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News Post: DemonAI · Never Post

• 0:10
  Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
• 0:13
  podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
• 0:15
  Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, September 1 at
• 0:19
  09:03AM eastern, and we have a people show for you this week.
• 0:26
  In this episode, Georgia chats with Matt Sitman, cohost of the
• 0:30
  Know Your Enemy podcast and former associate editor of the
• 0:34
  Catholic opinion journal Commonwealth about Pope Leo's
• 0:38
  recent comments about the algorithm and why so much of his
• 0:42
  papacy seems to be concerned with the cultural impact of
• 0:46
  artificial intelligence. But first, we are gonna take a quick
• 0:50
  break.
• 0:50
  You will listen to some ads unless you're on the member
• 0:53
  feed. And when we return, we'll we'll talk about a few of the
• 0:55
  things that have happened since the last time you heard from us.
• 1:00
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• 1:04
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• 1:09
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• 1:14
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  please drop us a line. Okay. On with the rest of the news.
• 2:46
  Matt Sitman: News. Oh, am so sick of the news.
• 2:51
  Mike Rugnetta: Hugging Face, the hosts of open source AI models
• 2:54
  and datasets used by industry researchers and hobbyists alike
• 2:58
  is apparently in talks to be acquired for a cool
• 3:01
  $14,000,000,000 by tech giant NVIDIA. The New York based
• 3:05
  startup that hosts models from Alibaba, Tencent, Microsoft,
• 3:09
  Google, as well as teenagers with an interest in anime
• 3:12
  titties took $235,000,000 in funding in 2023 from a
• 3:17
  combination of Salesforce alphabet and Nvidia. At the
• 3:20
  time, it was valued at around $4,500,000,000. Hugging Face
• 3:25
  turned down $500,000,000 from Nvidia earlier this year stating
• 3:30
  a desire to stay independent. Bloomberg reports that the deal
• 3:34
  hasn't been inked but is in advanced stages and includes a
• 3:38
  $1,000,000,000 employee retention package.
• 3:43
  Fake health influencers may be targeting your parents. The New
• 3:51
  York Times, Harvard Health, Futurism, four zero four media,
• 3:54
  and more have recently noted an uptick in AI generated doctors
• 3:57
  promoting supplements and other quackery in short form video,
• 4:01
  much of it targeted at seniors. Videos often encourage viewers
• 4:06
  to stop taking their doctor prescribed medications and
• 4:09
  instead replace them with various supplements often framed
• 4:12
  as Asian medicine. A number of videos have been linked to
• 4:16
  supplement manufacturers in China. Ads like these would be
• 4:21
  illegal on US television, the New York Times writes, but on
• 4:25
  the Internet, they face little enforcement.
• 4:27
  At the beginning of the month, former Google product manager
• 4:30
  Cody Sumter detailed a number of the fake accounts on his sub
• 4:33
  stack. Some of them have since been removed from YouTube.
• 4:37
  Deleted. Don't pick the mushrooms, asks the Epping
• 4:42
  Forest and Commons Committee in Essex, England. Mushroom
• 4:46
  foraging content has apparently led to an increase in visitors
• 4:49
  to the 8,000 acre Epping Forest and they are kindly asking as
• 4:53
  the British so often do, if those visitors could quote,
• 4:57
  click, don't pick.
• 4:59
  Identifying nontoxic mushrooms should be left to the
• 5:02
  professionals, of course, but additionally, over foraging runs
• 5:05
  the risk of damaging the forest's ecosystem, which the
• 5:08
  BBC writes had been home to several significant fungi
• 5:11
  discoveries in recent years. Bots are looking at the Internet
• 5:18
  too much and we gotta figure out how to stop them. But how? Enter
• 5:23
  the IETF's AI preference working group. Here's the deal.
• 5:28
  The burgeoning and perhaps waning, but who can say age of
• 5:31
  AI internet traffic has overwhelmingly shifted to bots,
• 5:36
  which are probably doing a number of things on an
• 5:39
  individual level. Maybe they're looking at a website to answer a
• 5:42
  question someone asked. Maybe they're scraping all of that
• 5:45
  content off of that website to train on it and build a
• 5:48
  proprietary model. The question is, what if it's your website
• 5:53
  and you don't want that to happen? Or you're okay with one
• 5:56
  of those things happening, but not the other.
• 5:59
  Right now, we have no real way of saying no thank you to bot
• 6:03
  traffic, and we certainly have no fine control over which type
• 6:07
  of bots or access we want to allow or disallow. The IETF or
• 6:13
  the Internet Engineering Task Force is a volunteer
• 6:16
  organization responsible for setting standards for the
• 6:19
  Internet. The Center for Democracy and Technology writes,
• 6:23
  quote, the core network and transport protocols that the
• 6:26
  Internet runs on, like TCP IP for packet routing, IPV four and
• 6:30
  IPV six for addressing, DNS and DNS SEC for translating domain
• 6:36
  names to IP addresses, and HTTP slash HTTPS for transferring web
• 6:41
  pages were all standardized by the IETF, end quote. That task
• 6:48
  force has now turned their sights on bot traffic. The
• 6:51
  stakes of which are quite high not just because of the volume
• 6:54
  of traffic their recommendations could impact, but because the EU
• 6:58
  is currently posed to turn whatever standards they develop
• 7:03
  into regulations and forced by law.
• 7:07
  So how do individual users and industry leaders like Adobe,
• 7:12
  Microsoft, Apple, etcetera, all of whom have seats on the IETF,
• 7:17
  set preferences for how they expect published material to be
• 7:21
  accessed and then used if the thing accessing and then using
• 7:26
  it is a bot? And how are those standards set in a way that
• 7:30
  enforcement, which IETF has no hand in, is both clear and
• 7:35
  effective. As AI gobbles up more of the Internet, lack of clear
• 7:39
  standards leads to piecemeal solutions. Publishers enclose
• 7:43
  their work behind paywalls or service providers like
• 7:45
  Cloudflare invent their own traffic management solutions.
• 7:49
  The IETF is then racing against several clocks to determine the
• 7:54
  best, clearest, and most ecumenical solution to these
• 7:57
  issues.
• 7:58
  The group met as recently as August 28, and all of their
• 8:02
  meetings for this session are up on YouTube if you'd like to
• 8:05
  watch them. The discussions are fascinating, detailed, and at
• 8:08
  times highly technical. While no formal standards have been set
• 8:12
  at the time of writing, they are expected to be forthcoming
• 8:16
  presently.
• 8:19
  Matt Sitman: No.
• 8:23
  Mike Rugnetta: Vietnam is suffering degraded Internet
• 8:26
  service indefinitely as four subsea cables providing a
• 8:30
  connection to the country have faults. Overall internet
• 8:33
  capacity is down 30% and the national telecom has warned
• 8:37
  residents that international connections may be slow. Eight
• 8:41
  total cables, six of them international service Vietnam.
• 8:45
  Though a series of recent issues have, lightreading.com reports,
• 8:48
  quote, prompted the Vietnamese Ministry of Information and
• 8:52
  Communications to approve the construction of at least 10 new
• 8:55
  subsea cables by 2030, end quote. Developing telecoms.com
• 9:01
  says a reason for the faults has not been given.
• 9:04
  Matt Sitman: The number you've called is disconnected.
• 9:06
  Mike Rugnetta: And finally, the pope warns that artificial
• 9:10
  intelligence could lead to new forms of domination if not
• 9:14
  appropriately regulated. In the address of his holiness Pope Leo
• 9:18
  the fourteenth to participants in the meeting of the
• 9:20
  International Catholic Legislators Network dated
• 9:23
  Friday, 08/21/2026, the pontiff says quote, the rapid
• 9:30
  development of artificial intelligence risks creating new
• 9:33
  forms of technological dependence with poorer nations
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  increasingly reliant on wealthier ones. We must remain
• 9:40
  vigilant in this regard, lest innovation become another
• 9:43
  vehicle for ideological or economic colonialism. Sadly, we
• 9:48
  are presented with a subtle form of domination when algorithms
• 9:51
  decide who is seen, who remains invisible, when digital
• 9:55
  platforms shape public discourse without accountability, and when
• 9:58
  the dignity of workers is subordinated to the optimization
• 10:02
  of systems. Such developments reveal a new face of the ancient
• 10:06
  temptation to domination and mastery without service, end
• 10:11
  quote.
• 10:11
  Contrary to what you might otherwise hear on the Internet,
• 10:14
  you do not need to hand it to the head of the Catholic church.
• 10:18
  However, credit where it is due, calling corporate backed AI
• 10:21
  developed without human concern a new face of ancient temptation
• 10:26
  goes hard as hell. After the break, George is gonna sit down
• 10:32
  with Matt Sitman from Know Your Enemy to talk more about the
• 10:35
  Pope, AI, algorithms, and technological domination.
• 10:56
  Georgia Hampton: On August 21, Pope Leo the fourteenth made a
• 10:59
  public statement to the International Catholic
• 11:01
  Legislators Network warning against the dangers of the
• 11:05
  algorithm. As reported by Vatican News, His Holiness
• 11:09
  advocated for laws to quote, protect users from exploitation,
• 11:14
  preserve personal privacy, ensure transparency in the use
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  of emerging technologies, and guarantee that they strengthen
• 11:21
  democratic institutions. Poplio explained that online, quote, we
• 11:27
  are presented with a subtle form of domination when algorithms
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  decide who is seen and who remains invisible. When digital
• 11:35
  platforms shape public discourse without accountability, and when
• 11:39
  the dignity of workers is subordinated to the optimization
• 11:43
  of systems. He warned that no single ideology should be
• 11:48
  wielding this kind of power.
• 11:51
  And if that emergent tech, like social media algorithms and
• 11:54
  artificial intelligence, are left to encroach upon and
• 11:58
  influence our lives without any safeguards in place, then they
• 12:03
  will erode the very foundation of humanity. Now, I'm not
• 12:08
  Catholic. I'm not Christian. I'm not even religious. And it feels
• 12:14
  very surprising and a little confusing, maybe, to hear the
• 12:20
  pope voice pretty much the exact same concerns I have about the
• 12:25
  technological infrastructure of modern life.
• 12:28
  And I was very curious to know more about the relationship
• 12:32
  between Pope Leo and technology. So I spoke to Matt Sitman. He's
• 12:38
  a cohost of the podcast Know Your Enemy and crucial to this
• 12:42
  conversation, a former associate editor of the largest Catholic
• 12:46
  opinion journal in the country, Commonweal Magazine. And he
• 12:50
  explained to me that Pope Leo's stance on technology actually
• 12:54
  starts way before August. It can be traced back directly to the
• 13:01
  reason that this pope chose the name Leo in the first place.
• 13:11
  Matt Sitman: So this is Leo the fourteenth. Soon after he was
• 13:15
  elected pope on his choice of name, he said this, I chose to
• 13:18
  take the name Leo the fourteenth. There are different
• 13:21
  reasons for this but mainly because Pope Leo the thirteenth
• 13:25
  in his historic encyclical Rare Novarum addressed the social
• 13:30
  question in the context of the first great industrial
• 13:33
  revolution. In our own day, the church offers to everyone the
• 13:37
  treasury of her social teaching in response to another
• 13:40
  industrial revolution and to developments in the field of
• 13:43
  artificial intelligence that posed new challenges for the
• 13:46
  defense of human dignity, justice, and labor. And just for
• 13:50
  another bit more of that what rare novarme, that encyclical he
• 13:55
  mentioned, that came out he put out his first encyclical earlier
• 13:59
  this year in May.
• 14:00
  I believe it was May 15, and that was on the anniversary of
• 14:05
  that very encyclical that he mentioned, Rerum Novarum. The
• 14:08
  encyclical has become the format in which popes kind of weigh in
• 14:12
  on big issues and kind of give their both kind of the Catholic
• 14:17
  take, but also it tends to be something they're really
• 14:19
  concerned about. This is like a major it's like official
• 14:23
  doctrine in a way, right? It's part of the magisterium, meaning
• 14:26
  the kind of it's it's the Pope speaking in a fairly formal
• 14:29
  capacity. Right?
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  And really, what Reverend Novarum was was talking about
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  the rights of labor, of working people in the context of this
• 14:37
  great industrial revolution. I mean, Leo the thirteenth, the
• 14:42
  the prior pope Leo, he is blistering when he talks about
• 14:47
  the exploitation and abuse of working people as these new
• 14:51
  technologies developed. Again, this is the context of the
• 14:53
  industrial revolution. But he says the decline of say the
• 14:56
  medieval guilds that offered workers some protection, like
• 14:59
  these new developments in the way the economy functions and
• 15:02
  the way people are working, that what their jobs are, they're
• 15:06
  leaving working people just totally unable to kind of defend
• 15:09
  themselves at the mercy of ever bigger, more powerful, you know,
• 15:13
  corporations. This is the age of, you know, massive wealth
• 15:18
  inequality taking off in a certain way with like, you know,
• 15:21
  robber barons and titans of industry.
• 15:24
  And so it's very interesting to me that right out of the gate,
• 15:27
  Pope Leo the fourteenth, the current pope, calls back to this
• 15:32
  prior this is really the start of Catholic social teaching, a
• 15:35
  phrase he used in that in that statement and that you'll
• 15:38
  probably hear me saying, that's just kind of that's that's kind
• 15:41
  of how Catholics think about society and politics in ways
• 15:45
  that should be, you know, they're not always explicitly
• 15:48
  dependent on the Bible or Christian revelation in a
• 15:51
  certain way, natural law, things that reasonable people can think
• 15:54
  about together and consider and discuss, you know, that's when
• 15:59
  that started. You know, it's been this body of thought and
• 16:02
  Pope Leo was saying, we need to update this body of thought that
• 16:04
  Catholics have been thinking about since the industrial
• 16:07
  revolution, specifically in this context of AI and new emerging
• 16:11
  technologies because he thinks this is like the issue of our
• 16:15
  time on par with the industrial revolution.
• 16:17
  Georgia Hampton: So thinking of this encyclical as I mean, a a
• 16:22
  foundational text of his beliefs and as you said, his his
• 16:26
  addition to Catholic social teachings. I'd be interested to
• 16:29
  hear more about Pope Leo's interpretation of that in
• 16:34
  regards to AI because then we obviously need to get to his
• 16:37
  points about the algorithm and how that fits in.
• 16:40
  Matt Sitman: Yes. Well, you know, with AI, kind of generally
• 16:43
  speaking, and this this will lead into, you know, what he
• 16:46
  says specifically about algorithms because I did check
• 16:50
  and in Magnifica Humanitas, the encyclical, we're discussing
• 16:56
  algorithms are mentioned by name at least 19 times.
• 17:00
  Mike Rugnetta: Woah.
• 17:00
  Matt Sitman: Yeah. Like, so in some ways, AI and algorithms are
• 17:04
  they're not identical for Pope Leo. Like I think we can, you
• 17:07
  know, disentangle them some, but his critique of them both is
• 17:11
  basically he's very concerned about them becoming a form of
• 17:16
  domination that is insidious and subtle because who's doing it?
• 17:21
  Right? It's it's like it's not I or you or we or even they, it's
• 17:26
  the algorithm doing it.
• 17:28
  Right? And he makes that point a lot with technology, not just
• 17:31
  the algorithm specifically, but in general with AI. He's like,
• 17:35
  who are like, is there democratic input? You know, say
• 17:39
  the the all the fights now in The US over data centers. Right?
• 17:43
  It's kind of like, well, is this just a technical problem or is
• 17:46
  this really a problem about people in a democracy having
• 17:49
  some say over what can be built in their backyard or what are
• 17:53
  they being you know, what laws regulate what we are seeing,
• 17:57
  what is being fed to us. Do we have any say in this? Can there
• 18:00
  be any democratic control? Pope Leo, he always is coming back to
• 18:04
  the defense of human dignity and saying, can we need to take a
• 18:07
  step back and think about how the power and control this gives
• 18:11
  tech overlords, that gives massive corporations, what this
• 18:15
  might do to the already rampant inequality, wealth inequality in
• 18:20
  our societies, the jobs that might be lost. All these are
• 18:23
  things that we should be discussing in a democratic way
• 18:27
  and that people should have some say over.
• 18:29
  That word domination is the one he uses a lot. An insidious
• 18:33
  subtle form of domination because it's not coming through
• 18:35
  like armies invading your country or a tyrannical leader
• 18:38
  seizing political power, but it's through technologies we're
• 18:41
  all kind of adopting just almost passively. Right? He's saying
• 18:45
  it's it's kind of like just shaking us say, whatever you
• 18:48
  decide. I mean, he has his own view, but it's like we are
• 18:51
  sleepwalking into, well, something he likens to the
• 18:54
  industrial revolution.
• 18:56
  Georgia Hampton: Yeah. I mean, in in his most recent
• 18:58
  statements, he compares this kind of slippery slope, like,
• 19:03
  passive adoption of AI whole cloth as a threat of ideological
• 19:10
  colonialism. And what's interesting to me, certainly as
• 19:14
  someone who has, I mean, virtually no relationship to the
• 19:18
  the Pope and and the Catholic Church writ large, that so many
• 19:22
  of of his comments kind of don't have very much to do
• 19:25
  specifically with AI as a threat to like religion or Catholicism,
• 19:32
  but as like an existential threat to us as people.
• 19:37
  Matt Sitman: Yes. Totally. I mean, this is how he starts his
• 19:42
  encyclical. I mean, he mentions humanity created in all its
• 19:47
  grandeur by God, you know, references the biblical stories
• 19:50
  like the Tower Of Babel and things like that. But I mean,
• 19:54
  he's very clear that he wants to he wants to build a city founded
• 19:59
  on the common good, to use his language.
• 20:01
  And so that means like it's it it is not yeah. His concern is
• 20:05
  not what does this mean for the Catholic church. It means his
• 20:08
  concern is what does it mean for human beings? And he addresses
• 20:11
  kind of all people of goodwill, you know, to join in these
• 20:15
  deliberations, you know. He might use specifically Christian
• 20:19
  language or idiom, but he does not I I think like any person of
• 20:23
  goodwill who cares about like treating other human beings
• 20:26
  well, you know, human dignity, that's a concept that yeah, he
• 20:30
  talks about it as a Catholic, but he addresses this encyclical
• 20:33
  to everyone who might make a contribution to helping us
• 20:36
  discern the best way forward and build the common good.
• 20:39
  Georgia Hampton: Something about this that is also very
• 20:41
  intriguing to me, and it's interesting that you mentioned
• 20:43
  the Industrial Revolution as a previous focus of analysis and
• 20:50
  some concern. My curiosity is also about where the pope, I
• 20:59
  guess, specifically exists in relation to emergent
• 21:01
  technologies, sort of historically. Because my very
• 21:06
  outsider presumption, I think, before this conversation was one
• 21:10
  where it was like, oh, well, it's like the concern is of
• 21:13
  modernity. The concern is of a certain kind of modernity that
• 21:17
  is maybe independent of traditional religious practice?
• 21:22
  Matt Sitman: Well, I mean, you're not wrong to to kind of
• 21:25
  have wondered about that because there are, you know, different
• 21:28
  popes sometimes do offer more kind of comprehensive critiques
• 21:32
  of just, you know, like the technology becomes sort of, you
• 21:37
  know, emblem of things that have gone wrong more broadly in
• 21:41
  modernity. Right? Sometimes it popes have slipped into that. It
• 21:45
  is kind of fascinating to me, like, the relationship between
• 21:49
  popes and technology, like some of the first, like, radio
• 21:52
  stations, you know, or the first, like, telescopes that
• 21:55
  looked at the stars, you know, astronomy. Like, different
• 22:00
  postures toward technology, you might say, over the centuries.
• 22:02
  Georgia Hampton: Mean Galileo would probably have a lot to say
• 22:04
  about Yes.
• 22:05
  Matt Sitman: Yes. But I will say Pope Leo, one of the really
• 22:08
  interesting things about him is he his degree as an
• 22:12
  undergraduate was in mathematics. And he the
• 22:15
  religious order he before becoming pope, bishop, and then
• 22:19
  cardinal and pope that he was is a member of is the Augustinian
• 22:23
  order. And you don't really need to know much about that other
• 22:26
  than, you know, the vows of poverty and obedience, your
• 22:30
  typical kind of monk like behavior or, you know, brothers,
• 22:34
  you know. But he they needed a website at some point, and Pope
• 22:39
  Leo just made it himself.
• 22:41
  Oh. Like he built a website. So like my sense is this is a guy
• 22:44
  who studied math at at Villanova back when, you know, when he was
• 22:47
  in college and has had a keen interest in technology along the
• 22:52
  way. He built the first website for his Augustinian order, think
• 22:55
  just because he seems like that kind of guy, right, who's kind
• 22:59
  of like handy and knows something about tech and has a I
• 23:03
  would say, he's not just like this, you know, removed priest
• 23:07
  who someone hands him a briefing on AI. I think the fact that he
• 23:11
  chose the name he did, explained it the way he did right away.
• 23:14
  His first day as pope meant that this is a guy who's been
• 23:17
  thinking about technology and artificial intelligence
• 23:20
  intelligence specifically for quite a while. And when he came
• 23:23
  in as pope and said, this is this is our industrial
• 23:27
  revolution, I think that says not just something about his
• 23:30
  political instincts and values, but kind of his his own
• 23:33
  biography and the interesting relationship Pope Leo has with
• 23:37
  technology himself.
• 23:39
  Georgia Hampton: Is is it right for me to assume he's like the
• 23:41
  first online pope?
• 23:44
  Matt Sitman: You're not wrong to assume that because, I mean, it
• 23:48
  was pretty clear that, say, Pope Benedict the sixteenth or Pope
• 23:51
  Francis, you know, they were of an age where, like, they really,
• 23:56
  you know, like, I have grandparents who have never sent
• 23:58
  or received an email. Right. I think they're kind of like maybe
• 24:01
  in closer to that category, but Pope Leo, like, is very aware of
• 24:07
  the kind of political discourse in The United States. And like,
• 24:12
  there have been reports that have come out that essentially,
• 24:14
  he's kind of online, like kind of is still on Twitter. Least at
• 24:19
  least to kind of I've wondered, does he have a burner account?
• 24:21
  You know? Oh my god. But like, he's aware of what people are
• 24:25
  saying about the Catholic church himself and kind of, you know,
• 24:29
  when he does something like put out an encyclical on artificial
• 24:33
  intelligence, he is not simply just being handed, I think, like
• 24:37
  a briefing book again of like tweets that people are saying or
• 24:41
  headlines. I think he is personally engaged in a way that
• 24:44
  I don't know all the specifics of, but I kind of believe
• 24:47
  everything I just said, right, about where he came from in his
• 24:50
  biography, it kind of makes sense to me that he would sort
• 24:52
  of be keeping an eye on what people are saying about, you
• 24:55
  know, some of his interventions in our public life. Especially,
• 24:59
  he's the first American pope, which we haven't mentioned yet.
• 25:02
  But so he's but I think he's really so that's kind of
• 25:06
  interesting just in terms of technology. Like, it kind of
• 25:08
  would be the first American who, you know, maybe has some of
• 25:11
  these impulses, but also he knows just how deranged the
• 25:15
  right wing of the Catholic church is in The United States.
• 25:18
  And he knows they literally trying to kind of destroy Pope
• 25:20
  Francis's papacy. I think Leo is like, I cannot I cannot simply
• 25:25
  outsource this. Like, I'm an American, I'm the first American
• 25:27
  pope.
• 25:28
  I know what these people, you know, I know what they're up to.
• 25:32
  I know they're up to no good. And I'm not just going to kind
• 25:34
  of passively respond to their criticisms, but I'm going you
• 25:38
  could I think he's engaged in a certain way and that has
• 25:41
  something to do with his interest in in relationship to
• 25:44
  technology.
• 26:03
  Georgia Hampton: I do wanna talk about I don't know if it's
• 26:07
  gauche to separate the broader practice of Catholicism or
• 26:12
  certainly the way it exists in this country from the pope. But
• 26:16
  I wonder where AI sits within Catholicism as a system beyond
• 26:28
  just the pope and clearly his perspective on it.
• 26:31
  Matt Sitman: Well, you know, I think one way to to begin to
• 26:34
  answer that question, and I I'm gonna read from his encyclical.
• 26:37
  This came out in May. So these were before some of the most
• 26:40
  recent comments that prompted this conversation. But I think
• 26:44
  this is a good example of how it might relate to Catholicism more
• 26:48
  broadly or how you can see where it doesn't doesn't relate to it.
• 26:52
  Leo writes, indeed, entrusting an algorithm in practice with
• 26:55
  the power to select who is worthy or not without anyone
• 26:59
  bearing responsibility for that judgment is to hand over the
• 27:03
  task of redefining the boundaries of human
• 27:05
  possibilities.
• 27:06
  In this process, political responsibility is also lost. Not
• 27:11
  just empathy toward those excluded which can after all be
• 27:15
  simulated. The exclusion of the vulnerable becomes cloaked in a
• 27:19
  veneer of neutrality and objectivity against which it
• 27:23
  becomes difficult to raise objections. In this way,
• 27:27
  injustice goes unnoticed and compassion, mercy and
• 27:30
  forgiveness understood not as mere appearances but as real
• 27:35
  political actions gradually disappear from view. So you can
• 27:40
  see that he's not saying anything about going to church
• 27:43
  or Catholic doctrine there, but it would also be a mistake to
• 27:48
  not see that at some level, that phrase, the task of redefining
• 27:52
  the boundaries of human possibilities, that could not
• 27:56
  but be a concern of any religious faith really.
• 28:00
  Right? Because I mean, religions, one thing they do is
• 28:04
  they say this is what it means to be a human being. What it
• 28:07
  means to be born, to suffer, to live, and to die. Right? And and
• 28:12
  so there is a way in which AI is it's not a specifically Catholic
• 28:19
  concern in the sense of all the particulars of the Catholic
• 28:22
  faith, but in another sense, it is it goes right to the heart of
• 28:26
  the claims the Catholic church makes.
• 28:29
  Maybe what this the reason like Pope someone like Pope Leo has
• 28:32
  to weigh in or why it's like such an urgent matter for him
• 28:36
  is, does not AI isn't it actually forcing us to ask
• 28:41
  questions about what it really and truly means to be a human
• 28:44
  being? Like, we're really getting down to very concrete
• 28:48
  questions of like, what is the difference between something I
• 28:51
  write and create as a human being and something the
• 28:53
  algorithm or the AI chatbot does? Right? That is making you
• 28:57
  say, what does it really mean to be human? And that is something
• 29:00
  that like, whatever else you think of them, that's what
• 29:03
  religions have answered for us.
• 29:04
  And so it's almost like AI is almost throwing us back on such
• 29:08
  elemental questions of what it means to be a human being.
• 29:12
  Georgia Hampton: Yeah. I I mean, I just keep going back to your
• 29:14
  point about what was it, Catholic social doctrine?
• 29:17
  Matt Sitman: Yes. Mhmm.
• 29:19
  Georgia Hampton: Because I will say again, as someone who is not
• 29:21
  Catholic and has no relationship to Catholicism, hearing the pope
• 29:27
  make any kind of statement about technology, before I even know
• 29:33
  what it is, I have to admit there's a part of me that's
• 29:36
  like, well, is the threat here that this technology will take
• 29:41
  people away from the doctrine of Catholicism?
• 29:44
  Matt Sitman: Yeah.
• 29:45
  Georgia Hampton: And it's a and it's just more control. But that
• 29:48
  kinda doesn't sound like what is going on.
• 29:53
  Matt Sitman: I I know what that's so interesting. I know
• 29:55
  where you're going with that or I I I'm tracking with you. And I
• 29:58
  think part of it is because I have the same tendencies
• 30:00
  actually. Like, I'm, you know, I'm a bit of a dissident in the
• 30:04
  church, so, you know, I have some of those skeptical impulses
• 30:07
  as well. But where I'm going with that is that, like it's not
• 30:14
  a threat the technology isn't a threat to the Catholic church
• 30:16
  per se or it's not you know, Pope Leo isn't criticizing it
• 30:20
  because he realizes it like it's it's, you know he's not saying
• 30:23
  what he's saying because he wants more control.
• 30:25
  But there is a way in which I kind of wonder the extent to
• 30:28
  which artificial intelligence, it's kind of the way we live
• 30:32
  online now, in the place of technology and kind of like
• 30:35
  inhabiting our consciousness. If like maybe what's going on is
• 30:42
  like the very possibility of a rich spiritual life is being
• 30:46
  threatened. And so, you know, like sitting in solitude, like I
• 30:50
  often say to my friends, like, why do you go to church? And I
• 30:53
  said, there's lots of reasons. But I said, among other things,
• 30:57
  like, even in periods of my life where my faith was not as robust
• 31:01
  or alive as it as it has been in others, I would still go to
• 31:05
  church because where else in our society do you, like, sit there
• 31:09
  quietly not looking at your phone for, you know, somewhere
• 31:12
  between forty five minutes and a little over an hour and let
• 31:15
  alone sit there quietly and think about your life.
• 31:18
  And it's like there are ways in which you don't have to go to
• 31:20
  church to do that, obviously. But I do feel like churches are
• 31:24
  one of the, you know, number of ever shrinking number of spaces
• 31:28
  where like quiet and solitude and thinking about your life in
• 31:31
  a certain way is encouraged and that can be through meditation
• 31:34
  practices, that can be through other religious traditions, that
• 31:38
  can be through running, right, in the morning and thinking,
• 31:42
  love being alive and I love this world. But all those things, all
• 31:46
  impulses toward interiority and I think reflectiveness and
• 31:51
  thoughtfulness and thinking about your life in an
• 31:54
  intentional way are threatened by the kind of array of
• 31:58
  technological devices and algorithms and social media
• 32:03
  sites, like, literally or, you know, designed to make us
• 32:07
  addicted to them.
• 32:08
  Georgia Hampton: Mhmm.
• 32:09
  Matt Sitman: Right? There's there's a great line of the
• 32:10
  poet, W. H. Auden, where he says, all sin tends to be
• 32:15
  addicting, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
• 32:19
  Woah.
• 32:20
  And I which that's, you know, really heavy to drop at this
• 32:24
  point in the conversation. But you know what I'm saying? Like
• 32:27
  like, I think that might be that's my very circuitous answer
• 32:31
  to your question that I think like, yeah, what Pope Leo's
• 32:34
  alarm, it's not like, oh, how can I talk about this to kind of
• 32:37
  gain more power for the Catholic church, which some popes, you
• 32:40
  know, might have done? I really think this is a truly earnest,
• 32:43
  honest, like, cry from his heart about, like, us being on the
• 32:48
  brink of kind of not really being fully human anymore in
• 32:51
  terms of the way we treat each other and organize our society.
• 32:54
  Georgia Hampton: Which is just a question of like the essential
• 32:57
  act of being alive. Like, his comments about the algorithm and
• 33:03
  very much them being one of of control is part of that, I
• 33:08
  think.
• 33:09
  Matt Sitman: The control part, you know, it's very interesting.
• 33:12
  In the more recent comments about the algorithm specifically
• 33:16
  that Pope Leo has made, I thought it was really
• 33:18
  fascinating, and I'd love your reaction to this, is he's
• 33:21
  comparing it to colonialism. Right? Like a new the algorithm
• 33:26
  is a new form of economic domination that really a new
• 33:29
  form of a new form of colonialism. And I think like
• 33:32
  that kind of language may be more apt than we realize because
• 33:36
  like what is being colonized?
• 33:37
  Our minds and souls Yes. Among other things. Yes. Right? But
• 33:41
  that I think what did you think of I mean, surely, you stood up
• 33:45
  a little straighter in your chair when you start to see a
• 33:47
  pope talking about because of the efficiency or the greater
• 36:52
  good.
• 36:53
  Right? Like like, some of what we're talking about is like,
• 36:56
  what what about all the tax revenue from data centers?
• 36:59
  Right? Well well well, yes, there are that tax revenue, but
• 37:03
  what lives you know, what water are you willing to poison?
• 37:06
  Right?
• 37:06
  What what parts of the natural environment are you willing to,
• 37:10
  you know, build these centers on? Or like, what people are you
• 37:12
  going to displace? Or what jobs are going to be displaced?
• 37:15
  Right? You sometimes just have to say no.
• 37:18
  It's no. You can't do this to other people. You just can't.
• 37:21
  And there's and there's not many voices in the world who will say
• 37:25
  no no no no no even as the tax revenues start coming in. Even
• 37:29
  as the even as the geopolitical competition with China takes
• 37:33
  center stage.
• 37:33
  Even, you know, you can name all the reasons, it'd be great to
• 37:37
  fudge on human dignity and say, actually this group of people,
• 37:39
  their dignity, we can actually erase the circle around it and
• 37:43
  say it's expendable in this case. That's always a
• 37:46
  temptation, always. And so I think one one reason, like the
• 37:51
  passage I just moved about infinite dignity, every human
• 37:55
  being possesses infinite dignity without exception no matter what
• 37:58
  state they find themselves in, is because that's just not
• 38:01
  something you hear very much.
• 38:26
  Mike Rugnetta: That is the news we have for you this week. We
• 38:29
  are gonna be back here in the main feed on or around Thursday,
• 38:32
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