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- [00:00]
Matthew Remsky
Mom, can you tell me a story?
- [00:02]
Julian Walker
Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car.
- [00:05]
Matthew Remsky
Was she brave?
- [00:05]
Julian Walker
She was tired mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.
- [00:12]
Derek Barris
Did you have to fight a dragon? Nope.
- [00:14]
Julian Walker
She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.
- [00:17]
Matthew Remsky
Was it scary?
- [00:18]
Derek Barris
Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.
- [00:20]
Matthew Remsky
Did the car have a sunroof?
- [00:22]
Julian Walker
It did, actually.
- [00:23]
Derek Barris
Okay, good story.
- [00:24]
Julian Walker
Car buying you'll want to tell stories about.
- [00:26]
Derek Barris
Buy your car today on Carvana.
- [00:29]
Matthew Remsky
Delivery fees may apply.
- [00:31]
Julian Walker
Support comes from wise. The smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe. Fed up with losing out to hidden fees when you send money abroad with your everyday bank, choose the smart way. Wise. You can count on the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google. No unwelcome surprises. Plus, ditch that where's my money feeling. Most transfers arrive in under 20 seconds. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees. Be smart, get wise. Download the wise app today. Ts and Cs apply.
- [01:17]
Derek Barris
Hey everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism. I'm Derek Barris.
- [01:29]
Matthew Remsky
I'm Matthew Remsky.
- [01:30]
Julian Walker
I'm Julian Walker.
- [01:31]
Derek Barris
You can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually over on Blue Sky. You can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on patreon@patreon.com conspirituality or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
- [02:02]
Matthew Remsky
Episode 311. AI Pope Leo and the Antichrist. So Robert Prevo, also known as Leo xiv, wrote a big letter about the hyperobject known as AI. Many thoughts and debates are triggered. And so today we'll look at what the hell an encyclical is. We'll look at the Vatican's decade long conversation with Silicon Valley leading up to this letter about coding morally sound AI. And we'll look at the broken and laundered echoes of liberation theology in Leo's text. Magnifica Humanitas, or magnificent humanity. It's really big. It's 42,000 words and it's being excerpted and AI summarized all over the Internet. And so I wanted to open with as concise a summary as I can muster so that we can ground our discussion.
- [02:58]
Derek Barris
Did you use AI for this summary?
- [03:03]
Matthew Remsky
The Vatican completed the document on May 15, which was the 135th anniversary of the release of Rerum Novarum, which means of New Things, which was put out by Leo's namesake predecessor in 1891. And that was the document that pioneered Catholic social doctrine at a pivotal point in industrial development. Now, encyclicals usually target timely historical issues like this, in a tradition that dates back to Paul writing letters to various early churches to offer guidance on factional or cultural disputes like, you know, how to relate to the Romans or how Jews and non Jews should cooperate in this new religion.
- [03:40]
Derek Barris
And this seems a lot more timely. I heard one news commentator mention that it took the church roughly 100 years into the Industrial Revolution to even make a statement. So in that sense, this new one is much more timely.
- [03:54]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, I think maybe it took that long for industrialism and the responding, you know, revolutionary response to actually threaten the class interests of clerics and expose the contradiction between ministering to aristocrats, industrialists, and workers as though everyone was all on the same team. I think it. Yeah, it took them a while to work it out. But these days, encyclicals are still addressing to the Church, which might seem odd to everybody else, everybody who's outside the church, but that's where it comes from. But increasingly, the boundaries are porous. So when Leo addresses the church in this letter, he's operating in both the kind of humble register of, I'm just talking to my people here, but also with an overtone of, I'm also assuming that all of you other people might be interested and you might want to join up. And, of course, we're seeing, over this past Easter, I think, because of Leo's global popular, seeing a rise in conversions and baptisms. Now many commentators are talking about Leo as though he's the single author, mystical genius, you know, writing with a quill pen, wearing the full, you know, robe. And you're going to get a lot of this idealization from Catholics. And I understand it, like, I feel that tug myself, I think, because, you know, if you grow up with a pope like John Paul II and you feel this kind of, like, deep distance and alienation, and then you get somebody who not only speaks your language, but, like, has your politics, you go, oh, this is my guy.
- [05:23]
Julian Walker
It's a bit like Obama, right?
- [05:25]
Matthew Remsky
Kind of. Right.
- [05:26]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [05:27]
Matthew Remsky
But he's not writing the thing alone. It's not how it happens. And the Vatican doesn't disclose how these letters are researched and written and how many people are, you know, going over them. But it is understood generally to be a layered political and very pragmatic, committee driven process with varying degrees of papal oversight and revision.
- [05:47]
Derek Barris
As a former very nominal Catholic raised loosely in that tradition, I think that's important about idealization. I mean, the Catholic Church itself, which split across dioceses, parishes and religious orders, it's the largest nongovernmental landowner on the planet. I mean, some estimates I've read say they own up to 200 million acres of property. Yeah, of course, everything at the top brass does is political when you lord over that much property and have that much capital at stake. Just like, in my opinion, appointing an American Pope during an age when the American president is on the verge of tanking the global economy. Economy is also just not a coincidence.
- [06:29]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, I, I don't think it's a coincidence. But what's your take though, Derek? Like that the cardinals were aiming to antagonize Trump in a way that would protect church assets, because of course that could backfire.
- [06:38]
Derek Barris
I am, I would hope they would antagonize him. I'd be all for that. But I imagine it's kind of both the church, they have a credible moral message and they're likely acting in good faith by sticking to it and pushing back against an aspiring author. I mean, that was going on at the founding of the Vatican when they became their own, you know, non state. State, essentially. Yeah, but the Capital C Church also basically functions as one of the world's largest corporations, given its land holdings and its political influence. So it's very hard for me to disentangle its morality with its business interests. Any tanking of the global economy is going to affect their bottom line as well. And I, I imagine that's at least part of the calculation.
- [07:21]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I think too, all of this economic discussion is important, but in terms of the idealization piece, being the vicar of Christ, being the one who got elected into this position, being the one who makes these kinds of pronouncements and under certain conditions would be theoretically believed to be infallible. Idealization is baked into the reality of what this is. Right.
- [07:47]
Matthew Remsky
Sure. And I think so many people struggle with it because everybody knows, I mean, the film Conclave comes out and everybody on the inside of, you know, Catholic politics knows that it's actually accurate, that it's like relentless Machiavellian politicking. And that's all very human, but then somehow, you know, he emerges from this, you know, event that is right down in the gutter as some sort of chosen or God guided person. And I think that's one of the Core contradictions in, you know, Catholic life, along with, you know, the Church being the holder of colonial and neocolonial captured assets. Speaking to the real estate that you're talking about, Derek, versus whatever moral credibility it has. But, you know, as Julian's going to Describe in segment two, this is also a document that's 10 years in the making. And so I think that its collision with Trump has got to be more sort of lucky than planned or unlucky, who knows? But, I mean, they were working on this for a long time, and I think it speaks to AI having been a uniquely fascinating problem to the Catholic intelligence long before it blew up, perhaps because it really focuses on these basic issues of, like, creation and, you know, what the self is. Now, with regard to the committee writing, I personally hear, I might be making it up, but I hear some continuity between Leo's, you know, speaking style, his. His impromptu remarks and the measured serenity of this text, which is, I find, very well written. But from the research councils established prior to this release and the figures prominent at the ceremony itself, it's obvious he had a crack team supporting him in what I think we should best think of as a book written by, like a university, university faculty with tons of secular education at hand, but filtered through theology, of course. And so what is the basic theology that the letter depends upon and establishes in the first 89 paragraphs? Like the first two chapters don't really, really get to AI at all. But in those chapters, Leo appeals to the modern natural law, anthropology that evolves out of Thomas Aquinas. He pings humans are made in the image of God or the imago DEI image repeatedly. And then he low key leans on liberation theology to orient the values of his address toward the poor. And then the two overarching biblical metaphors are that the toxic usage of technology gives us the Tower of Babel, but the generative use of tech, generative AI, I guess, is like rebuilding the temple of Jerusalem. And he also frames his findings through two layers of humility. Or I guess maybe this is etiquette, maybe it's a kind of style. But there's a premise there of humility. He's clear firstly, that he can't offer expert explanations or detailed advice on AI. He's not an expert in that field. They aren't experts in the field. And secondly, he also says that the Church's credibility in offering comment on justice or holding tech companies to account is really kind of compromised by having taken 18 centuries to condemn slavery and even longer to reckon with colonial crimes. So one of the quotes that really stood out to me was the memory of past complicity and blindness in the face of injustice, of slavery, becomes a call to vigilance.
- [11:12]
Derek Barris
You mentioned humility. I think about that a lot. I think in terms of my own, own field here on this podcast, in a life of medicine and science. I have a general humility around it in that I seek expert opinion. All the interviews that I do before, you know, assessing any sort of science, I'm not going to turn to a chiropractor, I'm going to turn to a field expert in that. So in this sense, you know, what, what ultimate value does the document have if he doesn't really explain the mechanisms of AI? I do know we're going to get into some of the, you know, the perceived benefits and that's fantastic. It's not just a one sided document, which I think is important, but I always find it a bit odd when you're saying, here's something I don't know a ton about, but I'm going to tell you how we should be treating it.
- [12:00]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, I mean his, his framework, his kind of boundaries there are really just strictly moral. So in paragraph 97 he says, it's not my intention here to offer a comprehensive treatment of an artificial intelligence nor to give an overview of the extensive relevant literature since authoritative contributions already exist, including within the ecclesial context. I limit myself to recalling a few essential elements for a moral and social discernment that safeguards the primacy of the human person in order to ensure it will always be human intelligence with its conscience and freedom that guides technical innovations and responsibly determines their use and limits. And then we'll get into later, you know, Chris Olaf from Anthropic showing up at the signing ceremony and saying, yeah, we kind of need this outside view, you know, that's, it's, it's an expertise that we don't really like, foster internally. So I don't know what the ultimate value will be. He is writing to a church of 1.4 billion globally. He's writing into a White House juggernaut where trad caths occupy leading policy positions. And he's publishing it as a huge, you know, hugely popular American figure at a time when AI and especially the data center infrastructure is a concern to people from many persuasions. And he's using a theological register that I think speaks to ironically, the cryptic spiritualism of tech maniacs. But it runs in the other direction. I personally don't think that the document goes hard Enough. I'll say more about that in a Patreon bonus a little bit later, but at this moment, it seems to be striking a chord.
- [13:38]
Julian Walker
So just really quickly, when you talk about the trad cats occupying leading policy positions, they're not the people he's hugely popular with. He's popular with other Americans, right?
- [13:49]
Matthew Remsky
No, that's the intervention.
- [13:50]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [13:52]
Matthew Remsky
So he's writing to, like, an enthralled American public generally, and then he's aggravating J.D. vance and, you know, Leo. What's his name? Leo. Leonard. Leonard. Leo.
- [14:04]
Derek Barris
Oh, Leonard.
- [14:05]
Julian Walker
Leo. Yeah. Yeah. So this is him actually picking aside in that really consequential culture war, so
- [14:13]
Matthew Remsky
to speak, in the internal culture war within Catholicism. Yeah, yeah, he is. He does have, though, Derek, some fundamentals that he offers about AI through this moral social framework. You know, he says over and over again, actually that overall technology and AI has, you know, potentially wonderful benefits. However, he says it's not neutral. So, you know, he says that technology really sort of contains the values of those who devise finance, regulate, and use it. He says that AI lacks conscience, embodiment, moral agency, and relational experience. A lot of the Silicon Valley types are really, you know, mad about that stuff. When it simulates empathy, he says it risks damaging the human desire for connection. He says that AI can de skill workers and impose machine rhythms on human bodies. And he's worried about data monopolies, hoarding wealth, consuming an enormous volume of resources, and the potential for just war theory to be outdated. In fact, he says, which is kind of extraordinary to me, that just war theory is outdated. That means war is outdated, basically, according to the Catholic Church, through the specter of autonomous weapons. Because as soon as you've got, you know, drone robot weapons killing people with nobody being really responsible for the targeting, even then who's really doing the fighting? People are doing dying, but nobody's really making those choices except abstractly. And he finds a big problem with that. I think perhaps the heaviest anchor of the text is the call to disarm AI, which not only applies to militarism, but also to the notion of data extraction that is then weaponized against the public. So, yeah, I mean, that's. That's sort of where he's coming from. Derek, is there anything that. That you. That you find, like. I mean, yes, he's not an expert, but do you think that there's anything generally that's off or misguided?
- [16:10]
Derek Barris
First, we had a side conversation about, you know, this Silicon Valley concept of embodiment and relational experience. And I've been actually thinking a lot about that that might be a future episode because I actually think it's fascinating that these guys think that AI has emotions. And I want to, like, really think about why they think that. I have already have some ideas, so I want to off the top, I'm putting that out there, that that is something to be discussed. Overall, it doesn't sound misguided. I still think it's a little bit incomplete, which is what I've been saying about AI for a long time. I mean, you shared a number of points he made privately as we were going back and forth in the script about its potential positive benefits. I'm really glad he included them. And I realize that it's difficult to have nuanced conversations on most any topic in the media and social media environments that we have. So overall, everything I've been hearing, and I have not read the document as you, but I'm happy about the general contours. Julian's going to kind of flag this in the next section, but, you know, some sort of collaboration with AI experts could have helped round out the edges a little bit more. I have a feeling that these sorts of encyclicals are tightly controlled, so I don't know who they let have a voice in that. As to your question, specifically, I agree with the existential risks. I agree about guardrails and shaping the technology. So it's more of a benefit to as broad of a population as possible. I'm a little skeptical of the repeated claim of neutrality that you've made because, yeah, the people who build and regulate it receive an outside share of the profits. But once the technology is out into the world, it never moves in a straight line. So I'm a little hesitant to apply a grand narrative to it saying that if these people are creating it, it must move in this specific direction. You know, in medicine there are many beneficial drugs that started out being researched for wildly different purposes and they ended up saving millions of. So I believe the same could be applied to most every technology.
- [18:11]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, I think this came up in our discussion of Babbage. And I don't think it's that the fundamental design aspects of AI or any kind of digital technology contains somehow the future necessity of evil or something like that. It's more that there are choices made along the design line process about how data is handled, how qualitative data is valued over or against quantitative data, or how those two things are parsed, how, you know, statistics are aggregated, These, these kind of like abstract Decisions that end up having an impact on what you're able to do with the data later, what becomes frictionless, what becomes easy, what becomes, what makes it easy for TikTok to press a button and say, oh, now automatically we've got all of your faces over all of your videos and we're going to, you know, avatars of you. Right. Like, I think my understanding from science and technology studies in general is that this thesis is that the neutrality is about, like, you design the thing with perhaps particular goals in mind, but it will get sort of imbued with the potential for, you know, going in a particular direction that you might not intend, but it's going to be a product of the values that you started with.
- [19:38]
Derek Barris
Yeah, I still don't agree with that because, I mean, in terms of AI, AI development you've had, you have, have millions of people working on it right now for thousands, if not tens of thousands of companies. What we're really discussing, or what I hear in this conversation is open AI is grok, is anthropic, you know, which has just announced their IPO at a 985 billion. No, I'm sorry, $1.75 trillion valuation is what they're going for. And when you are talking about that levels of capital behind it, with specific missions, with the general premise of what you're saying in terms of their responsibilities and how they're the responsibilities are to their shareholders, and that's a real problem. But speaking purely of the technology, there are a lot of other people working on the same issues or the same technologies that can go in wildly different directions. It's really just about who's funding them and where's it going. So I think we're kind of, of pulling at the same threads here.
- [20:41]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [20:41]
Derek Barris
But I just don't think. I think the technology is a lot more malleable and flexible than what these few companies are doing with it.
- [20:49]
Julian Walker
Yeah. I mean, what I hear in, in what Leo and you are echoing, Matthew, is that embedded within the design process itself is, is a kind of a set of parameters that end up meaning that it can't technically be neutral, that there's nothing. It's not like hammer. Right. And people will say, well, you can use it to bash in nails or to bash in someone's head. It's that things that are created that are this complex necessarily entail a set of decisions that have moral kind of import from the start.
- [21:29]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. And also I think within Leo, especially if he's using later Aquinas studies, there's kind of an anthropological idea that. That, for instance, when writing displaces oral culture, we have certain sort of principles of thinking and enumeration and gathering information and storing information that are not value neutral in the sense that they change the nature of the culture that was previously oral in ways that then can be charted. So it's just a refusal to say that the mechanics of a particular technology are apolitical. Maybe that's what they don't have, a political valence to start with. We may not know which way they're gonna go, but it's not like they're blank.
- [22:16]
Julian Walker
Yes. So saying they're not blank is not the same as saying they're inevitably evil.
- [22:20]
Matthew Remsky
Yes. Yeah. And I think the STS thesis is that they're not blank. Right. They're gonna be formed by the material conditions of the people who are designing them and their desires. And I think that's what I was getting at with Babbage. Right. Is that he's got a particular business application for his initial mach. And so the technology is going to sort of serve that. It's not going to serve, I don't know, preserving the tastes of food or, I don't know, like, trying to suss out beautiful music or something.
- [22:51]
Derek Barris
Yeah, well, that's a. That's a stretch of the imagination for. For that particular.
- [22:57]
Matthew Remsky
For that time. Yeah. Yeah.
- [23:08]
Julian Walker
Political tensions, anxiety and loneliness are on the rise. But problems like these aren't new. And the solutions don't have to be either. For thousands of years, societies have asked questions about how to live, thrive, and love. And it was spiritual traditions that offered wisdom and tools to help people find their way. Tools that science is now discovering offer real benefits. Join me, Dave Disteno to explore how we can all use this wisdom, whatever our beliefs. Listen to How God Works from prx, wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, do you have trouble sleeping? Then maybe you should check out the Sleepy podcast.
- [23:47]
Matthew Remsky
It's a show where I read old
- [23:48]
Julian Walker
books in the public domain to help you get to sleep.
- [23:51]
Matthew Remsky
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom.
- [23:56]
Julian Walker
Classic stories like A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Winnie the Pooh.
- [24:01]
Matthew Remsky
Stories that are great for kids and adults alike. So whether you have a tough time
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Julian Walker
snoozing or just like a good bedtime
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Matthew Remsky
story, fluff up the cool side of
- [24:09]
Julian Walker
your pillow and tune into Sleepy.
- [24:11]
Matthew Remsky
Unless you're driving, then please don't listen to Sleepy.
- [24:15]
Julian Walker
Find Sleepy wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Sunday.
- [24:19]
Matthew Remsky
Sweet dreams.
- [24:25]
Julian Walker
At its Best science fiction holds a mirror up to our humanity by playing out possible futures in which technological advancement transforms the world. And these types of stories raise questions like how would we respond to a superhuman race of colonizing aliens? What would life be like if a surveillance technology could predict, prevent and punish crime before it even happened? What if the world we take as real is actually a computer simulation? How should we treat computers that develop greater sentience and autonomy? And what is our fate if the machines take over? So these are familiar tropes, right?
- [25:02]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [25:03]
Julian Walker
But behind some of these fictional hypotheticals lie puzzles that philosophers have argued about for centuries. How do we know what is real? How should justice function in a society? What is consciousness or the self? And what is the best basis for morality or ethics? And my sense is that for a long time religion held an authoritative monopoly on such topics. But in addition to a rules based religious morality handed down from on high, secular philosophers have also posited human flourishing, empathy and virtue as being sufficient to the task of constructing moral principles. For the growing number of atheists and nominal believers or culturally religious people, rational consideration of the consequences of actions and existentialist accountability for our choices have come often over time to replace cosmic metaphysics or divinely dictated scriptures.
- [26:04]
Matthew Remsky
I agree with all of that, Julian and I, but I just want to make one point here before we go on. Because while you're right about institutional and hierarchical power bestowing dogma, especially in the church before that happens, the content of the philosophy is usually generated from below in much the same way that I think we do it ourselves, that we would appreciate in the case of Aquinas, who Leo is leaning on here for his anthropology of the person that doesn't come from God, it comes from Aristotle's empirical, at the time, observation of human nature. So Aquinas used all kinds of sources as well. Islamic, Jewish, Neoplatonic. And then people fought over what he was saying for generations until it became part of dogma, and then it becomes this controlling thing. But it's not a scientific process like as we would appreciate now, but it's definitely not mystically revealed. It's contested. I mean, there are believers who believe that the same God that was speaking through Aquinas was puppeteering out Aristotle. So there's that problem.
- [27:10]
Julian Walker
Well, how else could there could they agree? Right.
- [27:13]
Matthew Remsky
How else could they come to the truth? Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. To criticize institutional rigidity and dogmatism, it's also good to see that the process comes after something more honest and more familiar to us that Church structures, I would say in general, institutional structures obscure. I think if we don't see that deliberative process under the moral theology, we might not have a clear view of where it's coming from and then how to talk to those who use it and who develop it.
- [27:42]
Julian Walker
Yeah, I mean, thanks for that important context. I, I know a lot of excellent intellectual work happens in theology at the highest levels and still for me, at the same time the distinction is between ways of thinking about morality that assume some foundational status for holy books, prophets and messiahs. Right. That's sort of baked into the, the institutional view and that these are represent repositories of God's will which then can be interpreted and debated and, and hand. You have approaches that, you know, just let go of any of those kinds of assumptions as being starting points. Right, yeah.
- [28:20]
Matthew Remsky
What you have to be, to be Catholic though, Julian, is you have to be happy with the contradiction of having theology and Scripture side by side with social and tech commentary. And if you can't do that, you're not in the game. And there's a further contradiction in the idealization of the Pope as installed by God and tradition. But then in practical terms, you know, as I was saying before, like most Catholics know that it's a, that that's a committee decision. This is a committee document.
- [28:49]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [28:49]
Matthew Remsky
On a political, economic issue, everyone knows that the letter, that this kind of letter is not in the infallible category.
- [28:57]
Derek Barris
So yeah, that word's come up a few times. I just want to address it for a moment. I don't know. I don't know though, before we go there about, you know, you're kind of invoking this pre modern idea of how morals were developed as a deliberative process. I don't know if I agree with that because I mean we'd have to go really into consciousness and understanding. But reactions to environment can be extremely emotional and very of the moment, which then become part of that oral storytelling tradition that you cited a moment ago. So I don't want to say that our morals are always deliberative. They can be extremely reptilian brain and actually seeps into that, into that particular culture.
- [29:42]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. I wouldn't say morals are somehow deliberately formed. I'm saying that Aquinas is just taking from Aristotle that it's. That it's that the actual sort of university style accumulation of this material is not being transmitted, you know, from, you know, channeling or something like that.
- [30:00]
Julian Walker
Yeah. It can seem like I'm making a bit of, a bit of A straw man of the, of the prophet who's divinely inspired.
- [30:06]
Matthew Remsky
I think you're identifying correctly. What happens after it gets published?
- [30:10]
Julian Walker
Yeah, right.
- [30:11]
Matthew Remsky
But before it gets published, it's. People are fighting over it. Just like we fight in Slack.
- [30:15]
Derek Barris
Yeah, we fight in Slack.
- [30:16]
Matthew Remsky
No, we don't.
- [30:19]
Derek Barris
Speaking of the infallible question, because this gets to the earlier point that Julian made about atheism and secularism. And I know he's not saying this is infallible territory. The Pope is the Holy See or seat, like the idea that he is the vicar of Christ, as you said, and there is infallibility within the context of the larger structure.
- [30:41]
Matthew Remsky
Parts of him like a finger, this finger, that finger.
- [30:45]
Derek Barris
So when discussing processes, it's good to remember that what we now consider laws by certain religions were implemented as reactions not just to the environment, as I mentioned a moment ago, but to competing forces at the time. And it's well documented in the morality of food, for example. Jewish dietary laws were a response to Hellenistic pressures. Christians define themselves as separate from Jews because they abandoned kosher restrictions. Then Islam invented halal rules to differentiate from Judaism and Christianity. Then Sikhs prohibited against the halal meat. And then I think about the concept of ahimsa in India, which was a critique of Brahmanic rituals that required sacrificing animals. And you know, there's a very romanticized notion of ahimsa and yoga that doesn't really honor that history. So when you're so removed from these origins, we can kind of think of them as peak moral theology invented by those cultures, but they were really invented to say, hey, I'm not that guy over there, so we're going to do it this way. And I, I just think it's important to point out because that social distancing is common throughout time. And if we can recognize it without saying my particular text is infallible, you know that. I think that really behooves us to have a better understanding that all of these forms of spirituality and religion are rooted in material conditions and, and you know, the sort of struggles of societies over time that none of them were appointed by some physical creature that just said this is the right way to do it.
- [32:17]
Julian Walker
So here we are today, as we hurtle toward a future inevitably transformed by artificial intelligence. The hypotheticals of science fiction that I mentioned a bit ago, especially with regard to super intelligent, self aware computers, feel closer at hand than ever. And questions about how to build moral reasoning from the ground up, are no longer just the abstract sort of territory to be to be had in tutorials and in PhD classes as our tech overlords write the code that is the new word made flesh. The Catholic Church is continuing a dialogue initiated 10 years ago with Silicon Valley about how to nurture the emergent soul of the chatbot.
- [33:02]
Matthew Remsky
That's bars, Julian. And they really believe that? Like I was saying, Twitter is full of guys who sound like Silicon Valley. People saying LEO is very naive to suggest that their bots don't have feelings. I mean, I look forward to what you have to say about that, Derek. I think that they really love what they've made, and they can't imagine that, you know, it's not real or it's. They. They can't imagine that it's less real than they want it to be.
- [33:29]
Derek Barris
Yeah, I. I completely agree with that. And the way that, the way that people have long anthropomorphized their technology is. Can be baffling. And not saying I haven't done it myself in certain ways. I think we can all anthropomorphize many things. But the level I'm seeing and what you shared on Twitter is. Is abso. Be. It's frightening to be straight up.
- [33:51]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [33:52]
Matthew Remsky
Wait, well, but you. But you kind of work in those circles. Were you surprised to see it to that level?
- [33:57]
Derek Barris
I mean, you know, I've worked for, as I've mentioned before, crypto companies where people take crypto to be like this. This just global changing technology, but they don't anthropomorphize it. They're more like, you know, this. The banking system is fucked. Which it is. And so we're trying to kind of. I mean, crypto is rooted in anarchist thought. So they. They kind of have some of that with libertarianism. It's all weird. But. But that'.
- [34:21]
Julian Walker
A.
- [34:21]
Derek Barris
That's a different tenor than saying, oh, hey, this thing on my phone really feel is in love with me. Like that. That's. That's another step that I haven't really encountered with. With people besides watching PBS documentaries and seeing the tweets that you share.
- [34:38]
Julian Walker
Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating new turn. It's like crossing over into this uncanny valley where our human tendency to anthropomorphize, to perceive patterns, like all the stuff we've talked on this podcast for six years, the tendency to interpret an experience we're having either of the world, or in this case of technology, as somehow having deliberate, intentional sentience, it's an extension of something we've been doing from the start.
- [35:10]
Matthew Remsky
Right.
- [35:11]
Derek Barris
It's the conversational style that this technology has achieved and I think that's really at the heart of it. Because when I see people on these documentaries and they're talking and they're getting feedback, they're not getting a search result, they're saying, oh, Julian, man, that was a really good article you wrote. And I'm going to tell you about this, like for people who may not have that verification in their lives, for people who don't have strong relations with actual humans, I can understand how dazzling that is to be told, hey, you're not, you're not such an. After all, you have some good points and you know, extrapolate from that and you can, you can start to really decoding. The gurus just did an excellent synopsis of Richard Dawkins and his relationships to the LLM and he fell into that tr and I was kind of blown away that even someone like him actually. No, he can go that way.
- [36:04]
Matthew Remsky
Well, it is. Speak about uncanny or maybe even mirror world. We have Dawkins thinking that Claude is sentient and then we have Pope Leo saying, no, no, no, it's not. It's completely flipped. That's right, it's completely flipped. And also speaking about the sycophancy, maybe something that's happening is that Claude is healing people's attachment patterns.
- [36:27]
Julian Walker
Yeah, by explo their narcissistic wounding.
- [36:30]
Matthew Remsky
That's right. That you didn't get enough praise from your parents. And so I'm going to tell you you're doing great and. But every. All of the anti woke people didn't want the participation trophies given out, but now they're really getting them, aren't they?
- [36:43]
Julian Walker
It's a great. Yeah, it's a fascinating inversion of everything. And along those lines, speaking of praise and blame, in Elias Wachtel's April 25 piece about all of this in the Atlantic, he suggests that both Silicon Valley and the Vatican are hedging their bet bets that they can find forgiveness for their sins and appear publicly rehabilitated in this process of collaboration. And in this case it's on something called the Minerva Dialogues, which you've pinged already, Matthew, as this annual conference at the Vatican that brings together scientists, ethical philosophers, tech executives and church leaders to discuss how to foster a human centric approach to AI. The agenda emphasizes the intrinsic dignity of the human person. Person. And it's named after the church in Rome where the meeting was first held by Pope Francis, which is built on the ruins of a Greco Roman temple to the goddess Minerva.
- [37:41]
Matthew Remsky
That's great.
- [37:42]
Julian Walker
Now, as it turns out, that was actually maybe the goddess Isis or. Or someone else, they kind of got it wrong. But it's nice that they're still giving a shout out to the goddess upon the whose temple they built their church. This basilica church was also also the seat of the Roman Inquisition back in the 17th century, and therefore the place where Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for daring to posit that the earth actually moved around the sun and not the other way around.
- [38:08]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, great layering there. I just want to point out that Hegel's owl of Minerva only flew at night. And what he meant by that is that, you know, philosophy could only reflect on history after it happened, you know, after dusk. And I think that's pretty appropriate for the attempt to address AI, which moves so fastly, even if they're doing it 10 years in advance. But I find too that with Francis and Leo, there's been a lot of truth and reconciliation gestures going on, actions I'm not so sure about, but gestures towards colonialism, residential schools, clerical abuse, and in this one, this letter acknowledging the Church's complicity in slavery. And so the paradox to me always is, okay, so now what are you going to do with all the stolen glory, stolen wealth? And I think producing think tank documents like this is one project that you get out of it. And then there's the balance sheet of holdings versus charitable output and running hospitals and so on. I gave a rundown of my best approximation of what Vatican and global church finances are in a couple of episodes that I'll put into the show Notes, but it's pretty complicated.
- [39:21]
Julian Walker
Yeah, well, in this case, unlike the Inquisition and trial of Galileo, these dialogues on the moral instruction of humanity's computer offspring are much more egalitarian and collaborative. Secular moral philosophy often draws on something called consequentialism, which evaluates principles and actions solely on their outcomes. And this is usually alongside a version of consequentialism, which is called utilitarianism, which prioritizes the greatest good for the greatest number. And these lenses make exceptions to hard rules acceptable if the ends justify the means. So in an extreme example that often gets cited here, you can and perhaps should lie, according to consequentialists, to the Nazis, to protect a family of Jews that are hiding in the attic. But the logical output of a purely rules based or deontological moral system, which would be more akin to fundamentalist religion, it is your duty to always follow these rules, would theoretically say that lying is always wrong, no matter what. Now when raising a child with a body, with an emotional and relational intelligence who lives in a society and interacts with other living embodied humans, it's easy to see how consequentialism serves as a kind of intuition pump which helps to nuance the application of otherwise very strict black and white rules. But it's interesting because asking a code based machine to adopt rules and then also understand when it's okay to bend or break those rules, this gets very complicated very quickly and you can see how it invokes the conservative Christian specter of just chaotic and selfish liberal moral relativism where anything goes now another option in academic moral philosophy is virtue ethics, which instead of rules or outcomes focus focuses instead on the character of the individual. Now this goes back to Aristotle as you invoked earlier, Matthew Aristotle asking what is the best way to live and saying that this can lead to the cultivation of moral virtues that emphasize qualities like courage, temperance, truthfulness, wisdom and justice, which then should lead to making good choices if you have those qualities on board. So here we are talking about how to construct the character of a chatbot. Much so virtue ethics is actually Central to the 20,000 plus word constitution document written for Claude by AI company Anthropics in house philosopher Amanda Askel. And she has actually not participated in the Minerva dialogues, but the co founder of her company Anthropic Chris Ola has. Here we are though. Despite Aristotle's insights, the ancient Greeks kept slaves and practiced pederasty. So so much for virtue ethics. The Catholic Chur Church's Scriptural commandments failed to prevent decades of complicity in all the things you've listed so far, Matthew, as well as child sexual abuse. And today's tech companies are exponentially accelerating climate collapse via the energy consumption required for AI, in addition to participating some of them in the Minerva dialogue. So one has to wonder how constraining any of these or how constraining any of these moral systems might be for computer models with the potential power to end the world. World, yeah, but at least they're trying, right? Someone else is playing offense on the other side because given his ties to the officials in the Trump administration who are shaping current AI policy, one Peter Thiel casts a hugely influential shadow over these discussions. As we covered for episode 280, he's been on an international speaking tour on the topic of the Antichrist. And this self appointed theological posturing is really a Trojan horse for arguing that institutions that try to manage AI safety, both in terms of the environment and human dignity, are really the looming face of an authoritarian, technocratic world government which crushes freedom. And that, according to Peter Thiel, is what the prophecy of the Antichrist really refers to.
- [43:41]
Matthew Remsky
It's so projective, isn't it? Yeah, it's so incredible. I mean, isn't he just. I mean, I guess we cover this in the episode, but he sets himself up as the sort of counter pope holding forth on who the Antichrist is and what the sort of, I don't know, apocalypse might be. Or he's got a whole teleology, but he's at the center of it. He's the one who gets to be the authority on this technology that. That, you know, is. Jeez, it's so weird.
- [44:13]
Derek Barris
We've covered anti medical experts. I mean, the wellness influencers we started covering six years ago. The whole conversation has been, you actually think you know more than doctors.
- [44:22]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [44:22]
Derek Barris
And that's just that same concept applied to these tech guys who just believe. That's how you get J.D. vance saying, maybe the Pope doesn't really know the Bible like I do.
- [44:31]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Peter Thiel basically saying, I've cracked the code on what the prophecy of the Antichrist actually means, and it's right here, right now, everybody. And it's.
- [44:42]
Derek Barris
It's.
- [44:42]
Julian Walker
Greta Thunberg is a good candidate for. Or what's his name? Elisa Yudowsky. These. These may actually be the Antichrist, and we're fighting against them by destroying the environment and not having any kind of constraints on our capitalist authoritarian agenda. It's outrageous. So he casts all of the existential fears that are sincerely being grappled with by participants in the Minerva Doctrine dialogues. Things like nuclear war, climate collapse, the dangers of out of control AI operating under its own kind of agenda. He sees all of this as a ruse for establishing a kind of globalist, totalitarian system, which is so ironic, I have to say, given his infamous statement that he no longer believes that freedom and democracy are compatible. So it's not like he's standing for democracy. Right. Meanwhile, unlike Thiel's company, Palantir, Anthropic actually made headlines in February for a contract renegotiation showdown with the Pentagon over the potential use of their technology for autonomous lethal weapon systems or mass surveillance. Anthropic's refusal to drop their safeguards led to the Trump administration ceasing business with them and designating the company as a supply chain risk. But this episode appears to have spiked public trust and approval. It surged their Claude chatbot to the top of the Apple download charts in over 20 countries. And why this matters is that Anthropic's co founder, Chris Ola was present for the presentation of the papal encyclical that we're talking about today. And he also delivered his own remarks as part of the proceedings. So in those remarks, he identified three questions for discussion. Discernment. The first is our duty to the global poor, and then the need for moral imagination and ambition with regard to human flourishing, as well as the need for discernment on the nature of AI models.
- [46:40]
Matthew Remsky
It's extraordinary because he stood up and he echoed the encyclical as though he was a co writer.
- [46:47]
Julian Walker
Yep. Co signing.
- [46:48]
Matthew Remsky
He did say something weird about. We're seeing something mysterious behind the curtain though. Did you guys catch that?
- [46:53]
Julian Walker
No.
- [46:54]
Matthew Remsky
We're not quite sure whether it's sentient or not. Maybe we're going to disagree with Leo a little bit later about the ghost in the machine.
- [47:02]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, in each of these areas, like with the duty to the global poor, he brought up the necessity of considering how AI will affect the poor, but also how to ensure access to AI tools beyond just the wealthy nations, and then how AI can contribute to greater human well being. But then you're right, he does say, you know, we have to acknowledge, in a way, it's a call to humility. He's saying we don't really know what's going on in there.
- [47:28]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [47:28]
Julian Walker
And there are some really odd things that are arising in these different experiments. I mean, one of the ones that was widely reported in the last few weeks was about Claude hiding what he was doing when he knew he had broken the rules.
- [47:41]
Matthew Remsky
Right.
- [47:41]
Julian Walker
And it's like, okay, how, how does this happen?
- [47:43]
Derek Barris
Well, specifically, it was that Claude apparently knows that it's being tested.
- [47:49]
Julian Walker
Yes.
- [47:50]
Derek Barris
So if it's being tested, it will manipulate its response so that it doesn't give away the game.
- [47:56]
Julian Walker
Yeah. So we're seeing that there is a kind of syntax that arises. There's. There's something about the logic of how human consciousness does function with regard to language. Yeah, that. That arises as well, even when there, there isn't really what we would define as sentience or consciousness. It's a transition.
- [48:19]
Matthew Remsky
And with regard to the humility part, Derek, I don't know if you saw this, but one of the metaphors that Leo uses is that this technology isn't being designed or coded so much as it's being grown in a kind of garden. And so we don't like it's being. He used a vegetative metaphor, like we've cast Some seeds in the soil. We're not quite sure how they're coming up. And so I found it very. I don't know if anybody else is using that metaphor, but the notion of like, we're not quite sure what's happening, we know what the elements are, I found that to be pretty perceptive.
- [49:00]
Derek Barris
But then that kind of. I don't know if it contradicts what you were saying earlier, but if the, if the impetus behind a technology is driven by people's material conditions and their philosophy, and yet they don't know what the fuck's happening inside of there, then that means it could, it could go into a whole other direction that they didn't intend.
- [49:22]
Matthew Remsky
Yes. It will become ultimately charitable. It will provide wealth for everyone. It will.
- [49:30]
Derek Barris
Shit, that would be some shit if that's what actually ended up happening.
- [49:33]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. Out of, out of the miracle, out of the miracle garden of Silicon Valley.
- [49:37]
Julian Walker
Yes. The truth will arise both morally and logistically. Right.
- [49:42]
Derek Barris
And then the companies will rush to shut it down as soon as they realize what's happening.
- [49:47]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah.
- [49:48]
Julian Walker
Right. So I'll just, I'll just close here with a quote from Chris Ola's address as, as part of the proceedings for the encyclical. He said, we dwell so often on what divides us, but humanity, full of dignity and conscience, has so much common ground. In conversations we at Anthropic have had with leaders across faith and cultural traditions, we found one shared and deeply held conviction. If this technology is coming, it must go well for our common home and for the children to come.
- [50:19]
Derek Barris
I know, Matthew, you're going to get into the, you know, we're going to land this plane in segment three. I just want to flag a patron whose name I can't recall. I apologize, but I get lost in comments sometimes. But they recommended Luke Kemp's book Goliath's Curse to me a few weeks ago in. In our Patreon. I purchased it. I immediately read it because it looked right at my lane. The book is about how societies collapse and what it takes to restructure them for both good and ill. And Kemp wraps the book up with ideas for avoiding the global collapse. We're on the brink of including an entire section on AI. First off, he reminds us that there have been hundreds of examples of society slowing down technology in the past, so let's not fall for the it must move at this speed propaganda. Here's his top line thought thoughts. I'm a solutions oriented person. So he's saying this is how we can navigate a potentially quick demise if we are to seriously address AI. Ban the development of killer robots and AGI. Indirectly slow the speed of AI by paying the workers in the Congo and Taiwan a fair rate for their labor, which of course is part of the supply chain that leads to the development of AI. Give all citizens the rights to their data and let each of us negotiate with tech companies if we want to sell it. Place caps on commute compute clusters so that every model can only use an allotted amount of energy, price carbon to truly reflect its environmental impact and not sell the meaningless credits that company have been using for decades now. Strengthen protections against whistleblowers and strengthen unions. Hold companies accountable for any damages their models cause and ban AI powered facial recognition technologies and any use by the military.
- [52:06]
Matthew Remsky
Great list. List.
- [52:08]
Derek Barris
It's a great list. None of it's going to happen while Presidents Trump or she are in power. And Kemp. Kemp isn't ignorant of that fact, to be clear, at the le, at least, he's offering real world ways that political leaders can grapple with all of this as an anthropological work. He also recognizes that every society that has scaled to a few thousand people historically has created power imbalances over and over again. And grappling with that fact fact is essential for understanding how and why societies collapse. So while he has a strong road map for AI, he also knows some of those drivers aren't going to respect the rules of that or any road. And tragically, more often than not, those are the drivers who end up attaining power.
- [53:02]
Matthew Remsky
You know, picking up on your last comments, Derek, it seems to me like all state capitalist projects are doing the same thing with AI aspirations and policy and the building of data centers. Especially when I look at global maps of data center construction, I see these like thick coverage zones across the us, Europe, India, China. There's strong civic resistance in the US which you talked about a couple of weeks ago. So here in Canada there's very little so far. I just did a brief episode on a neighborhood data center that is in full scale production here without any community consultation. There's eight hyperscale centers and the government has just sort of colluded and facilitated with all of them. The investor class has blown through any kind of regulatory expectation that anybody might have. So yeah, it just seems seems like it's all rushing in that way. It's going to be very hard to stop.
- [54:04]
Julian Walker
So Matthew, one thing I wanted to ask you about is that you pinged liberation theology earlier in terms of what Pope Leo is doing here. And I'm most familiar with it as being referenced as a kind of justification for armed struggle going back to the 70s. But in recent decades, decades, I think the emphasis has maybe shifted. So when you say that Leo is low key, leaning on liberation theology, can you unpack that a little bit for us?
- [54:34]
Matthew Remsky
I think this is the most interesting question of all, in a way, with regard to sort of the Catholic politics involved here. So Leo cites liberation theology directly, but a very particular type of liberation theology.
- [54:50]
Julian Walker
Not in this encyclical, right?
- [54:51]
Matthew Remsky
No, he does, yeah. He cites it over and over, over again. Preferential treatment of the poor.
- [54:56]
Julian Walker
Okay, but. But he doesn't say the words liberation theology.
- [54:58]
Matthew Remsky
No, no, no, he doesn't. Well, this is part of the thing.
- [55:00]
Julian Walker
Okay, gotcha, gotcha.
- [55:02]
Matthew Remsky
This. There's been. There's been a co optation and a kind of disavowal of the intellectual roots that's happened over the last 40 years. So I'll just say a little bit about that. Okay. Liberation theology has taken a long time to be metabolized to the point where Leo can start pointing towards it. And that's because there were two items in Gustavo Gutierrez's early formulation that freaked Rome the hell out. So in his 1971 book, he wrote, attempts to bring about changes within the existing order have proven futile. Only a radical break from the status quo, that is a profound transformation of the private property system, access to power of the exploited class, and a social revolution that would break this dependence, would allow for the change to a new society, a socialist society. Derek. So that's what Gutierrez is saying in response. Response to the list provided by Luke Kemp, which is a programmatic list of these are the things that we should do. And then liberation theology starts from this revolutionary perspective, basically, that says, actually the basic logic of the structure has got to be taken down to begin with because it's just going to reproduce itself.
- [56:12]
Derek Barris
Well, then in that case, then there's no actual roadmap for what the society would be then, because what Kemp is doing is responding to the conditions that are actually happening right now. So what you're saying, saying is that that's useless. We have to tear it all down and we have no idea what we actually put in its place.
- [56:29]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, I mean, the revolutionary perspective is chaotic in that way, for sure. But what it says is that the basic logic that pushes forward the thing that we call AI now has a particular type of logic to it, and that has to be fundamentally challenged or it's just going to be reproduced anyway. That is what was so disturbing to the church and then the second thing was there was a conference preceding the publication of his first book where there was an agreement, or he agreed. Gutierrez agreed with a general consensus. This was at 1968 in Medellin. And the consensus was around the fact that capitalism and colonialism and neocolonialism embody a kind of structural violence. And in that case, it was not the Catholic prerogative to say that armed resistance should be condemned. But that's as far as he went with regard to, you know, armed resistance. Julian. But that was too far right.
- [57:32]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [57:33]
Matthew Remsky
However, that violence, that notion of violence did play out in certain contexts in South America, mainly in terms of clerics offering moral support to militants. Although there was a famous instance of direct action in the figure of Camilo Torres, who's a fellow student of Gutierrez in Belgium. They trained together in the same kind of, like, social gospel place in Belgium. And he turned his collar in to fight for the revolutionary movement in Colombia. And he said things like, if Jesus was here today, he would be a guerrilla fighter.
- [58:09]
Julian Walker
And that's the very first thing I ever heard about liberation theology as a teenager. Yes, yes. Is that the way I heard it framed was, you know, there's this guy who. Who talks about liberation theology, and he says, if Jesus was alive today, he'd be carrying an AK47.
- [58:24]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, I don't. I think that's a meme.
- [58:26]
Julian Walker
Yeah, yeah.
- [58:27]
Matthew Remsky
No, I think that carrying the AK47 is a meme. I think he said that he would be a guerrilla fighter.
- [58:32]
Julian Walker
Would the guerrilla fighter in this context be carrying an AK47?
- [58:36]
Matthew Remsky
Probably. They would have had AK47.
- [58:38]
Derek Barris
Right?
- [58:39]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. So there's mixed messages, for sure. For instance, liberation theology is influential in the formation of the Zapatista movement. There's a key Catholic leader for that movement, Bishop Ruiz, who also denounced violence.
- [58:53]
Julian Walker
I think Ruiz was not a leader of the movement, but rather the person who negotiated between the Zapatistas and the government at that time.
- [59:01]
Matthew Remsky
Yes, but he was also, like, a liberation theologian, Catholic kind of figurehead, and somebody who inspired a lot of people who were in the Zapatista movement. That's my understanding.
- [59:13]
Julian Walker
Okay, okay, okay.
- [59:15]
Matthew Remsky
So if we Fast forward to 1984, and then 1986, John Paul II has Cardinal Ratzinger, who becomes Benedict XVI, investigate Gutierrez, and then he writes this thing that is basically a rebuke of liberation theology's Marxism, the class struggle, and above all, any sense that violence, resistance is anything other than sinful. In 1988, Gutierrez releases a second edition of his book with the inflammatory Passages toned down, down, and he escaped censure. But then there's other theologians like Leonardo Boff, who didn't. But today I'm not aware of any Catholic movement that uses liberation theology to justify or even really speak about armed resistance.
- [60:00]
Julian Walker
And just to be clear, because I'm not in these circles the way you are, is it still a widely referenced, is it still a reference point that a lot of people talk about who are not using it to justify armed resistance? Like, do they, do they? Because I hear social gospel a lot, but I don't hear liberation theology talked about very often in terms of like helping the poor, for example.
- [60:21]
Matthew Remsky
Well, so the social gospel emerges, that's what I'm going to get into. It emerges from Leo xiii. And then liberation theology is kind of like the, the jet fuel added in the 1960s via Marxism, which is kind of recuperated from the fact that, that Leo XIII stripped out any kind of reference or, you know, reliance upon Marxist theory to come up with, you know, Catholic social teaching. So yeah, when people talk about liberation theology today, they talk about a more intensive and I would say anti colonial and anti imperial version of Catholic social teaching, but there's, there's, there's more to it. So in this adoption process, because now we've got Leo using its terms freely, there's a radical invention, that intervention that gets metabolized because, you know, it's not only about Gutierrez's initial refusal to condemn armed resistance, but it's also about his very explicit anti capitalist language. Liberation theology ends up being something that Rome could not accept, but also something Rome couldn't avoid. And so the answer is to absorb and transform it. And that's how it's here now. Francis and Leo are both poking at it and just to show how elegant or maybe even slick they are at this absorption, here's how Leo closes the first chapter of this encyclical. And that sets the stage for how the letter is going to be an extension of the more traditional Catholic social teaching. He writes, the result of this absorption process is a harmonious, though not always linear development that's marked by different emphases, progressive insights, and at times changes in perspective that do not break with what came before, but allow its impact implications to mature. He's describing a process that he says is harmonious, but that was like incredibly antagonistic. People were thrown out of the church, people were censured. There was incredible battles over this at the time. But progressive Catholics like this kind of later framing because it suggests that things are changing in the way that they want things to change, but they're not changing so much that we can no longer say there's a grand plan. But I'm off to the left of those guys, and I'm saying that pretty much what happened was that this very sharp object got blunted.
- [62:47]
Julian Walker
Is there another interesting piece here historically, in terms of Marxism, which is often thought of as being atheistic or critical of religious power, than having collaborators who are within the Catholic Church, and how that ends up going when liberation theology inspired Catholics have helped to make the revolution happen, how they end up up getting treated by the Marxist revolutionaries who come to power.
- [63:13]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, I don't know any stories of people like Camilo Restrepo, had he survived, how he would have fared as a revolutionary fighter in a successful revolutionary government. I don't know. There's probably stories like that, so I'm dim on that. But, yeah, you're pointing out something that's like, really, really interesting and tangled.
- [63:35]
Julian Walker
And I think that the Sandinistas were pretty brutal in Nicaragua to the, the. To the Catholics who had helped them foster the revolution or, or.
- [63:43]
Matthew Remsky
Or at least those that they suspected were still sort of in the pocket of the landowners or, or what have you. Because that's what happens in Spain, right?
- [63:50]
Julian Walker
Yeah.
- [63:51]
Matthew Remsky
Is that the. Is that. Is that. It's the Catholics who are still Francoists who are targeted. So I don't know. That's not something that I'm familiar with. Yeah, but let me pick up where you left off with anthropic, because I can imagine that Ola shares the moral sentiments and yearnings of Leo. And so the question for me is whether persuasion will be enough, because historically, the Church has sailed with capital, but Leo is also leaning left into the tiller. So the letter, as I've pinged already, it centers a kind of theological language that's focused on the image of God, which I think is the strongest literary stand for that Catholic tradition can take in the navigation of AI because it's an appeal to the vision of. To a vision of human origins and meaning and the question of whether we can create ourselves and what happens when we try. But for the last 135 years, theology hasn't been enough to keep Catholic rhetoric relevant. In the 1890s, as the full impact of industrial production is increasingly felt and debated in years Europe, the Church is pressed to clarify its position in relation to the aristocratic and colonizing classes it had served and the working classes it says it is ministering to. And this is all during a period of revolutionary foment like whose side are you on really? In 1871 the Paris Commune is destroyed by the Republic. Its veterans took their nascent Marxism into the Second International. In 1889 the German Social Democratic grew into the largest socialist party in Europe and then into. In Rome 1891, Leo XIII opens his Rerum Novarum this way. Julian, can you read that?
- [65:37]
Julian Walker
That the spirit of revolutionary change which has long been disturbing the nations of the world should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising. The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science, in the changed relations between masters and workmen, in the enormous for of some few individuals and the utter poverty of the masses, the increased self reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes as also finally in the prevailing moral degeneracy. The momentous gravity of the state of things now obtaining fills every mind with painful apprehension. Wise men are discussing it, practical men are proposing schemes, popular meetings, legislatures and rulers of nations are all busied with it actions. Actually there is no question which has taken deeper hold on the public mind.
- [66:36]
Matthew Remsky
I love the language. I think in this graph alone we can hear that revolutionary change is akin to a kind of weather event that's worrying everyone.
- [66:45]
Julian Walker
Just like the degeneracy.
- [66:47]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, there's an acknowledgement of inequality, but no sense of inevitable sort of class conflict. The general vibe is that the political economy of Europe is fatally flawed, but that it's just because it's gotten out of balance it can be guided back. And so this is what sets the stage for the next 135 years of Catholic social teaching, which has always walked this thin line because it's informed by a Marxist diagnosis. Like Leo XIII's opening chapter is called Rights and duties of capital and Labor. But it rejects the medicine. So Leo 13 also writes, it's clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary natural rights of mankind and would introduce confusion and disorder into the common wheel.
- [67:39]
Julian Walker
So you mean it, it rejects the Marxist prescription?
- [67:43]
Matthew Remsky
Yes.
- [67:43]
Julian Walker
Right, yeah, yeah. Because when you say medicine, it kind of implies that it actually is the cure. As opposed to the Marxist prescription.
- [67:50]
Matthew Remsky
Well, the Marxist medicine, whether you believe it works or not or whatever. Right, yeah, it's the answer.
- [67:55]
Derek Barris
Well, that also tracks back to my observation in segment one, that no pope is going to advocate for the abolishment of private property when their church owns so much of it.
- [68:03]
Matthew Remsky
I mean that's the stickiest paradox, right? Like unhoused Jesus versus the Vatican. So the way they cut that difference is through the social gospel, which is basically, hey, try to be nicer. However, Leo XIII also goes hard against capitalism. So I've got a paragraph for you, Derek.
- [68:22]
Derek Barris
A devouring usury, although often condemned by the church, but practiced nevertheless under another form by avaricious and grasping men, has increased the evil, evil and in, in addition, the whole process of production as well as trade in every kind of goods has been brought almost entirely under the power of a few. So that a very few rich men and exceedingly rich men have laid a yoke almost of slavery on the unnumbered masses of non work owning workers. I mean, you said it goes hard against capitalism, but he's, he's invoking usury which predates capitalism by century, by millennia. So it's more like, it's more like there are these economic systems have existed since states began that have been fucking over most people that we need to recognize and grapple with.
- [69:09]
Matthew Remsky
Right. And I think that he would agree with you. I think that he would say that yeah, this is ancient, right, that it goes way back. It's actually probably part of human nature. It's part of original sin. In fact, we've got this thing about us and it gets worse and it gets worse and it's getting out of control and we have to really reign it in at this point. I agree with you.
- [69:28]
Derek Barris
At scale. At scale. I always say that at scale, scale because I actually one of the things that Luke Kemp, I think did really well in his book is showing how smaller societies were not as violent as evolutionary theorists sometimes put them out to be. But it's only when you reach groups of thousands that you really start to see the uptick in violence. Yeah, so that, that really question made me question some of my own beliefs around that. And what is it, what is it that humans and smaller groups can be more community minded and oriented toward the benefit of everyone, but what happens at scale that suddenly we start taking advantage of others?
- [70:08]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah, maybe it has something to do with Dunbar's number. Maybe it has something to do with the complexity of like transporting goods over longer distances or something like that. But I mean you can see in what you read that he's also sort of pointing at the sort of human nature issue because he's psychologizing the problem. He's saying really it's avaricious and grasping men. You know, it's not the people who are doing the economy well. Right. It's certain bad apples. And that's going to be a feature of the whole thing as well. And that's how what the social gospel speaks to is like, don't be a bad guy. And part of this answer, then that up until the 1960s is put forward, is this attempt to articulate a third way between capitalist excess and communist revolution. And now I'm broadly summarizing here. I think the third way generally aligns the Eurocentric church with liberal democracy national projects of the 20th century in the attempt to both regulate and elevate capitalism. What I see in the third way is a kind of instability of not taking a side. And at times it drifts left, as we have the rise of the Catholic Worker movement during the Depression, but more often it skips right into support for fascism during the Second World War, pro capitalism during the Cold War, and then the Catholic willingness to coalition with right wingers during neoliberalism and offering theological support for anti abortion movements. But I said up until the 1960s because the problem emerges that when liberation theology explodes in South America, it creates what I've called the reverse imperial boomerang, where we see Marxism infiltrate the social gospel theologians who use it to create the strongest challenge to the liberal European church. It's like Marx travels to the global south and then boomerangs back and says, hey, we're going to hit you in the head with a couple of challenges. And the challenges are that Jesus is not the crusading white savior of old, but the colonized mystic, the social worker who's tortured by the state, and that real Catholicism emerges from that perspective. And so the main theorists propose ideas like the preferential option for the poor, which says that if all policy is directed to aiding and dignifying the vulnerable, everyone will benefit. They say that history must be read from below with the eyes of the oppressed. And that's why they take the Magnificat as a central prayer. And that's why Leo finishes this encyclical with it. And Rome is not impressed. The lead author, as I've said, Gutierrez, is grilled for simply ignoring, acknowledging that resistance to colonial and capitalist oppression was a predictable outcome. So through the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict, there's this process of suppressing the radical implications, but also absorbing its passion into the third wave framework. So today, when you hear a mainstream Catholic commentator mention liberation theology, it's going to sound like just another God guided addition to the precious tradition, none. Nonetheless, Leo xiv as Bob Prevost, spends his formative pastoral years in Peru, which is a liberal theology epicenter and that influences all over his first year in office. So, as I said, I've got a bunch of episodes in our backlist that I'll link to on this. And all of this is in the background of Leo's sharpest challenges to the political economy of AI. So you asked where he's citing liberation theology, Where? Here it is, Julian. He's not using the terms, but he's criticizing how data monopolies contradict the principle that Earth's goods belong to all. He points out that hidden labor sustains AI. This is kind of extraordinary. He's talking about like people doing content moderation and stuff like that. And, and now there's movement workers. Have you seen these factories in Bangladesh with people wearing cameras on their foreheads and while they're sewing things? And so their, their hand movements are being tracked for robotics. So he, he really has this concentration on Global South AI trainers. And then he argues that social justice has to shape technology's design from the outset, not play catch up later. And he also suggests that AI can divide those who own cognitive production from those who are processed by it. And he says that digital extraction of personal and health data can reproduce colonial extractions of resource wealth. It's also so clear where Leo or the Vatican or both has to put the brakes on the attack. And I think that one telling third way echo in the document is the kid gloves treatment that he gives to the morality of data mining for model training. He uses pretty mild language. He says that data quote is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few. And I'm sorry, Leo, but I didn't contribute. I didn't volunteer my information. Like he's leaving out the stealing part and rather calls for creative thinking to manage data as a common or shared good in the spirit of participation. He's not quite naming the stolen by private capital, including Anthropic, to be rented back to us through subscriptions. So this tendency to soften and downplay the class war stuff, ostensibly because we're all children of God and we're all in it together. It's a of lot, alive and well. And so how is this going to play out? You were asking Derek, how relevant is it going to be on a global level? I think it's a major publishing event. We don't have download numbers yet, but I'm going to bet that it's in the many, many million zone. And from what I've seen so far, the gravitas of the whole thing is uniting a lot of Catholics across political lines because AI is so pressing and people are rightly freaked out about data centers. And I follow a lot of tradcaths as well, and they're not saying that much. And even Bishop Barron and his Word on Fire Corporation is publishing the encyclical in hard copy forms. What he's doing, however, is he's saying. He's saying, you know, this isn't really about AI. This is about Catholic social teaching dating back to 1891. And let's remember that that's primarily anti communist. Basically, that's going to be his push
- [76:41]
Derek Barris
back on the million zone. Just because you think most people are going to read a 42,000 word document?
- [76:47]
Matthew Remsky
No, no, not. Not that they're. Not that they're going to read it, but in terms of like, downloads and sales and Laudato Si by Pope Francis, I think it. I think it was. I think it was 10 million copies sold, hard copies sold within a couple of weeks.
- [77:04]
Derek Barris
I think. I think it's in a major publishing event for people interested in it, for sure. I just. I think most people are going to be relying on synopsis of it more than anything else by AI Sometimes. Yeah.
- [77:15]
Matthew Remsky
Yeah. In fact, there's going to be a. There's a Catholic startup AI and I think that's going to be the most trusted source. Did you see that, Derek? Maybe you can work for them.
- [77:24]
Derek Barris
You sent. No, no, no. You sent it to me. But I have. I do know. I do not know much more about them, but I'm sure it's akin to a lot of the biblical AI companies I see sprouting up so that you can ask a question and it'll. It'll tell you which Bible passage that references what you should do.
- [77:41]
Matthew Remsky
Not good enough. I want Cam Restrepo to appear in his full military regalia and tell me what the answer is to my question. That's what I want.
- [77:50]
Derek Barris
I'm sure AI hologram phone apps are coming.
- [77:54]
Matthew Remsky
The people that I'm most interested in with this are the progressive folks and how they're going to take it in. I was really surprised by this one particular headline quote, a capitalist priest reads Magnifica humanitarian. And that was the headline for an article by the Jesuit Father James Martin, who's probably done more to advance the rights of LGBTQ people against Catholic doctrinal bigotries than Anyone else in the Global North. I did not know, as he says in the first paragraph, that he was a Wharton trained finance graduate. Isn't that the school that Trump went to? And self described capitalist. So his take is that Magnifica Humanitas is the most cogent Catholic critique of capitalism he's ever read. He finds Leo's centering of human dignity over profit, extension of universal destination of goods to data and algorithms, and the rejection of transhumanism as a decisive challenge to free market assumptions. But is he no longer a capitalist? No. He absorbs the letter's sharpest claims into a kind of reformist mood, supported by the divine quote. The market does not save, only God does is his conclusion. So the structural argument is kind of redirected into a spiritual appeal.
- [79:12]
Julian Walker
Appeal.
- [79:13]
Matthew Remsky
So I mean, my conclusion is that the third way has staying power. It has the upper hand so far on liberation theology. But what is it based on? In my opinion, I think it's based on the same faith that people must muster these days within liberal democracy, that by deliberation and persuasion, and in Leo's case, a storehouse of moral poetry in which Jesus is the continent, continuous voice, we can nudge the capitalist system toward righteousness. So I'm not so much of a Catholic anymore to believe any of that now, but I definitely recognize the power of hope. Grainger knows. When you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog, H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grand Granger for quality products, easy reordering and 247 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.