was set up already to just be like, man, I could use some. I could use some better thinking about this stuff. And because I knew that there a certain number of people in. In news circles were just kind of excited about this encyclical as a news item. I began looking into the history of this Pope and his connection to this topic, and what's so cool when you get into it is just how powerful his command of this tech moment and of the history of worker exploitation is. So just to sort of set the stage, Pope Leo xiv, the former Robert Prevost, is a real one, as the kids say. Like, this guy, he was in Peru dealing with the Shining Path as a young priest. He did like 10 cushy years in Rome, and then he went back to Peru, where he's, like, driving vans through floodwaters and dealing with some really scary situations. Like, this guy is no Joke. He's not some pencil neck intellectual. He is a very serious person out in the world and a very smart intellectual about this stuff. And the reason he's called Pope Leo is he named himself after Pope Leo XIII, who in 1891 was the first guy to say factories are a nightmare and are creating nightmarish conditions for children who are being forced to work in them 14 hours a day. And that was the first time that the Catholic Church had ever really stepped into social concerns. They were always just all about the deity and what God was saying through them. But this is where he was saying, we need to help lift people up. And that language I knew, having read up on it, led eventually to the New Deal, the moral language about not. And what he specifically said was we can't be judging people based on how much they can produce in a working day. People have inherent dignity and value because according to Catholic doctrine, they are made in the image of God. Right? And Pope Leo, our Pope Leo, literally two days into his time as an elected, as the elected Pope was saying, I called myself Leo after this guy because of what he did and because I think artificial intelligence is the new threat. He's equating it to the horrors of being in a factory in the 19th century and saying we need to deal with this. And so I just was like, man, this guy. And already in his remarks I knew he was just a very, he was just a clearly like thinking about this and has like clearly been reading his textualism. I don't know if he's followed. You know, I hope he's a twit listener because he's definitely like, he's learning this stuff, he knows his stuff. And he's not just some grandpa saying we need to be more humane about AI. He's like really breaks down in this 43,000 word encyclical. What it is that, that, you know, is, is that he's concerned about at this very, very high level. So I, yeah, I woke up at like, you know, I came out at like 2:30 in the morning, but I wasn't going to do that. So I got up at 5 in the morning to read it and get ready to be on TV with it. And I was not disappointed. I really thought he, you know, there are a few things that I would have wanted from him that he didn't deliver. But, but man, it was more than I expected. So I was excited about it.
- [37:13]
A
Yeah. One of the interesting aspects of it for me also, as someone who isn't Catholic, was never Catholic, but did Grow up religious. But regardless of that, one of the things that was interesting was what you touched on about the historical context, the naming of this pope and the naming of AI as something that was going to be a big focus for him. And so I really find and find and found that fascinating. As you mentioned there, one of the ideas that you write about is, you know, how do we judge a machine and how do we judge a person and how those need to be different. And so it seems like that is at the heart of this document, certainly, as you point out, a big part of the industrialization and factories argument. Can you kind of maybe go into more depth about how that line is drawn, what the distinction is there?
- [38:15]
B
Yeah, so. So Leo XIII was the first one to start saying that, that the risk of factories was that they were going to change the way we evaluate humans. And it's amazing to imagine a world in which that was, you know, before that was true. Right? When, when. Because now we, I mean, GDP and per capita GDP is literally, literally the value of humans is something we calculate all the time in the modern world. But back then that was a new thing. And he was saying this is bad, this is dangerous. And so what, what Leo the 14th, our Leo is saying here is, is not just that we should, that, that AI is going to deepen that, but he also has these beautiful lines about the degree to which the whole premise, the whole marketing of AI is that we're going to do away with our inefficiencies and our errors. And he says at one point in the encyclical he wrote, building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected. I mean, he's saying we are weird and inefficient and we doze off and we, you know, and that is okay, we should, that is, that is the good thing. And he says that the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness. I mean, the guy is speaking very clearly to this idea that we can't be thinking about, you know, oh, Claude Code gets this done in ten times the, you know, in a tenth of the time. And as a result, we don't need, you know, those other nine people. And all of that stuff he's saying, that's not cool. Like, that is not a morally defensible position. And in an age where we're seeing these CEOs of these companies like you know, you're seeing the Marc Andreessens of the world and the, you know, writing these long treatises about, you know, look how smart we've been. And look, get out of our way. And, you know, we're doing God's work and all of that stuff. Stuff to see the actual voice of God in this case. And again, I'm not religious, but to see that guy being like, nope, that's not cool, is very powerful.
- [40:30]
A
Honestly, that's one of the aspects for me when this. When I first started talking about this, because I started nerding out about it, too. So I was sharing it with my significant other, and he sort of thought that perhaps the impact of, you know, some religious leader would not be that. And I started to break down sort of the reach of Catholicism across the world. And the way in which. Even the way that I've seen from this sounds funny as I'm like, oh, I have Catholic friends, but the way that I see even my Catholic friends,
- [41:10]
B
Some of my best friends are Catholic.
- [41:11]
A
Some of my best friends are Catholic. Yeah. And it's true. And. And even though they may not, you know, attend Mass regularly and that kind of thing, there is. There is a resonance to the Pope saying a thing even for people who are sort of casually connected to their Catholic faith. And so this does have a ringing impact. And I think one of the things that stood out to me was the tech leaders who were part of the conversations. And I kind of wanted to get your thoughts on that in. It felt like the mention that we heard the most about was anthropic. But it's my understanding that there were other AI leaders and big tech leaders who spoke to the Pope and the Pope's team as well. What do you think that says, though, about anthropic kind of being the headline there?
- [42:05]
B
Yeah, So a couple things that I think about this. So one is the way I read it is like when you see. So we know, for instance, that the multiple reports have shown that. That the heads of public policy for all the big tech companies have been going to the Vatican for some meetings, for this, for that, for the other. And they are clearly. They have clearly been trying to lobby the Pope because they're concerned about this. They are clearly not just brushing this off. They're concerned that this is. That this guy, the moral leader of the Western world, is going to, you know, slag them off. Like, he knows. They know. They knew clearly that he had been, you know, thinking in a smart way about this. They know from his public comments that he's not a big fan of what they're making, you know, so they clearly were trying to get involved and then they have been silent since this encyclical came out. No one's going, you know, saying, actually I think, you know, nobody's doing that from the PR departments of these companies, which suggests to me that it really, I'm sure it really triggered them and they are, as a result staying as shut up as they can about it. It. Anthropic was the only one on stage from one of these companies and Anthropic is a weird one because they've been quite active. This guy, Christopher Ola is one of the co founders, has been quite active, going to the Vatican a lot, being in these meetings, calling these gatherings, and clearly is someone who, like so many of the folks at Anthropic is trying to be on the right side of history around this stuff. But it is interesting to me, you know, so I think it's, there is, I think there's some genuine interest, interest in trying to do the right thing here. But I think as with all of these things, whether this, you know, this also felt like marketing, right? And, and the thing I've learned in my career is that like nobody at the top of these companies does anything unless it accomplishes multiple benefits. Right? No one's just doing the right thing to do the right thing. There's always a marketing aspect to it. And so, and, and I would just point out that, that what we're about to see tested at Anthropic as it prepares to go public by all accounts, and is suddenly going to be beholden to shareholders on a quarter by quarter basis, whether any of these principles that they've articulated are going to be in any way load bearing going forward. Because like literally on the same day that Christopher Ola is standing on the the steps with the Pope at the Vatican, American forces were sending missiles into Iran that are where the targets are being chosen by the Maven smart system of which we know Claude is a part.
- [44:35]
A
Yeah.
- [44:35]
B
You know, and so like they're literally party to the death of people and they're on stage with a guy who's just written this whole thing about how autonomous weapons do not absolve you of moral responsibility for what the technology does. You cannot hide behind the technology, you know, so like, the contradictions for Anthropic are enormous. And I think fundamentally my top line takeaway is the Pope considers Anthropic a nation state. He writes about this in the encyclical that all these companies are basically their own nations, they're not bounded by the normal governmental bounds. And I think he thinks of them as a diplomatic channel and had them there as a head of state over which he's trying to exert some moral authority. And so I've seen people say, like, oh, it's compromised and the Vatican's just a VC firm. But I think that what there is is a genuine effort there to try and keep some moral authority through the diplomatic connection with that company. And frankly, I'm glad. I want someone to feel shame in the face of the Pope and they clearly seem to be a company that does.
- [45:49]
A
So I was going to say, I agree with that. At the very least, that. Yeah, because so much of, so much of what we see from Silicon Valley feels like pride in shamelessness and especially right now. Yeah. And that, that's just a huge aspect of it. And it's always with this sort of underlying belief that, well, it's, we have to, we have to, we have. It's, it is very much the, the sort of king, like belief.
- [46:22]
B
It's interesting. I'm literally having this thought, as I say it, like, it's like the way the Catholic Church used to be.
- [46:28]
A
Yeah, right, yeah.
- [46:29]
B
Not for you to question. We know what God wants and we're telling you about it. You know, there's a very similar thing with these guys who are saying you don't like the short term effects of this and you're all going to lose your jobs, but in the long term, we know what's right for you. And so listen to us, which is so interesting to have, have then the Pope in the meantime saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's slow down and think about this. You know, so I, yeah, it's, it's, I think you're absolutely right about that. That's interesting.
- [46:56]
A
Now you in this point to a passage about the everyday decisions that, I mean, and you talked a little bit about this, that algorithms are making everyday decisions with credit, with jobs, with access to services. And so I think this is the thing. A lot of us know that's happening and there is some groaning about it, but at the same time it is still at the root of, of a lot of the technology that we have right now. So what is the encyclical saying? You know, could things get worse? Could they be worse than they already are?
- [47:30]
B
Oh, yeah. I mean, they, what they say. Right. I mean, he's, he's, again, he's, he's reading his stuff. You know, he wrote, he writes at one point about that the, the power to quote, profile, predict and influence behavior, often without individuals being fulfilled, fully aware of it. And for me I was like, right on brother, keep going. And he says then if such kinds of data are used to make decisions affecting concrete opportunities such as access to credit, employment or essential services. Again this is the Pope writing there is a risk of undermining freedom and discriminating against the most vulnerable. I mean he is naming these very high level invisible effects in this very concrete language that I just think that's the power of this, the language is the power of it because we know that the moral language of the Church can lead to policy. I mentioned before that this stuff, that Pope Leo XIII stuff led to the New Deal one way it did it. There was this priest economist named John Ryan who put out the, this book in 1906, basically arguing for a minimum wage. And it was based on the 1891 encyclical saying that watch out for factories. And he made this argument that combined Catholicism and sort of republican values. And what he basically took was the same thing that Pope Leo XIV is saying now about people have inherent value and you shouldn't be using the market to determine that value value. What John Ryan went on to say was people also have an inherent God given right to a basic livelihood. Like people deserve to be paid a living wage was essentially his argument. Even though factories don't have to, they should is basically what he said. And that led to Roosevelt imposing that kind of thing, that led to the minimum wage, that led to these labor movements. And so I think, think it's the, it's the fact that he's, he's seeing these far off threats, he's naming them now such that you're going to have bishops all over the Catholic world speaking to their congregations and their regions and saying that's not okay, or you know, watch out for this. And people in their own lives are going to say, hey, I am being treated as if my only value is this. And hey, wait a minute, you know, I, I am pretending as if my use of AI doesn't have anything to do with my moral responsibility. And you know, there's some power to the language he's devising. I think that's fundamentally what the power of this thing is.
- [50:07]
A
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B
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- [50:54]
A
One of the things that is always going to be close to home for me is any conversation surrounding colonialism. And that is this new form of colonialism, as you also point out, treating these places as nation states. What can you kind of solidify that idea and why it stood out to you as, you know, sort of a truly original idea and aspect of this piece?
- [51:23]
B
It really is like he really is like a, it's real journalism, it's real sort of scholarship. I mean, he's really got something here. So he says today colonialism assumes new forms. And first of all, like, you know, for the Catholic Church, which in the 1300s was actively telling explorers to go and conquer people, you know, this is a guy acknowledging that legacy of colonialism. Maybe not as explicitly as some people would like, but it's good. Like he's, he clearly understands the background and the church's culpability and some of that. He says colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information. He says, he warns about the extraction of health data, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps, demographic information. And this is the part where he gets really futuristic. He says these have become the new rare earths of power. Vital data which once aggregated and analyzed can be used to train predictive models, guide investment strategies, anticipate crises, and above all determine who and what is deemed to matter. In that paragraph, he's doing the new colonialism. He's talking about that, that the use of data is inherently exploitative. That's a very radical and forward thinking concept. He's referring to the rare earth crisis, right? So clearly reading that journalism and, and then fundamentally he keeps coming back to this, this industry should not be allowed to determine who matters. You know, I just, I, I, I think that it is. So it's such a, like at the rip current.com, i put up a, like a speculative bibliography of the tech journalism that I was like, I bet he's read this stuff. Here's the stuff that I think he,
- [53:07]
A
Yes, I loved that. I Meant to mention, I loved that.
- [53:10]
B
Here's Kashmir Hill's piece on Clearview AI. Here's Francis Haugen's stuff out of Facebook. You know, he clearly is up on this stuff. And so I just really. The days of, like, Fuddy Duddy Grandpa being like, what is this? You know, are gone. And this guy clearly is, you know, he's a math major. He studied math at Villanova, you know, like, he's a systems thinker. And it's just cool to have a guy like that combined with a real moral thinker, especially at a time when, like, the nihilism of the tech industry is so, like. I don't know, I just. They're so like, oh, what does it, you know, what does it really matter? You know, like, they just are. So they feel. It feels like they're treating more moral positions as if it's a weakness. I love that this guy is like, the strength of being human is our morality. And that is. It's very cool. I like that.
- [54:02]
A
I agree. Wow. Yeah, you've really touched on something that has sort of weighed heavily on me and all of this. And I think, yeah, there's that nihilism. That nihilism that in so many ways is born, I feel, of denial, is born of avoidance, is born of, oh, goodness, unresolved trauma of people who suddenly are in positions of power. It's just wild, the aspect that that has. And so it is, again, nice to have someone actually sort of shake things and go, let's. Let's ground ourselves again. Let's put our, you know, it's sort of the opposite of microdosing lsd.
- [54:47]
B
Yeah, totally. I mean, that's right. Because the illusion of tech is that everything is new and that these guys are encountering and solving problems for the very first time. And, and so to have someone come back and say, oh, no, no, no, there's language for this and here's what it is. And here's what you've walked right into. You're right. It's grounding in a way that, that I think the marketing built around this industry so often wants us to pretend. They want to. They want us to pretend that history doesn't exist somehow. Yes. And. And that everything is, you know, brand new. That they've. They're going to solve this thing that they've just discovered. It's like a bunch of high school freshmen being like, I just read Marx, did you know that? Blah, blah, blah, you know, it's that kind of thing. And, and, and to have this guy Be like, actually, you know, let's talk about this, because I, I am standing at the top of the oldest continuously operating institution in the Western world, and I can tell you none of what you're saying is new. Yeah, and here's where it's all gone terribly wrong before, because I'm named for that guy. You know, I just, yeah, it's good, it's good stuff.
- [55:50]
A
Knowledge is power, and in this especially, and I hope that it, you know, again, I want to believe that it's, it's a true wielding of power that will have an impact. It's enough to get those folks all coming to have a chat with the Pope at the very least and to try and figure out how, you know, how things were going to go forth.
- [56:10]
B
So I think that the, think the speech writers for many, many, you know, candidates who claim to have some kind of connection to the Church or the Catholic Church are going to be seizing on this kind of stuff. You're going to hear this stuff on the campaign trail, you're going to hear this stuff in lawsuits, you're going to hear this language move. I think, I hope that's my plan, my hope for it.
- [56:31]
A
Yeah, there's a passage about the. Well, actually, no, you touched on that. I want to kind of round things out here. A lot of the analysis of the piece circles back to Web, whether a moral document like this will change anything in practice. And so what do you think it's going to take for this encyclical to have a real effect? Where are you in terms of skepticism? Where are you in terms of hope about the future based on what this encyclical is saying?
- [57:03]
B
Well, I'm hopeful, so I'm less hopeful, of course, about domestic American politics and our reaction, how we will seize on this stuff. I think, you know, there are, there are places where, you know, I can imagine some, some candidates seizing on this stuff. And, and, you know, it may be being a thing, you know, but, you know, and, and so, so, but the United States, I'm, I, I don't know. Jury's out. Right? Yeah, but, but the, you know, we know that, that Europe, which is already the forerunner on so much of the regulation around this stuff, is try, Is also trying to think about this stuff, is thinking as actively about this as anybody. You know, they're only going to be galvanized by this. Right. That's a largely Catholic continent. You know, it's, it's, there's going to be a, this is going to help them feel more confident in what they are doing and in the experimentation they do. And so I, I think some of the language is going to move through them. I think about all of the economies that are currently trying to figure out what they want to do with AI, what the, what the, what their regulations are going to be. And when I think across the vast, you know, economies of Brazil, you know, Chile, you know, these deeply Catholic countries that are trying to figure out what they want to do with this stuff, I think that what the Pope is, has to say is going to be a very powerful thing as a, as a political force. And so I think that there's some, there's some places where it's going to get immediate traction. But I, I really just think that we are, I think we're on a path to some, to some tough times economically.
- [58:48]
A
Yes.
- [58:48]
B
And big transformation tends to come out of those times and, and there's typically one or several people in each of those generations that really like learns to, to articulate the thing in a way that everybody can understand. And John Ryan was that person in the early 20th century who set the stage such that Roosevelt was ready to enact some of these teachings around the inherent value of people as policy. And so we might, I think it was a perfect storm that made that possible. But we might see that again. We're not in unfamiliar territory around an economy riding high that could really see a real problem, needs some transformation to get back on its feet and maybe find it in the language that began with this encyclical. I don't know, it's like trying to predict the weather, but I can see a world in which those circumstances could come together. And again, I'm sorry, sick of the self styled. You know, you mentioned kings, you know, the sort of philosopher king posture that so many of the folks at the top of this industry are taking. And to see what it really is to be a moral leader and an intellectual and spiritual leader on something like this is just nice. It's been a while since I've seen anybody publicly a big public figure come down on this in a way that I, I felt excited about. So that's what, that's where it got me.
- [60:21]
A
Wow. Jake Ward, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. Thank you for paying attention to these things. Thank you for your analysis. If people would like to read and listen and view the stuff that you are working on, where should they go to do?
- [60:36]
B
Yeah, the rip current.com is where everything I do belong lives. You can literally have everything you want if you become a paid subscriber there and and I'm growing my YouTube channel as well, you'll get a lot of this content there. And Micah, again, always such a pleasure and such a thoughtful conversation that we always have. So thanks for having me.
- [60:54]
A
Thank you. We appreciate it. Alrighty folks, that brings us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. If you would like to subscribe to the show, head to Twit TV tnw. That's where you go to subscribe. Audio, video, all there. I want to briefly mention Club Twit again. Twit TV Club Twit is where you go to sign up. $10 a month, $120 a year. Lots of great benefits. Now's the time to get in as we will be covering WWDC soon, so be sure to check it out. If you'd like to follow me online, I'm ikasargent on many a social media network where you can head to Chihuahua Coffee, that's C H I H U A H U A Coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to check out my other shows, iOS Today and Hands On. Apple will have published today and Hands On T Tech publishes on Sundays, so tune in then. Thank you and I'll be back again next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly.
- [61:52]
B
Bye bye.