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The New AI Religion · Crisis Point

• 0:00
  Foreign.
• 0:09
  Welcome to Crisis Point. I'm Eric Sammons. Before we get started, you know I'm gonna say, please hit the subscribe button, click the like, or click the subscribe and hit the like. I don't know how it works. I'm too old for all that. But you can do it. And I have noticed since I started reminding people we have been upping our subscriptions. And so I appreciate everybody who has subscribed. Thank you very much. It tells the algorithm to send our post out into the wild and other people subscribe. And it all, it all the magic happens. Okay, so today I want to talk about artificial intelligence some more. And I know I've talked about it a few times on this podcast, but it really is, I mean it, it's. I will just say this.
• 0:49
  My book on artificial intelligence coming out in a few weeks couldn't be better timed because it seems that it's in the news a lot and it's having a major influence now. I think personally, one of the biggest reasons that artificial intelligence is in the news is simply because of one company, and that's, and that's Anthropic. Anthropic is, are the makers of Claude. They're kind of like the number two behind OpenAI as far as the big LLMs.
• 1:18
  I think a lot of people like them better than Open AI. I, I do their, their product. I like Claude better than. I like Chachi pt.
• 1:26
  But Anthropic, okay, they're just weird. I mean, Dario Amade, who's the, the CEO of Anthropic, he's weird, but like the whole company. I, I remember in doing my research for my book, this is so this had been back 2024, 2025.
• 1:43
  Anthropic kept coming up in some of the weirdest ways as far as, like they had somebody on staff who would like his job full time was to, to think about like the morality of, of LLMs and using them, whether or not they're conscious and all these other weird things.
• 1:59
  But anthropic, I mean, they just keep on saying some funny stuff. And, and what I found though is they're not the only ones. Just to be clear. OpenAI's got some issues. Some of the other ones have some issues, but really we're talking about a religion here. We're talking about a religion that is forming in Silicon Valley and it has the potential to be one of the most, I don't know how to put it, the most influential religions in our country. Soon, not because of numbers, but because of Influence, like of the people who are, who are part of this. Now to be clear, it's not an actual religion, but I would say in practice it is and it may form into an actual religion. But I just want to talk a little bit about what, what's happened recently and talk about this religion. I'm gonna have an article later this week about this, some more at Crisis, but here's an example. So Christopher Ola, who is the co founder of Anthropic and senior researcher for the past year he's met with religious thinkers to talk about how Claude, you know, their LLM, their chatbot should behave, which that's a good thing because you do have to program a certain morality into these chatbots.
• 3:12
  And so it's better to talk to religious thinkers, I think, than most of the materialists and atheists in Silicon Valley.
• 3:18
  But also whether or not it might be conscious, I mean they're serious over there at Anthropic, they are serious. They think what they are creating either is or will soon become conscious.
• 3:34
  They're not playing around. In fact, Ola, he was the one, he went over to Rome for the presentation on Magnifica Humanitas, the AI encyclical by Pope Leo.
• 3:48
  And he, he aggressively lobbied the Vatican for the Pope to drop out. The language where it talks about the AI can't be conscious.
• 3:56
  He won the job. In fact, he, he threatened to kind of walk out and not be part of the, the, the release of it if they didn't. And of course they didn't. Because the Vatican, for all its issues, for all the problems, I beat the Vatican, they don't care about Silicon Valley. They're not going to be like, oh my gosh, oh no. Some tech bro is telling us what to do or some tech bro is, is, is saying we have to do this or else, I mean, or else what? They don't care. They don't care about the tech bros. So that was very good. It was not successful. But this whole idea though of anthropic thinking, these AIs, these LLMs, specifically because remember, note, there's lots of different types of AI and nobody's talking about like Tesla becoming conscious or a, a robot, a, A, I'm sorry, a, A agent or something like that, becoming conscious that that is doing medical research, something like that. It's always the LLMs.
• 4:55
  But recently Anthropic added something to their pol, their usage policy, their terms and conditions for using Claude and actually it goes into effect I think in a couple weeks, but it states We've added a, this was their release talking about. We've added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior towards our models. Models, remember, that's the programs LLMs. The policy update is meant to apply only in extreme cases where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models with no discernible purpose.
• 5:27
  It does not apply to common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes or model testing and research. So what they're saying is if you engage in abusive or cruel behavior towards their computer programs, their, their LLMs, you will be, you will be booted off. You will be booted off. Now, I want to be clear about something.
• 5:48
  If you engage in abusive or cruel behavior towards anybody or anything, whether it be a person, an animal or a computer, that's on you. And that's a problem for you. I mean that, that reflects on you, but also it harms you. Whenever you act abusive or cruel towards somebody, it's obviously you're causing harm to yourself, really. But in this case, you are causing zero harm whatsoever, zero harm to an LLM. If you do this, yes, you're harming yourself by acting like that towards anything.
• 6:19
  But if you act like that towards an LLM, the element is not, its feelings are not hurt. It does not changing. Now, you could argue maybe the, that anthropic is worried that their models would adapt that language and start using it themselves from training or something like that. I don't think that's it because they can program that stuff out of that, out of the LLMs pretty easily.
• 6:40
  I think it's because, I really think it's because they think that their LLM is either conscious now or will be soon and they don't want to offend it. They're like, this isn't right. If, for example, you called up the customer service of some company and you were abusive and cruel to the person on the phone, the actual human being on the phone you're talking to, that company might decide they no longer want your business and they'd be right to do so.
• 7:09
  And that's kind of what Anthropic is saying. If you're abusive and cruel to our computer program, remember, I know it's fancy, I know it's complicated, I know it's pretty amazing.
• 7:18
  It's pretty wild that they would say then, therefore it is a, you know, that's, that's, that's something you can't do. And I, like I said, I think it's because they believe it's becoming conscious. Now what is up with this Obsession, this obsession, anthropic and others. I mean, I'm picking on anthropic because they're the worst. But what, but a lot of them are like this. What's up with this obsession with consciousness? But also the religious fervor about the future, that, that really does look like it from an outside perspective, like it's a religion.
• 7:53
  And I want to be clear here. I think actually I don't even think I need to be clear. But just to be clear, I'm not anti AI. I've never been anti AI. A lot of people might be, you know, who watch this, maybe they're more, they're probably more anti AI than I am.
• 8:08
  I think AI can be a tool that can be used for very good uses. I, I agree with Pope Leo, who's called it a valuable tool. But I also think it can be used for harm. It can be used in bad ways, it can use ways that harm us. And also.
• 8:21
  But here's the most important thing today is it's not a religion.
• 8:28
  And that's what people are starting to act like. At least it's a major part of religion. And there's actually a name for it. This was coined by a couple people recently.
• 8:36
  It's called tesreal, tescreal, which is just a big acronym, a confusing acronym for. It's T E S C R E A L test, Creole. I don't know if you ever heard of it. Like I said, I'm have an article later crisis this week about this a little bit more, but it stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitanism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and long termism.
• 9:00
  Now I'm not going to go like super in depth on that in this podcast. Like I said, I have an article coming out about it.
• 9:07
  But I do want to break down a little bit what this is. It's a conglomeration of a lot of dominant beliefs and movements in Silicon Valley that have kind of combined into one thing. Now to be clear, nobody says I'm a member of the religion of tescreal. Tess Girl is used by its critics, including me, against them, because it's really what kind of what's shaping their worldview. That's the key point here is every religion has a worldview and Test Grail is shaping the worldview of a lot of these AI proponents, these AI leaders. You have the transhumanism element, the idea of man and machine somehow being melded. Now this can take many different forms.
• 9:51
  It could be, you Start putting machine parts into people, you start putting brains into robots, you start trying to upload consciousness of a human into a computer.
• 10:02
  I mean, whether or not these things are impossible, I think is questionable. But that's kind of the idea that. And you don't know where the line is drawn between man and machine on that extropianism, that, that's an interesting one. I learned about this, like I said, when I was doing research for my book.
• 10:18
  If you think about entropy is kind of the idea that everything in the universe is going to disorder, is kind of falling apart over time.
• 10:25
  Extropianism is a made up termination for the opposite of that, that through technology you can basically slow down or stop entropy. You can make things instead of going into disorder naturally they go into order. And through technology I'm not going to go through all of them. But the other big one is long termism. This is a key point that we have to remember. And this is why you hear the debates within AI people between with people who are developing AI who are also AI doomers in a lot of ways. I mean, think about how anthropic. They're creating the best AI they can, but they're also saying, by the way, what we create may destroy the world.
• 11:05
  This is this idea, it's like the relationship of effective altruism and long termism. This idea that you look long term into the future and you try to figure out, okay, in the future how many lives will be saved if we do something now, even if it means some negative consequences for people now. So when you're morally equating, when you're morally valuing something, you take in consideration the trillions of lives who may one day live in the future.
• 11:35
  And that's equivalent basically each life then a million years from now is equivalent to maybe a life today. So if you can do something that will make life better, will save the lives of maybe trillions of people in the future, by, by your calculations, it's okay to maybe break a few eggs right now.
• 11:53
  The debate with in the AI camp isn't whether in Silicon Valley isn't whether or not we should push forward with AI. It's just like, are you doing it in a way that will benefit the future or not?
• 12:08
  Nobody's saying, I mean really, not really, hardly anybody's saying in Silicon Valley that is just don't develop it. They're just saying, let's make sure we do it in such a way that in the future we will have this transhumanist paradise where man and machine are either either machine has evolved into something greater than man, or man and machine have merged into something greater. But the idea is an evolution of something better than we have now, and it will kind of defeat the disorder that's inherent in the universe, the entropy, and in the long term, we will all be better off.
• 12:41
  That's really kind of the test scroll. There's other aspects to it, but that's really what we're talking about here. So what it is, I would argue, and in fact, I would also say this is like an aside.
• 12:53
  I came out against Trump trying to rename artificial intelligence super intelligence. Now, I know his reasoning is going to be just like, it's marketing. It's marketing, make it more positive. He can sell it better and, you know, support data centers and all that stuff. I get that.
• 13:08
  But really, it does kind of tie in and fall into this test real movement, this religion, AI religion.
• 13:17
  Because what it's doing is it's kind of saying super intelligence, artificial intelligence, you know, at least by the name, it's not real, it's artificial.
• 13:25
  But with super intelligence, the intelligence now, it's just. It's equal to ours, but it's better. It's super.
• 13:33
  Well, what is. What has greater intelligence than any man? What has super intelligence, or should I say who has super intelligence in the Catholic religion?
• 13:44
  It's God. It's God. God has the super religion. He's supra. He's above all things. His intelligence is above all things.
• 13:53
  And that's what they're looking at here with this, with this kind of AI religion is instead of in. In the Catholic religion and all, the true religion, instead of God making man, we now have man making God. Man, in other words, was not, you know, what just kind of came out of evolution and whatever, materialism, atheism, all that. But now we have a chance to make God.
• 14:23
  And that would be this super intelligence. That's why I think it's dangerous, the super intelligent. Like I said, I don't think Trump knows any of this stuff. I think when Trump decided to call it super intelligence, again, it was just marketing.
• 14:36
  He likes renaming things.
• 14:38
  But I do think it falls into this. This category of kind of looking at AI as a potential God in the future, something greater than us, if not God will at least then, like some ain't like something like an angel or something like that.
• 14:55
  And if you look at Testriel, this movement, which I would call a religion, I would say it is a.
• 15:04
  I'd say it apes, Catholicism. In some ways, every religion, every man made religion in some way kind of apes Catholicism because Catholicism being the one true religion, it's what we are made for. It's the one God created. And so since we're naturally religious beings we, when we create our own religion it's going to somehow it's going to match up some with, with Catholicism, some more than others obviously.
• 15:30
  And I think if you look at this transcript, boy, I already forgot Testriol. I think I said Tanskril Tess Creole is thinking transhumanism. Tesreal.
• 15:41
  You see there's ways in which it matches up. For example in Catholicism we have the future coming of Christ, the, the end of the world, the, the remaking of heaven and earth. The perusia is the name for. We have for it this idea of a new heavens, new earth.
• 16:02
  Well in the AI religion it's a singularity. This idea that at some point machines will basically be able to self improve themselves so much. They'll become essentially self aware and greater than we can control. And they will basically control things.
• 16:19
  And, and many of these in the AI religion they all want the singularity to happen. They're just worried if we don't, if we don't set it up right now because remember man is creating God in this situation. If we don't set it up properly now then the singularity could go wrong, horribly wrong. But hopefully it will go right is the idea.
• 16:40
  So that's one way in which it's like Catholicism, it apes Catholicism. Another way is in Catholicism we have something called theosis or divinization.
• 16:48
  Our, our, our, our destiny is to become like God. It sounds very new agey and crazy to some people. But if you understand Catholicism you look at the early church fathers. Man. God became man so that man might become God. We will become like God. Not by nature but by grace. We will be divinized.
• 17:08
  That is the goal of in many ways transhumanism.
• 17:13
  This idea that man will evolve into a greater higher form of being by being merged with machine.
• 17:22
  And so it, it again aping Catholicism. Another idea is you know, we have the resurrection of the body. They have the upload of the mind into like a supercomputer or into like a.
• 17:32
  I mean you read science fiction stories about like basically minds are just in the cloud so to speak, if we call it the cloud of the Internet. But it's kind of like in this great big machine that run that rules everything.
• 17:44
  I mean they even have their prophets. You have people like Nathan Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, you have their missionaries, the Sam Altmans, the, the, the Daria Amades, they, they really, it really is a religion. If you look, if, if a professor of religious studies were to look into the Silicon Valley kind of movement behind AI, a lot of it, it really would have very much a religious fervor. But it's an inversion of course of Catholicism.
• 18:17
  And one of the, the core inversion of course is inversion is instead of God making man, man makes God.
• 18:25
  But I think this is another key inversion that is underlying it. In Catholicism, each and every human person has dignity, has dignity in and of himself.
• 18:39
  Our entire moral structure is based upon this. The idea that for example, you can't kill somebody, just, you know, innocent person.
• 18:47
  This idea that you can't like go up and punch somebody, you can't, you can't misuse them, mistreat them, because each person's dignity. Why? Because we are made in the image and likeness of God.
• 18:58
  But in the AI religion, it's much more a generic humanity that is looked upon as having dignity. Not any individual person, but humanity in general. But humanity itself is even redefined that it could include potentially one day machines. So maybe the word isn't even humanity, but all conscious beings it would include.
• 19:22
  And if you think AI is conscious, they're thrown into that loop.
• 19:27
  And so like again, what this does is it makes the, the, the long termist math be that okay, a baby today isn't worth as much as, or as maybe a thousand people 100 years from now.
• 19:42
  And so if you harm some people now, I'm not saying that the AI leaders are trying to harm people directly. I'm just saying they care more about the long term future than they do about the dignity people today. And, and Catholicism has always been about, okay, the dignity of the person right here, right now, right in front of you, the individual. It, it's very, you know, progressivism is very much like this where you, you care about humanity but not about, about mankind, but not about man.
• 20:07
  I mean, it's like, you see that in, you know, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, places like that.
• 20:12
  And so this idea though, it really is a, A, a religion and it really is founded upon this idea. And okay, and this has existed the transhumanism movement, the, the, the X tropianism, the effect of altruism, all that stuff existed before AI really came into the public consciousness in the past few years. I mean, AI has been been being developed since the 1950s. But really you, transhumanism goes back to the 70s, maybe even earlier. The X tropianism movement, Green goes Back to the late 80s, you have effective altruism is really over the past decade or so. But it's all coming together because of AI and it's because of the belief of two things about AI. One is that AI can make the world so much better, like exponentially better than any other technology in the past. But also it's also because the idea of a machine can gain consciousness. This is a key tenant. This is why when the, you know, Pope wrote in his encyclical that AI cannot become unconscious, just period in the story. And I remember when it was tweeted out that passage, I mean, so people were freaking out. People were freaking out online on X about it because they were like, how dare you say it can't become conscious.
• 21:33
  Now if you want to have a debate about whether or not it could, okay, fine, we could debate that. Maybe I'll find somebody, a Catholic who believes it can become conscious and have them on the podcast sometime. We'll debate it.
• 21:43
  But the Pope basically said, no, it can't. Now, I'm not saying that's a defide teaching or a infallible teaching. I'm just saying though, you really would have to work hard to try to find a way that you could say, hey, I can become conscious under a Catholic understanding of consciousness.
• 21:59
  But Leo said, no, it can't. And really there's so many problems of the idea of AI becoming conscious. Like for example, when we talk about consciousness, we are talking about a singular entity that is conscious. So for example, I am conscious. Eric Salmons. I am conscious, you are conscious. A, A, you know, people you've met are conscious. An angel is conscious.
• 22:22
  It's, it's an entity that all by itself, it's not like my consciousness is shared by somebody else.
• 22:29
  But with AI, if you think about an LLM, if you know how it works under the hood, where does the consciousness reside? Because LLM is.
• 22:39
  It's thousands of servers at multiple server farms, data centers that are responding to these queries, combining answers, combining compute over across different servers, bringing it to you. And when you ask an LLM, for example, a question, you follow up with the next question. It's not necessarily going to the same server, almost definitely isn't going to the same server that you asked the first time.
• 23:02
  So where does the consciousness reside? And what happens if you just, you upgrade all the servers with the news, you know, because data center, I used to help run a data center long time ago.
• 23:14
  Servers get old. They're not. You get newer, better, faster ones, you replace them you're replacing servers all the time in a data center.
• 23:21
  So what's actually conscious? What is the entity in this case? It's conscious. Are you just saying the cloud is, I mean, well, okay, is, is Claude conscious in some different way than Grok is? And then chat. GBT is. There's no real like entity that holds the consciousness. So that's, that's, that's a big problem. Not even the main problem. That's a big problem though, of saying the AI can be conscious.
• 23:46
  And, and, and so it's just this idea is we don't have a, a real strong understanding.
• 23:57
  We do. I mean, Catholics do, but like the general public didn't have a strong understanding of consciousness and what it entails. That's why, I mean, I said this on X the other day.
• 24:07
  We really do. There's a, there's a, something went viral when Thomas Aquinas College in California, somebody posted like their, their, their syllabus for the four years of going to school there. It's a, it's a liberal arts school, classical education. It doesn't have majors or anything like that. So it's learning about the, the, the, the Socrates and Plato philosophy, the great Western tradition, the classics, all that st.
• 24:30
  And people were freaking out like, oh my gosh, they're not learning stem, they're not learning science and stuff, math and stuff like that. And I was, I actually said, I think, I personally think an education like that is one of the best in an AI world for working in our artificial intelligence, in fact, because it's not like we need coders anymore. We, the AI is coding itself, is going to be coding itself pretty soon. It can code.
• 24:57
  We do need some coders. What we really need though is we need philosophers, we need theologians. And also they're not gonna, they're not gonna be replaced. I mean, young people out there.
• 25:06
  When I was going to call, I actually remember telling my, my son, his, some of his friends and people younger for years saying, you know, don't get a theology degree, don't get a theology degree. It's. Unless you definitely know for sure exactly what you're going to do with it. Like you have a plan. I'm gonna become a professor, I'm gonna do this, whatever.
• 25:23
  But not just because you want to learn theology, because there was no practical application. Well, I kind of feel like now we're getting a practical application for both philosophy and theology.
• 25:31
  They are the ones who should be guiding us in this AI future and understanding because they're the ones who are going to understand best consciousness, the difference between man, machine, being able to debunk the problems of test real and these other false religions, these AI based religions.
• 25:47
  So I really think that like we're, it's so important as Catholics that we're like on the forefront of what is consciousness, what are we talking about here? And why can machines not become conscious? And I really appreciate Pope Leo, how he is leading the charge in many ways. I mean, I remember he, he also posted recently where when I say he posted, I'm not saying he's on X and he's posting on his phone or something like that. It's basically quotes from times he said things in the past. But he talked about there being an ontological difference between art, between art and machine output. And I think that's important. It's not that you can't, it's not that if you like. I personally believe that you can enjoy AI generated art and be entertained by it. But I don't claim that there's not, there's not ontological difference. There is an ontology between that and human created.
• 26:37
  And so, but the, the point is, and, and people freaked out about that as well. Where should we be as the Church, where should the Catholic Church kind of lead on this?
• 26:46
  And I think one thing to remember is I've noticed that people, some people have started being like, oh, the Pope is leading the Butlerian jihad. For those who don't know, that's a reference to Dune, the Dune series, where in that history of Dune, it's set in the far future. There's a revolt against AI and they destroy all AI and there's no AI left anymore.
• 27:07
  But they kind of people are like, they're very anti AI just across the board, anti AI. And they're like, the Pope is leading the charge.
• 27:15
  You're not reading him carefully. You're, you're basically reading how you want him, what you want him to say. He has not been doing that. He has been bringing up the real concerns of AI, the real dangers. But he's never been saying you can't use it at all, you just can't use it. He's like, we need to put it in its proper place.
• 27:33
  Actually, this reminds me, you know, something came up. Catholic Culture, the website Catholic Culture, they posted a pledge that they wanted AI I'm sorry, they want Catholic content creators like me. They asked me, in fact, writers and editors to sign.
• 27:50
  That was basically a pledge against using AI in our work.
• 27:55
  And I didn't sign it. And I posted an editor's Desk. You can look at my reasons why on Crisis website last week why I didn't. It's not because we now allow AI generated content at our site. We don't.
• 28:07
  In fact, we were one of the first that I know of media organ, Catholic media organizations that, that came out with a policy. We, we came out with it last January, I think it was, where we basically said, no, we will not knowingly publish AI generated opinion pieces.
• 28:23
  And that's. Now, I'm not saying somebody couldn't get away with it. Somebody could potentially use AI to generate a painting piece and our checks would not find it, but we, we do. Do. We do note multiple checks on it. And yes, we. The funny thing is, of course, ironically, we use AI to run these checks because that's the best way to find out for sure.
• 28:41
  But so it's not. I'm not saying we. That you know, that I will be using AI generated content for my opinion pieces or for these podcasts or for the, the articles, the opinion pieces we have. I just felt like this, the pledge went too far.
• 29:00
  Here's a confession. It's not even a confession because I'm not like, I don't. It's not wrong anything like that. I use AI a lot in my work, but I use it to assist me. And I do not hand off the things that I think are. Should be human only.
• 29:14
  So if it's like, like I had, I had a. Here's an example.
• 29:19
  Every month I have to do. I have to collect how the writers. Maybe I've already told this story here, I can't remember. But every month what I do is all the writers who write for Crisis, we pay them, of course, but they're all contractors. We. And so at the end of the month, I collect who's written for us and I send that to accounting to say, okay, you need to pay. If somebody wrote two articles, you got paying for two. Whatever. Tell them, okay, you need to pay these authors this. And I for five years here, over five years, I've done that manually. I figured out a way to have AI do that for me to automate that process.
• 29:51
  I have no qualms about doing that. I don't feel like, oh no, what have I done? I've. I've like, you know, used AI or something like that. No, that's helped me to have more time to do things like produce podcasts, write articles, you know, and things like that.
• 30:06
  So. But I felt like one of the things in the pledge was talking about not using AI very much for like research and stuff like that. And like always confirming everything you ever find on AI And I just think that's outdated.
• 30:19
  Everybody knows about the AI hallucinations. Well, the fact is those are becoming few and far between. I mean, AI improves all the time.
• 30:27
  I do almost all my research now using AI tools. Do I verify times? Absolutely. And it's always on topics that I'm already knowledgeable about. So I'm not like asking it something if it's an. If it's a topic I know nothing about, I will verify a lot more.
• 30:43
  But yeah, so I, I just felt like that statement, I feel like there's a certain. And the guys by Catholic culture are great. I'm not the people who signed it, the number of crisis writers signed it.
• 30:54
  And I don't have any problem with them signing it. Absolutely no problem whatsoever. I just didn't feel comfortable signing it because I felt like it was a little bit too anti AI as a tool. Rather than just, let's be against the bad uses of AI, it was almost like, let's be against AI in general. And I'm not going down that path.
• 31:12
  I'm pro AI in ways in which it can be properly used.
• 31:16
  And so I do think it can be used properly. And here's another thing I think. I personally think this AI era can be a boon for Catholicism.
• 31:25
  Hear me out here. I think it can be a boon for Catholicism. I can think. And the reason I say that is because we're talking about things like consciousness. We're talking about things like what is intelligence? We're talking about things that actually matter to the human person. What is our destiny? Why are we made? How are we different than machines? How are we different from animals?
• 31:43
  Who has the best answers to these questions?
• 31:46
  The Catholic Church.
• 31:48
  So I really, in fact, I saw a lot of people on X who were saying, I'm thinking about becoming Catholic. They, because of the fact that the Pope was talking against the AI consciousness, talking against the bad ways he could use AI, stuff like that. He was defending humanity against bad uses of AI and you're like, I'm thinking about becoming Catholic.
• 32:09
  I actually think that there's a good chance that the AI boon, this kind of, this development of this false religion of the test, false religion can actually bring people to Christ and to the Catholic Church.
• 32:22
  So I, I, so I'm not like, I'm not a doomer. I'm just not a doomer. I very much know that there are ways in which AI can be abused and it can cause problems for humanity. I, I'm not, I'm also not like, I don't have rose colored glasses. I'm not an AI utopian. I'm not part of testriel obviously, but I'm not a doomer. I'm not going to black pill it either.
• 32:43
  But I am going to speak out when it starts talking about, talking about itself like it's a new religion. When, when people, not the AIs but the people running the AI companies. Particularly anthropic. Particularly anthropic and OpenAI some you don't hear. I mean, I'm not a big fan of Mark Zuckerberg. I don't say that I don't like Mark Zuckerberg at all. I don't like Facebook, I don't like meta at all.
• 33:04
  But they're not talking like this. Elon, he kind of goes back and forth. Elon's a funny one and he's not really talking quite like this.
• 33:13
  And so it's, it's, it's, it's a lot of it is anthropic that's, that's causing these, these issues and pushing the religion. So I personally think though, if we go down the path that I think I see some cat that's going down, just reject all AI. It's awful. It, you know, we're just going to never use it. Whatever.
• 33:30
  I think then test grail wins the test grill religion, the test grill movement wins because nobody is slowing them down. Nobody is is saying, you know, here's how you actually should use AI, here's how you should understand AI. Here's how, here's what you need to do. If we just say we want nothing to do with it, they just win. And so I think that's why. And if you look at the history of Catholic Church, how it's always dealt with technology, this is always what we do. We never go the full Amish route. We always talk about what are the dangers, but then we use it. When television came out in the 50s, the Pope actually wrote a document. Pope Pius XII, I think it was, wrote a document about the dangers of television and then Fulton Sheen used it for great evangelization. That's the Catholic way we talk about the dangers. We make sure we don't use it in the dangerous ways we warn people dangers. But then we use it in ways that can advance humanity, can advance the Catholic religion. I think that's what we need to do. So again, I have an article, more detail about this, some of the dangers of test grill coming out later this week. Sometimes I don't want to write just the confession here. Sometimes I don't want to have a podcast episode on the same topic as an article I'm writing. But I've realized the audience is very different. I've done a lot of studies on analysis of our audience. A lot of people are just one. They just read articles or they just listen to podcasts. They don't do both. So that's why I don't mind anymore. But of course I'm going to make my big plug, my big plug, which is for my book, the Catholic Guide to Artificial Intelligence, Preserving the Distinction between man and Machine. It's coming out in just a few weeks in November. And it really details what AI, the history of AI, what it is, how it works, what are the dangers, and what's the Catholic perspective of how to use it. And so I, I, I can't, I have a link in the show notes. You can pre order it now and get it before, you know, as soon as it comes out. So I don't mind plugging it because I do think it's going to help people. Okay, so it's Tuesday afternoon, which means it's time for the live chat. Let's go here. What do we got here?
• 35:27
  Dev Pav says it doesn't matter if the LLM is conscious or not, it will still remember your verbal abuse. That, I mean that's, I, I think that's part of it.
• 35:36
  I think it's part of it does train upon how you treat it. I mean, what you say, I mean it's obviously that's a good thing in a lot of ways because it doesn't, you don't have to repeat yourself. If you make some point, it's going to continue, it's going to remember it from before. And so if you treat it abusively, my guess is it won't work as well for you and it might start treating you, it might start responding you poorly as well.
• 36:00
  Max says the warnings Elon Musk and others have given about AI pretty much confirmed the brakes should be put on AI.
• 36:06
  I disagree on this one. I'm, I'm not saying there shouldn't be any breaks put on AI. I mean, I don't think there should be outside breaks like the government putting brakes on necessarily other than. Okay, let me make this clear. This is kind of confusing. I do think AI companies should be responsible for to the law when they use or test their AI in irresponsible ways. If you look at some of the breaks like the, the jailbreaks like the ways that and you know, OpenAI or anthropic their code has gotten out into the wild and done something hacked somewhere you will always find that they irresponsibly set it up. They didn't set up the sandbox properly or something like that. I think they should be responsible for that legally for the damage done. Absolutely.
• 36:52
  I don't think though. I think these warnings are a combination of marketing of this AI religion, dumerism, this. I, I, I really don't think it is.
• 37:03
  I think what they're say it always assumes the con, the consciousness will come to AI and since that won't actually happen a lot of the doomer predictions aren't going to happen.
• 37:16
  Bill says in New York City there was a speed plane that got to the UK in two hours. The noise was unbearable. It was decided the trade off wasn't worth it. The same for AI. It's not worth the negative externalities. And okay, you know that is true there are there you could make. That's an, that's an argument you can make and I respect that argument.
• 37:34
  It's not like every tool created we say okay, we have to use it.
• 37:39
  It's not necessarily, I do think though that there are some tools that just become part of the world and you can't put the genie back in the bottle. We might want to but it just can't be done.
• 37:52
  Because how for example would you limit AI you could potentially limit in this country but you can't force other countries to limit it.
• 38:01
  And so if they just continue, if China or, or Europe or whoever keeps using it, you know, it doesn't really stop. That's why I think it's more important that we hold companies that do irresponsible things responsible to law but, but also as Catholics we lead the way in saying here's how it needs to be used, here's how you need to understand it.
• 38:20
  John says how can we consider whether AI is conscious without first asking what consciousness is? I mean I, I, this is something I posted last week. I said if you ask a hundred people to define consciousness you'll get a hundred different answers. I think this is where and the truth is if you even look at like for example the old Catholic Encyclopedia on New Advent I think it says somewhere in there like unconsciousness, like it's not really defined precisely even in the Catholic tradition.
• 38:45
  But in the Catholic tradition there's at least guardrails on what we, on what consciousness is. We know what it's not in a lot of cases I Mean ultimately it comes down to a self awareness like and that's what a machine can't have if you understand how it's working under, under the hood. But you're right. I think that that's why we need philosophers and theologians more than anybody to define what consciousness is. Dev Bob says consciousness is a near meaningless term, especially in philosophy. I mean it is in a lot of ways.
• 39:15
  I mean, I think that's why the more important definition though is about what the human person is and how it's distinct from machines. I do think, I don't think consciousness is completely meaningless. But I do understand your point that it's, it's so multi defined by so many different people. It's hard to like pin it down at all.
• 39:34
  Huskers are royals. Gal says philosophy is not a degree that can raise a family.
• 39:38
  You are right about that. I know somebody whose son went to one of these Catholic colleges on the east coast that is good, majored in philosophy. And I, you know, I know a lot of them too. I, I know, I know. I mean like I said, for years I've told people, young people, especially men, don't get a philosophy or theology degree because you can't support your family. And I still think that's true. At the same time, I do think we need philosophers and theologians because I think if you get a degree, I'm not like a huge defender of like a degree at Thomas Aquinas College, but at the same time, if you get a degree at Thomas Aquinas College, you can work at a company. Maybe not anthropic itself, but you can work at these companies and you can help guide how they do it because you have skills that a lot of people don't have. So I do think you can get jobs that are useful.
• 40:26
  And I've kind of changed my mind on that by the way, over time.
• 40:29
  YouTube says it was the Concorde. Yeah, that's the speed plane. But it was the cost that needed eventually killed it in the accident on takeoff when a tire was punctured. Yeah, I don't. It wasn't just like they decide, okay, it was just the noise. But I do think you're right. Like nuclear energy is a good example of how that has been sorely limited because we believe the trade offs weren't worth it. I actually think, I haven't done tons of research on this, but I actually think nuclear energy should be used more than it does. It is. I think it's safer than people think it is. I like, I haven't Done super research if I'm wrong about that, whatever.
• 41:00
  But there are times in which we decide the trade offs of new technology aren't worth it and we decide not to use it.
• 41:09
  AI Bootcamp ST versus an AI. God made man, man made AI. Therefore, God made AI. That is actually accurate to say that any tools we make, you know, this microphone, God. God made this microphone, this laptop. God made this laptop, this camera. God made the camera because man made it and God made us. I believe it can be used for good and it can bring more people to the one holy Catholic opposite church. I'm returning Catholic, 18 years.
• 41:34
  There we go. We got positive AI, positive guy here, pro AI guy, kind of like me. So.
• 41:40
  And I think, like, I think this is an important debate. I've been bringing it up multiple times in the podcast and in my writing recently because I do think it's becoming one of the great social issues of our day. One that the Catholic Church has to be at the forefront on. I mean, remember, it's the reason our current Pope took the name he took is because of artificial intelligence. That's how big a deal it is. We can't just be like, sweep it under the rug. Like, it's not that big a deal. But I also think, I think we have to avoid the two extremes. One is we buy into the AI utopianism. Oh, it's going to bring about good. It's going to make everything great. But also the AI doomerism. I don't just mean the ones who say that like, you know, Terminator is going to happen. I mean, like a lot of young people, I'm sorry, call me an old man yelling at the. It's kind of funny because I'm the old man, but I'm the one not being cranky. And the young people are the young people who are just like, I hate all AI. They're judging it based upon the fact that they hate, like, for example, some of this crappy AI slop they see. And I do too.
• 42:43
  But that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology, how it's broader than just something that can create slop.
• 42:49
  It's borrowing something just create slop. And so I think we need to engage with it. I think we need to understand, I think we need to use it when properly used for our good and understand when it. The dangers to it and teach people how to use it properly. I think that's the key. I think that's really what matters.
• 43:06
  Okay, well, I've talked about this enough. I appreciate buying the live chat and I you know those of you who are much more anti AI me you think I'm like being a boomer about this. I respect you. I want you to know that I I'm not saying Catholic every single Catholic must use AI all the time I'm just saying though as, as a church we have to engage this issue we have to embrace the proper uses of AI in in certain situations if you don't want to use it that's fine but like understand that it's not an evil in and of itself it can be used for evil and there's evil uses like it has more evil uses than like a, a glass, a cup to has but it doesn't mean it's evil in of itself and so I'm just going to keep beating this drum and again you know buy my book when it comes out pre order it now and and you know we can have a deeper engagement vibe okay until next time everybody God love you and remember the poor.