{"id":51900,"date":"2026-05-26T20:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T20:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/51900\/"},"modified":"2026-05-26T20:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T20:19:08","slug":"at-the-a-i-epicenter-technologists-dismiss-pope-leos-warnings-about-the-new-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/51900\/","title":{"rendered":"At the A.I. Epicenter, Technologists Dismiss Pope Leo\u2019s Warnings About the New Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Pope Leo XIV presented a 42,300-word open letter<\/a> to the world\u2019s 1.4 billion Catholics on Monday, calling for protections against the rise of artificial intelligence, he was joined by Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, which is one of the tech industry\u2019s leading A.I. companies.<\/p>\n

As Leo urged corporate executives, government regulators and other citizens of the world to safeguard humanity from the dangers of A.I., he included Mr. Olah as a symbol of the dialogue he hopes to foster between the leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.<\/p>\n

But for Jeremy Nixon, Monday\u2019s gathering at the Vatican showed that those two worlds are far from aligned. While the pope said that A.I. was fundamentally not human, Mr. Nixon, a well-connected figure in the Bay Area\u2019s frenetic A.I. scene, argued that Mr. Olah\u2019s remarks seemed to hint at the opposite.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are not in dialogue,\u201d Mr. Nixon said during an interview at A.G.I. House, a San Francisco \u201chacker house\u201d with deep ties to many of the people who helped create the A.I. technologies discussed in the pope\u2019s encyclical. \u201cTheir perspectives are distinct.\u201d<\/p>\n

The difference between the humanist\u2019s view of A.I.\u2019s risks and the technologist\u2019s dream of what it could become is something that has long been discussed in Mr. Nixon\u2019s community. \u201cIt is the reason the community exists,\u201d Mr. Nixon said. \u201cIt is its underlying purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Nixon, 33, is one of the founders of A.G.I. House, which is named for Silicon Valley\u2019s headlong pursuit of \u201cartificial general intelligence,\u201d a hypothetical machine that can do anything the human brain can do<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are named for this moment in history,\u201d he said of his seven-room group house. Over the years, it has been home to a rotating collection of researchers, entrepreneurs and philosophers.<\/p>\n

More than most, Mr. Nixon understands the technology emerging from Silicon Valley and the attitudes of the people building it. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, when Silicon Valley started developing the technologies<\/a> that power chatbots, Mr. Nixon worked in Google\u2019s central A.I. lab. Later, he founded A.G.I. House with Andrej Karpathy, who was an early employee at OpenAI, oversaw self-driving tech at Tesla and recently joined Anthropic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mr. Nixon said the papal encyclical might mean something to the world\u2019s Catholics, but he doubted that it would have an effect on Silicon Valley. The only reason that Silicon Valley even paid attention to the event, he said, was that Leo invited Mr. Olah to speak.<\/p>\n

For Mr. Nixon, the pope\u2019s open letter read like one of the many government policy documents that have been shared among think tanks and regulators over the past several years. \u201cIt did not seem like the church had thought deeply about what their independent perspective was on A.I.,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is not clear they could do that even if they tried.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cThey couldn\u2019t have a position on it, because they don\u2019t understand it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The response to the encyclical from across Silicon Valley was fairly muted.<\/p>\n

David Sacks, the Silicon Valley investor who served as the White House A.I. czar, pushed back<\/a> on the pope\u2019s call for additional A.I. regulation. \u201cIf we hand governments sweeping power over A.I. development in the name of safety, how do we prevent it from being used to censor, surveil, and control citizens \u2014 as Orwell foretold in \u20181984\u2019?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and who now runs the financial company Block, welcomed the pope\u2019s call<\/a> for A.I.\u2019s underpinnings \u2014 patents, data and technological infrastructure \u2014 to be shared with everyone, not just a relative few.<\/p>\n

The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

Looking out over San Francisco, toward the Golden Gate Bridge in the north, A.G.I. House plays host to ad hoc seminars on the philosophies driving Silicon Valley\u2019s pursuit of A.I. and \u201chackathons\u201d in which researchers from the leading labs explore the boundaries of the technologies they are building.<\/p>\n

In the early afternoon following the pope\u2019s encyclical, dozens of foldable chairs were set up in rows across the living room. But on this Memorial Day, the only figures in the room were two jet-black mannequins that stood near the wall.<\/p>\n

The A.G.I. House founders first moved into a $68 million mansion in Hillsborough, Calif<\/a>., just south of San Francisco. They wanted to create a group house where researchers and engineers gathered to discuss new ideas and create new companies. Mr. Nixon started a second house in San Francisco near the top of Twin Peaks, overlooking the city from its highest hills.<\/p>\n

Many of the founders and important researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI joined the earliest gatherings at A.G.I. House. Mr. Nixon is now founder and chief executive of a start-up called the Infinity Artificial Intelligence Institute, which is trying to automate the creation of A.I<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mr. Nixon said he has met a generation of scientists who shunned traditional religion in favor of technology. After growing up with books like \u201cThe God Delusion\u201d \u2014 in which the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins painted God as a false belief contradicted by empirical evidence \u2014 he and his peers saw A.I. as an alternative that was more real and far more powerful.<\/p>\n

A.I. has started to crack math problems<\/a> that humans struggled with for decades<\/a>, he said, and it will soon cure diseases in the same way. \u201cPractically speaking, it will achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species \u2014 or even a new God.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are matter-of-factly saying that they are looking to build a machine God,\u201d said Rayan Krishnan, the chief executive of Vals AI, a San Francisco company that tracks the performance of the latest A.I. technologies. \u201cThey are not saying that ironically or in jest. They are saying it as a matter of fact.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his encyclical, called \u201cMagnifica Humanitas\u201d or \u201cMagnificent Humanity,\u201d Leo called for safeguards that would protect humanity. He stressed that humans must continue to play a fundamental role in the workplace.<\/p>\n

\u201cA society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThis creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Work, he added, is not just a way of earning income. It is \u201ca requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also used the biblical story of the Tower of Babel \u2014 in which a group of humans who speak a single unified language aim to build a tower that reaches to heavens so they can exert their power \u2014 as a way of warning Silicon Valley against the pitfalls of trying to outdo God.<\/p>\n

His most forceful message was that A.I. was fundamentally not human<\/a>, because it could only imitate certain parts of human intelligence and behavior. \u201cSo-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

But in a seven-minute speech at the Vatican, Mr. Olah, the Anthropic co-founder, described a technology that may be progressing beyond a simple machine.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is actually happening inside them?\u201d he said. \u201cWe find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Nixon thought Mr. Olah\u2019s speech was far more spiritual than the words delivered by the pope, even if Mr. Olah was making claims that were not necessarily based on science. Though Mr. Olah hinted that chatbots may have working lives of their own, Mr. Nixon said, they are still very much dependent on humans to do anything, as Mr. Olah noted.<\/p>\n

\u201cA.I. is still controlled by people who are trying to make money or solve some mathematical problem or what have you,\u201d Mr. Nixon said. <\/p>\n

But what is clear, he added, is that A.I. researchers are trying to build technologies that have jobs, feel joy and pain, and exhibit all sorts of qualities that match and even exceed the traits that make us human. He believes it could happen within the decade.<\/p>\n

He chuckled at the pope\u2019s invocation of the Tower of Babel. When he was at Google, a project the company called Babel built translation technology that has essentially allowed everyone to speak the same language<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On Monday evening, he and others in his circle gathered in the A.G.I. House living room to discuss the encyclical. They agreed that Leo\u2019s open letter would have little effect on Silicon Valley, he said, but they wondered whether Silicon Valley might have an effect on the pope \u2014 if the Vatican might use A.I. technologies to \u201ccreate a New Jerusalem.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA.I. and its capabilities represent something analogous to the Second Coming,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Pope Leo XIV presented a 42,300-word open letter to the world\u2019s 1.4 billion Catholics on Monday, calling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[30652,6744,1556,3013,25,1555,26106,30651,26165,30650,25992,9325,29748],"class_list":["post-51900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agi","tag-a-g-i-house","tag-agi","tag-anthropic-ai-llc","tag-artificial-general-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-computers-and-the-internet","tag-encyclicals","tag-jeremy","tag-leo-xiv","tag-nixon","tag-popes","tag-religion-and-belief","tag-roman-catholic-church"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}