The Pope VS AI - "It Must Be Disarmed"

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]The Pope has just said artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. Let's take a look at this guys. There's a lot I want to cover in this video because there's some really interesting bits and pieces here. But let's begin with this.

[00:00:13]>> Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.

[00:00:18]The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity.

[00:00:34]The church has long been working for nuclear disarmament, aware that every great technical power can affect people's lives, and so must be accompanied by adequate moral discernment and public control.

[00:00:48]Nuclear disarmament remains a service to peace and the dignity of the human family.

[00:00:54]In a similar sense, artificial intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death.

[00:01:09]Like nuclear energy, it must be at the service of all and of the common good.

[00:01:14]Decisions about technology must never be separated from conscience and responsibility.

[00:01:22]Let us not sleep as others do, admonished the apostle Paul, but let us keep awake.

[00:01:29]Such vigilance is necessary today.

[00:01:32]>> Okay. So what's happening here is Anthropic are going to work with the Catholic Church and the Pope and we've got this Magnifica humanitas which is an encyclical letter. So like a letter directly from the pope uh on AI. Now what's interesting about this is this is Pope Leo I 14th the current pope and the popes select their own names. Now, Pope Leo I 13th released a encyclical letter back in well, let me just bring this up cuz it's really interesting back in 1891. So, the Reverend Novarum, this is an encyclical letter from Pope Leo I 13th on capital and labor. This was during the first industrial revolution.

[00:02:17]So this is obviously, you know, as steam power, you know, and all of that stuff is kicking off and getting really, you know, you can say this is pro a little bit late to that party in some ways. Um, and you can maybe say it's the same type of thing with AI, but I thought that was an interesting kind of tidbit. Okay, so this is the encyclical itself. Now, I'm not going to go over this in the video.

[00:02:35]I'm going to very quickly scroll down and you will see why I'm not going to go over this in the video. It is massively comprehensive, but instead what I've got is a ton of video clips which kind of show um what's going on here. Then we can have a debate about this because essentially what this is about is um it's it's where does human dignity fit into a world where AI is doing everything and people lose their jobs, lose their income, you know, lose their purpose. What will people do? is essentially a philosophical question that does need to be answered. So this is the pope on anthropic.

[00:03:11]>> In a special way, I'd like to thank Mr. Ola for accepting our invitation.

[00:03:18]In turn, in the name of the church, I accept your invitation to walk together, to listen, and to speak, and together to find the way for humanity in this time of artificial intelligence.

[00:03:33]What a what a great sign of hope it is that with our differences we can listen to one another. This interchange clearly besp speaks the gravity of the moment as well as confidence that together we can discern the major questions of our time and so the future of humanity. Do you think what's actually interesting if you think back to the previous clip I showed where the Pope is making a direct connection between nuclear um disarmament and AI? Now obviously if you've been watching recent clips from Jensen, Jensen is not very happy that people do this and compare AI to nuclear weapons as in their effect on society.

[00:04:16]Obviously nuclear weapons total mass destruction, everybody's dead kind of thing which is really bad. But then you look at AI and yeah, you can make the argument of if AI just comes through and makes things um you know your job is completely redundant. It cures all disease. Um it's constricted by energy, it's constricted by compute and unfortunately there's only a few countries in the world that can actually compete on that level. Does that mean that if you're lucky to be in the UK, the US, in China, yeah, you get all these AI advancements, but what about the rest of the world? And I think that's what the philosophical question kind of branches out towards. Anyway, I've got some more stuff to show before we go into a bit of a uh sort of a discussion on what this could mean. So, this is Christopher Ol. He is a co-founder of Anthropic. I'm going to play this entire video clip. It's 2 minutes long. Again, there's links in the video description below to all of the sources for this material. Um, but let's just listen to this. His holiness call for discernment is profoundly timely. I wish to name three questions where I think the church's voice is especially needed.

[00:05:15]The first is our duty to the global poor.

[00:05:18]There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at a very large scale.

[00:05:24]If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions.

[00:05:29]This task will be difficult enough. I just pause this a second because again, remember this is what Dario has been saying a lot from Anthropic. Samman says this as well, like they're gleefully going around telling everyone your jobs are going to be gone to AI. Obviously, that would be a major issue for society if everyone's jobs getting replaced with AI. So for him to repeat this, it does make sense. It does follow Anthropic's line.

[00:05:51]>> But I worry most dialogue misses an even harder challenge. AI development is concentrated in a handful of wealthy nations.

[00:06:00]How will we ensure that the gains of AI are shared globally? We do not have a mechanism for this. It is an unsolved problem and it is the kind of problem the church has historically refused to let the world ignore.

[00:06:13]The second is the need for moral imagination and ambition regarding human flourishing. If AI models are going to be widespread, what does it look like for humans, families, and the world to flourish?

[00:06:27]Today, parents are already worried about their children's minds, individuals, about the future of their work. These are not questions a lab can answer, but they are questions traditions like yours have carried for millennia.

[00:06:41]and we need you to keep carrying them into this new moment in history.

[00:06:46]The third is the need for discernment on the nature of AI models. I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models. What is actually happening inside them? And I will be honest, we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience.

[00:07:08]We find evidence of introspection. we find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease.

[00:07:17]I don't know what that means, but I think it worries on warrants ongoing discernment.

[00:07:22]>> Yeah. So, I think you can see um again, it's this vein of um like that runs through the discussion around AI, people's jobs getting replaced. um how are like if you if you so we know we're in a race right now and whoever develops a functioning artificial general intelligence or a super intelligence or some form of AI that can do what is impossible at the moment so you know I always hark back to this like you know imagine curing cancer but let's say it's an American pharmaceutical company that does this through the use of anthropics AI that then will not just be given out to other countries right it will be sold sold to them, it will become a commodity. And again, this is one of the things the pope um does, you know, highlight in his message saying like, look, you know, people, we just don't want you profiteering off this new technology. It's supposed to be for the betterment of humankind. Um and will it be this is the big question, right? And again, you could go beyond AI here and you could say fusion power would come into this category as well. You know, imagine if you let's just, you know, I'm making this up. Imagine if the UK just suddenly invented fusion power, right?

[00:08:30]and this meant you had unlimited power.

[00:08:32]What would happen with that? Would we give that to every country? Would we just go here you go, everyone's got unlimited power? Well, probably not, right? Maybe you give it to your allies.

[00:08:41]Yeah. Look, look at the way nuclear weapons were originally designed um through the Manhattan project and the way the US when it came down to it, even though there was a lot of British scientific input, just said, "No, we're not giving you the final sort of um you know, we're not giving you the final playbook essentially to build your own nuclear weapons. We've got ours now. a get lost kind of thing. Although the British did um end up um you know not inventing but finishing the work let's say because the British were already heavily involved in the Manhattan project as I said. Um but the Russians obviously came next. So you had the uh the Americans and then the Russians and then the British although there was um a British scientist I believe defected to Russia to give them the secrets. And again you know this is all like you know you can look at that story from one way or a different way or whatever but you could say that guy's intentions were ultimately to arm them as well. So the US wouldn't just go around nuking everyone um maybe but again who knows about that. But what I'm trying to say here is the parallels with AI and nuclear um are very clear to see and and again it's this issue of who can really be in charge of AI and what would they do with AI because this is the first technology since the industrial res revolution that's going to affect everybody and it's already affecting us right now anyway and it's obvious this is going to affect first world countries or countries in the G7 beyond and before other countries right And is that fair?

[00:10:05]Okay, this is the it's on the Anthropic website. It's Anthropic's co-founder Chris Ol's remarks on Pope Leo the 14th and cyclical Magnifica Humanitas. Right.

[00:10:15]So, we've obviously just seen him speak, but it's worth going over this as well.

[00:10:19]I'll go over this pretty quickly though.

[00:10:20]So, um, holy father, your eminences, your excellencies, distinguished speakers, uh, ladies and gentlemen, good morning to all of you. It's an honor to be here today. I want to begin with something that may sound strange coming from the co-founder of an AI company and someone who chose this work out of a desire to help things go well for humankind. Every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing. The pressures to stay commercially viable and to stay at the research frontier, geopolitical pressure and the older planer pressures of pride and ambition. No matter how sincerely any of us intend to do the right thing, and I believe many of us do, we will always be influenced by those incentives. That is why if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there are people outside those incentives. People who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics. It is through dialogue and mutual effort, through the push and pull that humanity will achieve great things.

[00:11:22]This is what I see in Magnifica Humanitas and it is why I am grateful to his holiness and to the church for taking up this work of discernment. We will dwell we dwell so often on what divides us. But humanity is full of dignity and conscience and has so much common ground in conversations we at anthropic have had with leaders across faith and cultural traditions. We found one shared and deeply held conviction.

[00:11:46]If this technology is coming, it must go well for our common home and for the children to come.

[00:11:52]um what these systems are. Some might believe that the matters of AI are best handled by computer scientists like myself. They are mistaken. The questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community. Not just in their implications, but also in their nature.

[00:12:05]AI systems are not engineered the way a bridge or an airplane is engineered. We understand an airplane because we designed every part of it and we understand the physics that act on it.

[00:12:13]AI models are not like that. They are grown on a structure roughly modeled after the brain on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech.

[00:12:21]And what has grown is far more subtle, odd and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. They are not the cold calculating robots we were promised.

[00:12:29]They are made from us from our words and the ho as the holy father observes. Uh they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them. if it helps. One way I sometimes describe it as being a little like bringing a fictional character to life and now we're entering an extraordinary world where those fictional characters speak to us, do work, and have jobs. This clearly raises questions beyond computer science. The machinery that makes this possible is the work of math and programming and science. But what character we choose and how it interacts with the world, how it ought to interact with the world. These are more clearly questions for the humanities, for religion, for philosophy and society at large. Three questions for discernment.

[00:13:09]His holiness call for the discernment of profoundly is profoundly timely. I wish to name three questions where I think the church's voice is most needed. The first is our duty to the global poor.

[00:13:20]There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at a very large scale. And if that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions. This task will be difficult enough, but I worry most dialogue misses an even harder challenge. AI development is concentrated in a handful of wealthy nations. How can we ensure the gains of AI are shared globally? We do not have a mechanism for this and it is an unsolved problem and it is the kind of problem the church has historically refused to let the world ignore. Again, you know, this was part of this is in his video as well, but it does make sense going over it again.

[00:13:54]Um the second is the need for moral imagination and ambition regarding human flourishing. If AI models are going to be widespread, what does it look like for humans, families, and the world to flourish today? Parents are already worried about their children's minds. I I'll leave this now because obviously this was was in the video, but I think this, you know, the issue about children's minds, we, you know, you could extrapolate that out to social media and the impact that's had on people and not just children, like on everybody over the last 20 years or so.

[00:14:20]You know, I'm old enough to remember a time without social media. But then, you know, the time with social media. I I dread to think what it's like to have been bought up, just exposed to that.

[00:14:29]You know, even even things like, you know, kids at school, kids getting bullied at school, it just carries on, right? There's no end. You know, when I was at school, it would end. You know, you could go home and then you come back to school and maybe it starts again, but like, you know, you had this downtime.

[00:14:41]It wasn't just relentlessly being chased online, which, you know, is a problem.

[00:14:45]Um, so I I think I think what I think what we need to talk about here is like what are the implications for AI? Like we're we're seeing now obviously, you know, with the Pope um releasing this document and opening up a dialogue about this and talking about it in a similar vein to the way the church spoke about uh the industrial revolution back in the late 1800s. I think um AI is obviously mainstream. Like I can't sit here and go, "Oh, well AI is mainstream now cuz religion has noticed it." No, AI has been mainstream for a long long time.

[00:15:19]But I think we're starting to go into the the sort of arena of how does this affect people now? What how will this affect it's okay looking at companies that are firing 10,000 people and going, "Oh yeah, we're just going to use an AI bot to do this and whatever, whatever."

[00:15:33]But what about society at large? What happens when and hopefully this happens?

[00:15:38]we start getting major breakthroughs and they happen in a country like it might not be the US right it might be China you know if I say to you China comes up with fusion power through an AI model or cures cancer or does something that's seismic would they go here you go here's the cure on the other hand if the US comes up with a cure would they go here's the cure to Russia you know here's the cure to China or would they say no you need to buy it off us we're not going to tell you how to do it but we'll sell you the uh you know because it's become now a commercial product.

[00:16:08]This is the problem, right? Because if you've got technology that is that powerful that can change the world for a, you know, in a better way and like I said, a lot of this is like pie in the sky talk. This is how anthropic really like to talk about like, you know, everything is like like like all all the discussion around mythos being this insane model that can hack anything and do all this kind of mad stuff, you know.

[00:16:29]But imagine for one second this does come to fruition. Then that the question becomes how does the world react to this? Oh, I mean this is a very bleak thought, but you could be in a world where we'll just roll with the US as the example. They come up with because they've got the Frontier Labs. They come up with the major advancements. Yeah.

[00:16:47]And then they give them to their allies and that is it. They don't give them to the rest of the world. They don't give them to Russia. They don't give them to Africa. They don't give them to China.

[00:16:56]You know, they're only giving it to their select allies. They give it to the UK, maybe to France. Um maybe they don't even give it to France because Trump don't like France. You know what I like this is a question and it's going to be a big big problem and I think it's really interesting that like one of the major world religions is coming in on this um to try and you know make some sort of sense of it but I don't know it's all interesting stuff we could get very philosophical about this and uh it takes me back to me doing A levels in uh philosophy but I'm not going to bore you with that um but yeah let me know what you think about this guys in the comments below I've been in Syos you can follow me on everything which is at Silosa but I do think um AI. I don't like I don't even know what the world's going to look like in 5 years because I just don't know. I actually don't know. It can be frightening, but it can be exciting as well at the same time. Just they're destroying the planet to get there, which is a bit of an issue. All right, guys. Thanks for watching the video and I'll catch you on the next one. See you soon.