The harsh conversation was when Demis told Elon: I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman AI
And Elon responds to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am becoming interplanetary species.
And then Demis said: Well, you know my AI will be able to follow you to Mars.
And then Elon was silent…
Thiel himself sums up this meeting of minds: “It was the silliest meeting with Elon that we mediated.”
Proclamation in the shadow
Of course, I am not the only one raising this question about the Pope’s encyclical.
He The Catholic Herald asked“Does Magnifica Humanitas target Peter Thiel’s techno-political empire?”
Or, as a technology blogger Simon Willison wrote: “I can’t help but wonder if JRR Tolkien’s quote from The return of the king Was the Pope throwing some shade at Peter Thiel?
But I don’t think this Pope operates according to categories like “throwing shade.” As we saw when Leo confronted Donald Trump over his pet war in Iran, Leo sees his job as preaching and proclaiming.
“The mission of the Church is to announce the Gospel, to preach peace”, León he said at that time. “I simply hope to be heard for the value of the word of God.”
His quote from Gandalf may well be directed at Thiel, or perhaps more generally at those who think similarly. But it’s not confrontational or insulting. It is a way of speaking across differences using a line drawn from a cultural resource shared between the two sides. It offers a new interpretation of Tolkien’s tremendous work to those who see in it a license for war, technological disruption, battles and global action. Those things exist in the story and are exciting, but also terrifying and ultimately endured only for the purpose of defending community, hearth, and home.
In Tolkien’s world, it is the “little people” (in fact, it is the hapless outcast Gollum) who ultimately save the world from the battles and technologies of the “great ones,” and so it is in the limited world of the hobbits that the action begins and ends.
I think it is in this sense that the Pope offers a different vision to today’s technological aristocrats. He explicitly asks them to abandon their dreams of transhumanism and “artificial” intelligences and to replace those dreams with something more truly human.
