As AI fever rises in Silicon Valley, Pope Leo has a few words

ByTech Word News

Silicon Valley has always had messianic dreams dating back to the days when computers filled entire rooms.

In one of the industry’s oldest jokes, a programmer asks a computer, “Does God exist?” The computer replies, “It is now.” The Whole Earth Catalog, a proto-hacker compendium of tools that deeply influenced Steve Jobs, proclaimed: “We’re like gods, and we might as well be good at it.

By investing hundreds of billions of dollars in artificial intelligence, technology leaders are signaling that those early dreams have come true. Next stop, transcendence.

Just as the new religion of AI seemed to be consolidating its grip on humanity’s destiny, a new voice is being heard on the other side of the world.

His message to the tech industry: Slow down. Elevate a person. Machines are not gods.

Pope Leo XIV, America’s first pope, published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, or “Magnificent Humanity,” on Monday with great ceremony. The 42,300-word policy statement is reverent and doesn’t name names, but at its core is a scathing rebuke of Silicon Valley’s claims that it alone can be trusted to develop the future.

“AI can be a valuable tool,” the pope acknowledged, but the technology “tends to amplify the power of those who already have economic resources, expertise, and access to data. Without sufficient oversight and transparency, he warned, “those who control AI impose their own moral vision that becomes the invisible infrastructure of these systems.”

That would be bad news, he said: “A more moral AI is not enough if a few people determine that morality.

The encyclical is expected to be at the heart of the 70-year-old pontiff’s reign in the same way that Rerum Novarum, which advocated workers’ rights and fair wages, was at the heart of Pope Leo XIII in the late 19th century. Released while Silicon Valley was asleep, Magnifica Humanitas marked the latest effort to shape and possibly curtail the AI ​​boom.

President Trump came close to signing a measure last week that would have given the federal government the power to evaluate artificial intelligence models before they are made public — then rescinded his signature. That same day, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a measure to study the impact of artificial intelligence on employment, a confirmation that companies insist it is coming. Elon Musk, who has his own AI ambitions, tried to derail OpenAI, a leading AI company, with a lawsuit, but was thwarted on technical grounds this month.

Magnifica Humanitas comes as a challenge to tech tycoons like Mr Musk, whose power and influence rivals such medieval popes as Innocent III. Pope Innocent argued that the papacy is the sun and mere kings the moon: The latter cannot be seen without the light cast by the former.

Love ’em or hate ’em, Mr. Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and their ilk have a similar influence on our modern kings, the politicians. The US economy is fueled by spending on AI The technology is being deployed in offices and classrooms at breakneck speed and with unknown impact.

The old religion challenged by the new is a dramatic story, the stuff of thrillers.

Silicon Valley has met with little public opposition in its 50-year history. Certainly nothing with the poise and authority of Magnifica Humanitas. Pope Leo is the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics, and teaching them to be wary or even suspicious of AI — especially if the warning is regularly reinforced among the laity — could disrupt the technology’s global ambitions.

“How Much Influence Does the Pope Have in Our Secular Western World?” asked Timothy Ahn, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the development of AI in religious institutions. “We’ll see. I doubt the tech executives in Palo Alto will be reading this encyclical.”

At best, said Mr. Ahn, a former seminarian, the encyclical “will shape some moral reasoning.”

Popes have traditionally worked with a long-term view, and any assessment of the encyclical’s effect is years away. Those familiar with both Silicon Valley and the Vatican say any expectations of a direct confrontation, let alone a holy war, are misguided. Ten years ago, Pope Francis began inviting tech personalities to an annual AI conference called the Minerva Dialogues.

In any case, if Leo took on Silicon Valley head-on, he would probably lose.

The fact that the Vatican unveiled the encyclical with Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, a self-proclaimed “good” AI firm, raised the possibility that Leo isn’t trying to undermine AI so much as he’s just participating in the conversation around it. When Francis released his scathing encyclical on climate change in 2015, no oil company executives were invited to speak.

Luke Burgis, founder of the Cluny Institute, which studies how faith and reason influence technology and innovation, was optimistic that Leo’s words would have an effect.

“This encyclical is a live wire that really has the potential to change what’s being built in Silicon Valley,” said Mr. Burgis, also a former seminarian. “It could help give people a vocabulary to understand a new thing, in the same way that Rerum Novarum helped people understand the concept of a fair wage.”

But it won’t happen automatically, quickly, or easily.

“The church is just beginning its work here,” Mr. Burgis said. “It needs to connect with a powerful counterforce that currently has the upper hand, both in capital and computation.”

Twenty years ago, even the thought of a confrontation between the Pope and Silicon Valley was unthinkable. But in recent years, technology has moved deeper into matters that used to be exclusively religious in nature. There are widespread efforts to stave off death through various forms of lifestyle hacking. The singularity—the amazing moment when man and machine come together—is another hot topic.

Mr. Thiel, a technology investor, lectures about the Antichrist, who he says has arrived in the form of environmentalists. Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski founded the church in 2017 “support the realization of an AI-based divinity,” closed and then reopened in 2023.

Mr. Levandowski, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google but was pardoned by Mr. Trump, served time. Artificial intelligence is now widely seen in tech and tech circles as quasi-divine.

“People are so ready to make AGI their god,” he said Garry Tan, who runs start-up incubator Y Combinator, referring to artificial general intelligence, the next level of artificial intelligence John Lennox, a former Oxford mathematician who wrote “2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity,” said:This race for AI super intelligence is to make God and be God.” Bill Gatescontemplating the glorious future, he said, “You may almost call it a new religion.”

If AI is the new religion or God, it puts it in competition with the old religions and the old gods. And Silicon Valley generally has one answer to competition: Squash it.

Whatever ethical and humanist reasons Pope Leo has for protesting AI, he also has to defend his market share, much like Walmart had to defend against upstart Amazon.

Initial reaction from the tech world to the encyclical was muted over the holiday weekend. Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, sent it to his millions of followers on X.

For all the noise about religion in Silicon Valley, Leo doesn’t have many believers there. A character on the satirical show “Silicon Valley” once joked that Christianity is “borderline illegal” in the tech community, though the reality is more complicated.

Nearly a quarter of San Franciscans are Catholic, a higher percentage than in the United States as a whole, according to a recent Pew survey. But the percentage of religiously unaffiliated in the city is also much higher. The bottom line is that relatively few tech workers are likely to hear about the new pope’s new encyclical from a priest.

Many applications of artificial intelligence interfere with the traditional human role of spiritual advisor. The popular Text With Jesus app now offers voicemail replies. Bible.ai describes itself as “here to simply be a helper, a listener, a friend.” Just Like Me features the Jesus chatbot, which it praises for its “compassionate guidance” and “unconditional support.”

“People turn to AI in their darkest moments,” said Greg M. Epstein, humanities chaplain at Harvard and MIT.

Mr. Epstein, author of the book “Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation,” said: “The Pope is really doing the Lord’s work here, and I say that as an atheist. There are so few institutions left on planet Earth that have the gravitas, the power, the power, to take on this phenomenon and a community that is capable of taking on a person.”

Still, he fears it may be too late.

“Big Tech is essentially its own religion, with its own theology and rituals, not to mention its own power and influence,” Mr. Epstein said. “Pope Leo’s encyclical will automatically be considered false doctrine.”