The Vatican Takes On AI

24:52This is the question. And this is a different perspective. But the social doctrine of the church in this shape is a reflection that is 150 years old. So in 150 years, we are really clear state in a multiple occasion that first, First, we are not the owner of solution. We are part of the debate. We are part of the dialogue. And probably the church is also able to bring voices that otherwise will be excluded. Second thing has to be plural. There is a really interesting debate happening during the 60s and the 70s about unions. Should Christians look just for Christian unions? Well, the answer was really clear.

25:33not, because unions is something that is made to make social justice and negotiation of the paycheck is not important that you belong to the church. It's much more important that you are looking for justice. And so also the solution that probably the church is expecting is not a confessional one, but it's a plural one, something that can happen in a multilateral debate. And this is also politically interesting now, you know, in a moment in which multilateralism is seen like, you know, smoke in the eye. Well, it's stressing things that no one should be excluded. More than one, there is another element.

26:13When you talk about regulation, it's really cultural understood. In China means, yeah, the leading party give the rules that everyone will follow. in Europe is much more understand as an hard law things. In United States, we have a totally different understanding. In the social doctrine of the church, regulation is also the name that you give to standard. When we produce a car, we decide that we can drive it on the right side of the curb or on the left side of the curb. And having such kind of standard is something that is avoiding accident that help to save life. So the first step is a standardization of AI in which it's really clear and transparent the definition of some of the criteria that is bringing this technology to us.

27:02Everyone knows that the quality of data, for example, is something that produces the quality of answer. And if there is a demography that is underrepresented, probably the judgment of AI will be not so just on such kind of things. And this is a standard. Should we declare the number of people or the demographic or the quality of data that are behind such kind of system, or should they can remain secret like the recipe of Coca-Cola or Pepsi?

27:30Kara Swisher:Right. And so you're trying to broaden the debate. Now, Popolio met with representatives from tech companies, including Meta, Google and Amazon. What do you know about the concerns he shared with them? Or what was the reason? Well, let me say that this is happening in a sort of event that we are calling audience. An audience is a wild animal in the sense that can happen in a one-to-one private room in which you are really free to discuss about everything and nothing happens. Or it could be a public audience. And can you imagine when you are the CIO of a company that is at the value of one trillion?

28:09if you say something that can produce the lowering of value. So in that case, they are really, you know, hard guard related. And it's not easy that personal talking happen. Or it can happen in a plural way that is much more official, diplomatic, with a lot of, you know, dancing style. And so the speech that you are talking about happened in a really different condition. So we can imagine that in one-to-one private audience, I was in a private audience between Microsoft guys and Pope Francis, the debate was really free. Because you can say what you want and nothing surface. In a public moment with pictures, shaking of hands, every declaration could be a nuclear weapon.

28:56And so it's much less effective.

28:58Kara Swisher:Much less. But Pope has been trying to reach out to talk to different tech people to also get their insight, presumably. Yes, it's a two-way discussion. But at the same time, there's been some that have been very critical. Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, he was also in Rome ahead of the encyclicals release, where he gave a series of talks, including one where he reportedly said the Antichrist would be, quote, a Luddite who wants to stop all science. What is he doing, from your perspective? He's called people like me, Antichrist, things like that. Probably even that I'm a communist. Yes, what do you make of what he's up to?

29:33Well, you know, I think that he is like everyone has his own ideas and blueprint and ideological blueprint. My sensibility tells me that he's not believing in democracy, he's not believing in society, and he's believing that it's time for a society made by individual. But this is good. is something of the society is remained. So you are looking to trench your own space and no one can trespass. But if all the global society collapse, well, you will have no security. Try to think that. Every time in the morning I wake up and I would like to wash my teeth. I don't go and make any analysis on the water that has come out from the pipe because I'm believing that the water company, other human beings, other members of my species, make what is enough to bring me the best water that they can.

30:30Welcome to the social contract. So, in a really wild situation in which there is not more any social contract, and you are an individual with a series of individuals, this is simple something that cannot work. And this is where the ideology has to face with reality. And so in my perspective, the problem with Peter Thiel is this, is pushing on an idea that is good if you have to capture some values from a still remaining society. If it will produce the collapsing of society, it will be the law of the jungle.

31:04Kara Swisher:Which I think he prefers. I think monarchy is what he's going for. Vice President J.D. Vance is the highest ranking Catholic in the U.S. government, but I'm sure you remember when he told the Pope to, quote, be careful when talking about theology. He's been a little more muted on the encyclical. And at the same time, he sort of asked you all not to involve yourself in this thing. Were you surprised by that? And what would you like to see from him as a fellow Catholic? Well, you know, I don't want to be involved with the United States politics. I'm a foreign citizen. I'm a poor Franciscan. Let me talk about theology that is easier.

31:40And probably what I see as an Italian with the Italian politics, that what you express in public, sometimes as an ant that is a politic ant and is not really connected to the word that you are expressing. So, my feeling as someone that belonged to a country with a really complex politics, and that probably we have to divide the content of the world by the political ants of the man that was pushing this. And so, he is free as a politician, and probably as a brilliant one, if he was elected as a vice president, to use the political term that you want to make his own politics. Well, if we have to meet in a church talking about the gospel, well, the gospel could be a different topic, you know.

32:24Kara Swisher:But you feel that, as opposed to what these guys are saying, that the church has every right to be weighing in on this and actually making the wider. Well, my really deep faith as a Catholic is that the church cannot stop to talk about the gospel. And if the gospel bring us on some friction, it's not the first time in the history we have with a lot of different situation in the past, and we will face also this. We'll be back in a minute.

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33:55Kara Swisher:Now, you've said this is just the beginning of the discussion about tech. And I'm going to step back and talk about the idea of the church's moral authority. So every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Here's yours. I think you'll like who it is. My name is Joshua Bengio. And the big question I would ask Father Paolo Benanti is the following. International collaboration on AI safety is currently being outpaced by a competitive race to develop increasingly powerful models. How does the Vatican intend to continue leveraging its unique position to unite countries around shared, human-centered safeguards for AI?

34:38Which are the main stakeholders that you believe also need to be involved? well you know Joshua is always brilliant and he put the nail in the cube the problem is is it a competition and always competition something that is in some way good for everyone well you know competition bring a mathematical model that say winner take goals so if you win I lose when we face the most important thing in the world, like, for example, achieving a cure for the cancer. If you and me sit at the same table and you have an idea and I have an idea, both of us have two ideas. So the difference is a zero sum game and a non zero sum games.

35:26So if we are looking at the best outcome for humanity, we have to play a non zero sum games. That does not mean to not be naive because there are sections, like, for example, security, the protection of the most fragile, in which there are to put some guardrail in action. But if the global landscape, we become at zero some games, we are not producing any kind of wealth. We are not producing any kind of good results for humanity and probably also for the tech company. Because, you know, we can imagine a gold rush model, but with a gold rush model, well, you know, I don't know if all the money that are putting in inside this model will bring back some kind of return of investment.

36:10And so here it's a matter of a win-win situation, which is not just a matter of being faithful to the gospel, but also a matter to being really rational on what does it mean to look to a real return to everyone, a return to someone, to everybody.

36:27Kara Swisher:So what can the Vatican do to continue to leverage this? What is next from your perspective, to keep these human-centered safeguards that was talked about in the encyclical in place? And who are the main stakeholders here? Who do you have to continue to be in dialogue with? Well, it's easy, this kind of question, because it belonged to the social doctrine of the church. So I simply have to repeat, like in a catechism, some kind of point. Well, first of all, we saw really clearly we have not the way, but we could be the square, You know, it's not easy to have a dialogue if I know that you have billions and I have billions of interest on both sides.

37:07But because church is not investing, church has not money that are going on, it could be a square in which different players come to discuss. Which player? Well, the social doctrine of the church state really clearly, and we are talking of the late 18th century, where we are not so open like we are now today, that is not for the elected, but is for every woman and man of goodwill. So everyone that is looking for the best good, best interest of humanity is welcome here. So the only thing is, are you open to change your mind if you see something that sounds really convincing on the topic that we are discussing?

37:52This is the entrance gate. And I think that could be workable as a long time institution that is not the first time that is crossing a changing of time. So we are not the United Nations. We are not a sovereign state that globally has nuclear power or things like that. But we know something about what does it mean to be human and that there is a lot of voices that are asking to not be simple, suppressed for the convenience of someone.

38:20Kara Swisher:Right. So you would be a square, an actual public square. A square would be the model, yeah. I know that tech companies think they're a public square, but they're not. It's a private square owned by them, controlled by them. This is the mistake that we make in the first decade of the century. I've said that, you know, this has been my thing. I said, Mark Zuckerberg. I give this part of your speech to my students and also they know very well. It's a private city in which he doesn't help you. You don't get water, you don't get power and you pay a rent. It's just, it's not a square. And the funny thing here is that we use a word that has a really high value, that is democratization.

38:55because when, you know, the fighting for civil rights produced that a black woman sit on a chair that was reserved to white people, we was democratizing a right that we wrote in a paper, but was not active in society. If now we say that democratizing something is the ability that you have to have a login and password to a social network, well, I feel that we are betraying what does it mean to democratize things?

39:23Kara Swisher:That's correct. Yeah, they love to use a lot of words that aren't true. Anyway, so you write a lot about belief. On one hand, all of Catholicism is based on believing in an all-seeing, all-powerful God. On the other hand, we have AI, a technology that, as you said, a quote, voice that has no face, no history. And you've asked, how do you resist the seduction of a system that sounds like it knows everything, end quote. Talk about that idea and what can the church teach us about what deserves to be believed? I always say to people, there's nobody there. There's nothing there. You know, it's the most performative reflection of ourselves in a way that isn't controlled by us.

40:00Kara Swisher:So talk about what you meant by that, and how do you resist the seduction of such a system with church teachings? You know, I'm also a philosopher, so let me twist the two concepts together. I grew up, and during my elementary school, my teacher, to make me be practical with a pencil, allowed me to draw mushroom, red mushroom with white dots. Then some other teacher persuaded me to not eat because they are toxic. So here is how we become human, not by a set of instincts, but by the transmission of the lived experience of the former generation to us. This transmission needs that, I'm sorry, we believe to such kind of things.

40:53You have to believe that the mushroom is toxic without tasting it. Otherwise, you have no chance to get by. And sometimes we believe, sometimes we have not to believe. Otherwise, there is no such things as a progress. And so, human nature that required to believe to someone else's experience is also required to make problem on someone else's experience. Welcome to the human journey that bring us to the moon, but bring also us to the ability to kill someone because it's different by us. And this is the, if I can express in that way, the tragedy in the sense of the playing that we are doing as a humanity.

41:34Now, AI is a new act in such tragedy, in which we shape the way that we give for granted to acquire the quality of someone else's experience. The way that we get was a really architectural way. When we enter in the library of Georgetown, you know that it's huge, it's fantastic, and you have the scaffold with medicine, and you have the scaffold with social science. If during the COVID pandemic, I tell to Do you, you know, if you make a mat wash with vinaigrette, you don't get the virus. Do you don't pick this piece of information and bring to the medicine scaffold? But you bring to probably fancy stories collected in a night bar from a drunk at Franciscan.

42:20Well, this way work and allow us to grow in science, allow us to criticize some kind of bias that was injected in society. Now, AI is changing. There is not anymore any scaffolding, but the machine is throwing out things. And we don't have a brain helmet, a pair of lenses, an instruction that allow us to judge what is desirable to be truth and what is not. And this is producing a lot of tension that go between the innovation of science, like for example, what AlphaFold can produce in drug discovery, and the spreading of things like, you know, conspiracy theories and other fancy stories.

43:02Kara Swisher:Right. And so that is the problem. These are synthetic beings who are just giving us information, not facts, information. So one of the things that's important is to understand that it's being controlled by, as you noted, a very small group of people in this private square. And Pope Leo warned about the risks of consolidating power in the hands of a few. Talk a little bit about that, because he is the Pope, too, and that's the power is consolidate in the hands of the Pope. How could he show being more transparent to make this point? Now, the church is not, as you said, an investor. Church is not making money from it.

43:39Kara Swisher:It's just trying to collect souls, presumably, over time. How could he be even more transparent about making a public square more public here? Well, Cara, you know me and you know that I don't resist when I can make a joke as a Roman, as an Italian. So let's start from the starting point, the power in the hands of the Pope. You know, the Pope is someone that also confess and you know very well that between saying something and that the people do what you say, there is a huge, huge difference. So you can be a voice and the voice can achieve the bottom of your heart, but it's a voice. The second thing is really interesting.

44:17How can we be sure that the participation is really effective? Well, first of all, because the church is not the authority that has to put the seal on it. So it could be the square, but it's not the means. You cannot enforce these things in the force of the church. And so you need something else. And that means that the dialogue remains as a dialogue. You need something that is an institution. and institution according to the rule of law according to john rolls they are founded on the rule of law and on this idea that the participation and the transparency and the publicity of the ruling mechanism belong to everyone so the church can offer a space but the enforcement has to be made through the rule of law that means there has to be also diverse and it's parting of the rule of law, that there are countries that can feel much more at ease with one way and countries that will feel much more at ease in another way.

45:18But they democratically and according to the rule of law produce a discussion on this topic. And now here is a clear window where we see that the way in which we do think is much more important than the result of the things in itself.

45:35Kara Swisher:So one of the things that I've noticed, the moral authority of the church had come into question as a result of child sex abuse scandals, et cetera, had caused a lot of people to lose faith. It seems like this is gaining moral authority for the church again, like focused in on what affects average citizens and humanity, because most people in the United States right now tend to agree with what the church is saying here, even if they're not Catholics, you know, in terms of AI. I know, just as a personal thing, my son is, I'm Catholic, but I never took my children to church. My second son is going to mass every week now, and I never brought him, which is kind of interesting.

46:15Kara Swisher:But one of the things that attracts him, he's a technologist, is this moral authority of the church on not just AI, but in terms of what it means in a bigger sense. Does this give the church an ability to recover that authority, moral authority? Because it seems to with him, and that's just one case. You know, there is a danger in such question, because it's like if the church would like to have it, like a form of power and cautions. Right, right. I think it's a secondary effect of pursuing what does it mean to be faithful to the gospel. And the moment in the history in which we stress such kind of a concept is also the moment in which we lose it.

46:54And so with my feeling as a Franciscan, as someone that belonged to a saint that simple say, respect everyone and don't grasp power on everyone, is if we have them really happy, because it means that the gospel is resonating in society, the seeking for truth and the moral reflection that we are doing are shared with people, but this is not the end of the journey. We are not doing that to achieve this. We have to serve the human dignity, Magnifica Humanitas is saying. And if this is resonating with people, well, I'm much more scared that probably the damage that are produced by this transfer of power to few privates and is already produced a deep wound inside the society.

47:41Then, if you ask me as a theologian, is it this thinkable 20 years ago? I don't think. But this is interesting because, you know, history can surprise us.

47:51Kara Swisher:Well, one of the things when I think about the idea of what, you know, the church does have a moral authority and they do seem to have their finger on the pulse of what average people think, right, about this thing. And one of the arguments I keep having with tech people is that why are they so reasonable and you are not? And this is a church. It's a hierarchical church. And so it's a really interesting juxtaposition to have a church talk about democracy in the correct way and the wealthiest people on the planet insisting on their way or no way at all. And so when you think about where it's going, what is your best case scenario here for the impact of this encyclical?

48:35Kara Swisher:And what is your biggest worry? Well, my best scenario is that we open up a way. And so because technology is running, probably things we're running much and much and much. And in this scenario, the square is open and we continue the dialogue. And the dialogue will also produce a changing in some view of the church. Because, of course, having, for example, what does it mean to have the responsibility as a state on a lot of people is not so well experienced in the church. And this is something that we can have some kind of enrichment in the dialogue. What will happen? I don't know. I see that the most endangered animal here is not anymore the panda, could be the democracy, as we know.

49:21I think that is, you know, it's an ideology that is really dangerous. Fukuyama told us that transhumanism could be the most dangerous things. I think that the end of democracy could be the most dangerous things. Because, you know, in a really technological way, you can understand democracy as an algorithm that produces a result. And I see a lot of these people say, well, it's not enough efficient, simple change algorithm here. But this algorithm cost a lot of blood. It was a bloody century, the century that we simple left. If we forgot it, I'm scary that we are betting on someone else's blood to bring back what is important for us.

50:08Kara Swisher:Yeah, that is absolutely. I said to one of them many years ago when I was thinking about income inequality a lot, like in terms of them getting that, this is when they were just a little bit rich. Now they're really rich. They were super rich, but not like what's happened now. And I said to the person, I've sold this story before, that you're either going to have to do something about income inequality and what's going to happen here in terms of people being a permanent underclass, or you're going to have to armor plate your Tesla. That is where we're going with this. If you're not careful and you're all making all the decisions and you don't care and you were less and less caring about all of humanity and more and more caring about yourself and your group of people.

50:50Kara Swisher:And I swear to God, I looked at this guy and I thought he wants to armor plate as Tesla. That's what he wants. That's the world he does want. And that's terrified me, I remember thinking. Yeah, you know, the history will judge it. What we are remembering from middle age, brilliant things or armored things that remain in a museum. You know, I think that the history will judge this. That does not mean that we don't have to act because it will cost a lot of blood, especially of the most fragile people. But this is where ideology comes in. If you say it's better an armored Tesla that have public square in which you can walk and enjoy what is there, I don't know if you are thinking good on this.

51:33Kara Swisher:Yeah, I would agree. Anyway, Father Benanti, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for talking to me. It's always a pleasure. And I will see you in Rome. I promise. I hope so. Thank you, Cara. I absolutely will. Thank you for all the job that you are doing. Thank you.

51:52Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Michelle Eloy, Catherine Millsop, Tracy Hunt, Madeline LaPlante-Duby, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Lissa Soap, Eamon Whalen, and Julia Sharp-Levine. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you've fended off the Antichrist for another day. If not, that's a heresy, and you'll need to seek forgiveness. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

52:32Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Monday with more.