Why the Pope is taking on Silicon Valley and AI

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1:15Danny Fortson: Hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast where we unpack how technology is reshaping business, culture, and everyday life. I am Danny Fortson out here in Silicon Valley. Katie isn't here this week, but stepping in is another brilliant member of the tech team here, my colleague Mark Selman, technology correspondent for The Times. Hello. It's good to be back. It's great to have you. Good, sir. Today, we have a few light subjects. We're talking about the partnership in the world of tech between Anthropic and the Catholic Church. That's right. This week, Pope Leo presented a major statement on AI at the Vatican alongside one of the co-founders of the AI company Anthropic.

2:01and we'll be digging into what was said and why it matters.

2:05Danny Fortson: Plus, we'll be talking about why social media is as dangerous to your kids, apparently, as smoking or not wearing a seatbelt. And later on, we'll be hearing from the CEO of Proxima Fusion, a German startup trying to provide limitless clean energy by recreating the very same reaction that powers the sun. We'll find out how they do it and how far away this technology is from being a reality. But first, let's talk about that strange partnership between Silicon Valley and the Vatican. Yes, this gives us a real sense of truth to stranger than fiction. So Pope Leo, who is the first head of the Catholic Church from America, has become the latest voice to join the debate over AI.

2:52Danny Fortson: And he's just released the first encyclical of his papacy, which is a major teaching document in which he has warned about the dangers of AI and what it poses to humanity if left unchecked. And speaking at a Vatican conference, he warned that AI risks becoming, in his words, a quote, instrument of domination, exclusion, and death in the hands of big tech. Okay, so it's about 42 ,000 words. Yes. It's about half a book, and you've got to sum it up for our listeners in about 10 seconds. Yeah, we got about 10 minutes to do all that. No problem. First of all, Mark, I want you to be honest. Have you read it?

3:36No. AI helped me read it for everyone. But I have to say, you know, I didn't really have time to read 42 ,000 words. And this is exactly what AI was created for, surely.

3:47Danny Fortson: Indeed. There's almost an irony in what you just said. The framing he puts out is there's two examples. There's the Tower of Babel and then the book of Nehemiah about the rebuilding of the wall in Jerusalem. And the Tower of Babel is, in his estimation, what we don't want. It's this thing that was driven by hubris where all of these humans got together, tried to build this tower to the heavens, and basically pushed God to one side and wanted to kind of show how kind of amazing and supreme humans were. Nehemia in this, in his other example, his wall is destroyed and it is rebuilt by the community.

4:28Danny Fortson: Everybody coming together, taking a piece and together they build this thing that benefits everyone. And he's like, these are our two options, right? And I think it's really interesting that he lays out these are two options with this very very powerful new technology and and how are we going to go about it and i will say living here out here in silicon valley on the west coast it feels very babblish out here but um he also had uh an odd kind of um bedfellow in rolling this out to the world did he not yeah you've always got to have a tech founder beside you when you start essentially destroying the technology.

5:12But yeah, it was a very strange thing to have a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic there at the same time as denouncing the technology essentially and the way it's being built by a few companies.

5:26Danny Fortson: Yeah. So the person who was there is a guy called Christopher Ola, who's a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic. And he was at this event kind of sitting just a few seats down from the pope and where the pope is talking about like look this technology is being driven by effectively a handful of companies that are what he called i think a transnational was the world word he used that are basically more powerful than governments which feels right and he's kind of just raising all of the potential issues that that comes along with that. And it was just quite extraordinary to, you know, these are strange times in which we live where you have a San Francisco AI developer, one of the founders sitting three seats away from the Pope as he releases a book-length warning about the technology that they're building.

6:20Danny Fortson: And I think it's worth saying that the Pope doesn't come off as like anti-technology. He does lay out like this can do amazing things, but he's also really warns about a few different things one of them being like this is not human this is built to imitate humanity but humanity is separate apart and beautiful and should not be kind of shunted aside by this technology in other words don't effectively don't put this technology that is built in our image above humanity itself. I mean, you hear this criticism from people very much in the camp of criticizing social media, and they've moved on to AI, and the way they position AI as a technology that is essentially anti-human.

7:08It is there to replace humans. And they and many others are very concerned about it and where it's leading us.

7:16Danny Fortson: He does talk also about jobs, which again, it's almost like it's a theological document, but it's also almost like a policy document around like, what does this leave human work, human dignity? And those two are very linked, right? And it made me think of when Eric Schmidt from Google was giving his commencement address at a big university here in the U.S. and got booed off. He didn't get booed off stage. He got heavily booed as soon as he brought up the two words that everybody hates, artificial intelligence, because you have a bunch of 21, 22-year-olds getting out to the world. in this world where Anthropic, who is sitting three seats away from the Pope, has been saying, oh, we're going to eliminate 50 % of entry-level white-collar work very, very soon.

8:06Danny Fortson: This is going to completely upend society. Get ready. If you go through that document, it is like a shopping list of all the worries about AI from power concentration, accountability, regulation, etc. And I think that's why, obviously, Anthropic were there, who have always been front-footed when it comes to arguing for regulation, which obviously some say is good and some say is very self-serving. And that argument will always continue when it comes to tech companies. But it also is part of this interesting part of the soap opera between the Pope and the Trump administration, who have obviously been at odds.

8:43And then you've got Anthropic, who's at odds with the Trump administration. And then suddenly, Anthropic turns up at the Vatican. And it's a very neat circle.

8:51Danny Fortson: The last thing this made me think of is I spent, you know, close to three weeks in the courtroom in Oakland in this past month listening to Sam Altman and Elon Musk duke it out over the founding of OpenAI. And when Elon Musk was testifying, he talked about the origin of the story, right? Like how OpenAI came to be. And it was at his birthday party. He was talking to Larry Page from Google. And they got into this argument because Larry Page was like basically insultingly referred to Elon Musk as a speciesist. In other words, you're too worried about humans. They were talking about AI and how AI is going to be the greatest thing ever and it's going to surpass us in every way possible.

9:40Danny Fortson: and Elon said basically like that's a little worrying um that vision of the world and your kind of values at the heart of that is you kind of don't care what that means for humans that was his view of what Larry Page was saying and Page in response apparently said well you're just a speciesist and he was like yeah I'm team human but it just struck me that that kind of story about the founding of open AI, which of course has kicked off this whole revolution, struck me as reading through this encyclical called Magnifica Humanitas about the kind of, let's not forget the humans here. Because out here, there is this sense, almost religious, that we are entering this new age where the machines are smarter than all of us, where we are going to be effectively become pets to the machines.

10:42And this is the Pope being like, whoa, even if these machines are truly capable,

10:48Danny Fortson: we have to really think hard about what we value here and how this is going to play out because this would go very badly. Yeah. I mean, look, the industry really does have to start really grappling with this potential backlash because Pope is obviously extremely influential, more than a billion people. And it's, you know, if he's standing up and putting into an intellectually coherent way, you know, all the fears of, you know, all the critics across the world, that's not going to stop this backlash. That's just going to keep it going. And I think that, you know, the industry has not really come out with a coherent way to deal with the backlash, because obviously, you know, most of the time it's like, yes, but we've got to save cancer.

11:38We are going to, you know, create new materials. We are going to have great leaps forward in science. But that's a promise. And I think we are starting to see that the problems emerge, whether they're geopolitical or economic in the labor market. And that comes before the promises.

11:55Danny Fortson: I mean, the marketing has been a masterclass in how not to do it. It's been stunningly bad. Silicon Valley tech companies are just like, don't worry, guys. It's all going to be wonderful. We're all heading toward this incredible age of abundance. but to get there it's going to be really messy and you're all going to be put out of a job and it's going to completely upend society and it's going to make a whole small class of trillionaires and all this economic value is going to be funneled to the controllers of these models etc but just like that just to put a fine point on it i think the the four hyperscalers are set to spend something like a trillion dollars this year on data centers so anthropics co-founder can sit next to the Pope, but they're not slowing down, right?

12:46Danny Fortson: They are accelerating at a pace that is unprecedented in the history of capitalism, if you look at what's happening with their sales. And so this train is gaining steam, not losing steam. Yeah, and the stakes feel like they're getting higher, and Silicon Valley is just doing such a poor job of taking responsibility and, from my view, being thoughtful about what this is going to mean out there in the world. Well, that does bring us on to the next story quite beautifully. Did anyone say social media? Yes, exactly. Yeah, because, you know, we're still dealing with the previous technology that looks like it's got out of hand.

13:25And that's really the conversation that we've been having in the UK this week.

13:30Danny Fortson: So what's been happening? I hear there was a report. Yeah, so this is the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. They brought out a report that claims that medical professionals view the use of smartphones as on a par with not wearing a seatbelt in the car. And that report was essentially submitted to a government consultation on what to do with social media. And that finished this week. And it's really all part of the pressure on the prime minister and the government to act and deal with the effects and impacts of social media on kids. If you were to wind this back about six months, six to eight months ago, this government didn't really want to do.

14:16The Prime Minister was not really in favour of banning or a blanket ban on social media, but lots happened since then. Obviously, his authority has weakened. We've had a blanket ban introduced in Australia, and there's been a very effective campaign both within Parliament and outside of Parliament for something to be done regulatory-wise to deal with social media and kids. And so that's where we are. And in three weeks, two to three weeks time, we're expecting an announcement from the government explaining what they're going to do next. And we're expecting some kind of ban.

14:53Danny Fortson: Is this report part of that consultation process? In other words, in the two to three weeks when we hear the final thumbs up, thumbs down from the government, this is part of that kind of what's going into that process? Yeah. So the government, when it has a planning on big laws like this, they have a public consultation. organization now whether or not that is a genuine process or whether they just have to you know go through that is a matter of debate but yeah they have this national conversation there's sort of up to 80 000 submissions it's a massive project but obviously politically they kind of have an idea of what they want to do but this process is you know all the stakeholders so to speak you know try to get their their company's worth and this was the medics doing it i'm curious to get your sense of the uh of the vibes uh so to speak in the uk but certainly out here it does feel like we had b-ban kidron on uh i think last month or two months ago talking about this as well and she's been right on the forefront of it in the uk like it's like a switch has been flipped where it's like you know after years and years and years of like being like it's not conclusive there's not enough evidence etc.

16:04Like it feels like one, the evidence is piling up.

16:09Danny Fortson: So that argument has been harder to make. And also lawmakers around the world have decided to like not wait around anymore for social media to effectively police itself in a real way. And so as you mentioned, you had what's happening in Australia. And we talked about it before in the pod, I covered the first big social media trial in LA that was found against Meta and YouTube where they were found to, yes, you did create these addictive products. So after that LA case, then you had this new federal case coming up where you had a school district in Kentucky saying, look, you ruined our kids. We've had to divert our very limited resources to mental health services and other things to deal with this kind of the fallout of social media.

16:55Danny Fortson: All four social media companies that were defendants in that case have all settled as well. So that snowball is very much rolling down the mountain. A lot of this, actually, you can trace back to Jonathan Haidt's book. He's a social psychologist who wrote The Anxious Generation. You cannot underestimate the impact of that book on policymakers, on parents. And once that happens, the politics changes. When this becomes a popular measure, then guess what? Politicians, there is prick up, and they realize they've got to do something because hey what it's popular it's a vote winner and that's all that's what happened in australia it was the wife of a premier in southern australia read that book she you know she tapped her her husband on the shoulder said you've got to do something he brought in a law that was popular and then the prime minister of of the whole country acted and guess what it was done very quickly uh so that that is the dynamic at play here and and and here we're talking you know we're slightly dancing on the head of a pin as to you know what kind of ban uh is an australia style ban is it a ban a conditional ban basically that says hey guess what companies unless you make that product safe and get rid of all these algorithms and you know auto scroll etc you won't be able to serve it to children you won't be able to offer it to children so that kind of ban and we think it's the latter but we're not obviously 100 sure we wait to hear but whether or not they're going to act the same way with AI, we don't know.

18:21But actually, interestingly, I think that some of the proposals that come out in a few weeks will be dealing with AI chatbots because the government's been very worried, as a lot of people individually, about the impact of AI chatbots on kids and even adults. So that's where we're going. Anyway, should we move on to our guest today? He is the CEO of Proxima Fusion, a German company attempting to provide Earth with limitless clean energy. The process they're trying to recreate is called nuclear fusion, and it's the same reaction that powers the sun. It involves heating plasma to more than 100 million degrees.

19:03Danny Fortson: And that sounds very hard, but in this moment where we hear Elon Musk talking about putting data centers in space to solve this problem, perhaps this does actually make sense. But scientists all over the world have been trying to crack this problem for decades. And they hope it could eventually provide huge quantities of clean energy for the world because it doesn't rely on fossil fuels and produces no harmful greenhouse gases and very little nuclear waste. And it has nothing. It's very different from what you would expect or comes out of nuclear fission. But anyway, Proxima recently secured 400 million euros from the state of Bavaria and is seeking further investment of more than a billion dollars as Europe tries to compete with the US and China in the race for fusion technology.

19:56Danny Fortson: Francesco Shortino, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the pod. Very happy to be here. So I have many questions for you. I don't know if you've heard, there's this thing called artificial intelligence that needs lots and lots and lots and lots of power. Tell me about it. And fusion is one of these things, it's like the energy white whale, right? It's like it produces tons of continuous clean power. The only exhaust, if you will, is water, I believe, or something like that. Could you just explain what nuclear fusion is? I know this is basic, but can you explain what nuclear fusion is and where we are?

20:34Danny Fortson: Because this feels like this is a thing that we've been talking about and hoping for decades and just trying to understand where we are here in 2026. As you said, it's the ultimate source of clean energy. And the right tense there is it will be fantastic because we don't make fusion energy quite, not at the scales that are useful for commercial fusion production. The fusion concept, the fusion physical process is nothing new. We've known it for more than 100 years. We can do it in the lab, but doing a little bit of it and making instead copious amounts of clean energy is a different level. So we've been chasing fusion for commercial civil energy production for 60, 70 years.

21:16And the UK has actually had a really big role in the history of fusion. There has been a pretty significant acceleration in the field in the last 20 years or so. And I think that has been really on the exponential side. In the last two years, especially in the domain where Proxima operates, there's been more progress than in the previous 20 years, quite objectively. And this is happening across a number of topics in fusion because of computation, better electronics, much stronger magnets. So there are a number of tailwinds. Artificial intelligence is one of those. So in some sense, there is a coupling of AI and fusion where AI is helping us to get to fusion much faster.

21:56But you also need fusion, supposedly, to feed the AI at some point. It's pretty hard to imagine a future of humanity where there is growth in the sense that we want to see it. That does not involve clean, baseload energy from fusion. Of course, fusion needs to be not just clean, but also commercially viable. And that's the ultimate challenge of fusion, which every private fusion company is pursuing. There is a zoo of concepts in fusion. A zoo of concepts. I love that. Yeah, you could say so. Yeah. So fusion is, you know, it's not a technology. Fusion is a physical process. And how you implement that process and you make a power plant out of it is a wide field.

22:36Danny Fortson: So just so people understand, I think, and you can correct me while I'm wrong because I'm not a science reporter. you're effectively recreating the process of the sun on earth and doing it kind of in closed environment so you're creating a reaction that will generate something like 150 million 200 million degrees is it fahrenheit or celsius it's we're talking about celsius or kelvin at the end of the day what's important is that they're really high temperatures we're looking at 10 times the center of the sun yes exactly it reminds me of my kids when they ever say like what would happen if whatever we you fired a rocket into the sun it would melt it was like it would melt everything right so it feels like the kind of the challenge is creating something that's 200 million degrees or whatever the number is in a way that doesn't destroy everything around it is that basically how to sum it up yeah in some of the ways in which we are targeting to make commercial fusion we are trying to confine the hot ionized matter in a cage of some sort.

23:40That's what Proxima does. We create a magnetic field cage and that cage basically suspending this hot matter away from any material. We use magnetic fields to confine and hold this hot stuff in a stable way for as long as we want it. Using the very powerful magnets to effectively suspend it. That's right. So the magnet technology is one of the key enablers and one of the things that has been accelerating massively in the past few years. The other one is really computational simulation and optimization. So the ability to design these complex donut-shaped devices with all these twisty magnets that, you know, we started using supercomputing to design accelerators in the 80s, 90s, but the computing of that time was so-and-so, let's say, compared to what we have today.

24:27So AI, you know, it's accelerating the way we design because we design also through code and the acceleration of code, you know very well, is something spectacular these days. But AI is also helping us explore geometries. If you look at what a stellarator is, so this donor-shaped device with twisty shapes, a lot of the complexity is in the integrated geometries. So the design just being very complex for a human brain to really capture in all its consequences. It turns out that an AI is pretty good at doing that. If everything goes right with the science of this, can you just explain what the endgame benefit will be for everyday people in the UK, in Europe, America, etc., and when that would happen?

25:17So first, the actual objective is to create clean, baseload, safe energy. And I specified the baseload bit because the fact that it's clean and safe, I think everyone understands. But it's important to understand the place of fusion in a complex, clean energy system. The target of a company like Proxima is not to do 100 % of the energy supply of humanity. That's a silly kind of objective. Reality is a lot more complex in energy. You want systems to balance each other and to complement each other in different geographies, different supply chains, different geopolitical conditions. So fusion, I believe, will take 25 % of the grid, give or take.

25:56and then the citizen will benefit from fusion, not because they have a fusion reactor in the garden, but because the grid has been balanced by that clean baseload, which needs to be cheap enough that the entire energy system overall is balanced at a lower price. So the UK citizens like the European one, but more broadly, and humanity just generally needs more energy, okay? Humanity, the wealth of the people, scales with the amount of energy that they can access. That's well known. Increasing efficiency of energy consumption, it's great. It won't really get us to the next era of civilization. Fusion will, because fusion can increase the overall amount of energy that humans can access.

26:42Danny Fortson: It's interesting you talk about how these AI models are actually helping you move forward in the field. And we're always hearing in this very strange age of AI in which we find ourselves like, oh, we're going to sort climate change, we're going to cure cancer, we're going to live forever. So do you think nuclear fusion is going to, when we look back, it'll be one of those things that was helped, quote unquote, get solved by AI? So for us, AI has to do with figuring out better systems that are manufacturable. It has to do with basically saving time in the R &D process. We cannot build that many accelerators.

27:22so we need to advance our modeling tools so that we can iterate in code. You can only iterate in code if your models have been validated in experiments. The truth is that when you go into one of these transformative challenges, you just don't know how long it's going to take. You have a fantastic roadmap and after five years, you're like, ah, little did I know how naive because the challenges you ended up actually dealing with are always somewhat different. But if you have enough tailwinds, every time you discover that something is harder, you happen to also have moved in hopefully the right direction much faster than you had anticipated.

27:58And it's the balance of those two things that I think will bring new materials, will bring fusion, will bring better rockets, quantum computers much faster. Now, it's unlikely, in my opinion, that we will get all of those things to humanity within the next decade. Life is a lot more nuanced when you get to hardware rather than just software systems. the time to pour concrete and to do steel processing are sort of limits to how fast we can deploy these things. So it does take us an intelligent investor and a committed government to understand where these AI tailwinds actually lead. How do we deviate from the narrative of fluff of AI?

28:41AI is going to change everything. AI comes and it's going to be robots all over the streets all of a sudden. That's not the world as I see it. I think that world is coming, but it's not in three years. It's not in five years. AGI may be sooner rather than later but then how will it impact hardware like fusion? That's for companies like Proxima to determine.

29:03Danny Fortson: Can I ask how old you are, Francesco? Yes, I'm 33. Let's say we're still retiring at 65. Do you think the world will be awash in nuclear fusion reactors by the time you retire? I will be by the middle of my career in a phase where I cannot build fusion reactors fast enough, and I will die without being able to build fusion reactors fast enough. We will just not be able to deploy fast enough because we would be limited by the amount of steel. We'll be limited by the speed at which we can pour concrete. But the science is sorted. We have a clear scientific basis. Science is sorted is something that you will never hear a physicist agree to.

29:45It is a meaningless sentence. But having a clear scientific basis, that's a much clearer statement that I can stand by. If steel and concrete are the constraints and building is the constraint, it does feel like eventually China will win this race in the sense that they are very good at building plants, railways, etc., etc. Whereas, obviously, we are a little more constrained in UK, Europe and the West by various factors. We are more constrained, but I think we need to abandon this idea that Europeans don't know how to manufacture. We do plenty of manufacturing. In fact, we do a whole lot more manufacturing than the United States, for sure.

30:25And compared to China, China has perfectioned the art of doing high volume, relatively low cost things. And certainly they have an advantage in large scale manufacturing. Now, good news is for the foreseeable future, I would love to tell you that we are going to be constrained by high volume of Stellarator manufacturing, production. That's not the problem that I have in the next five years, no 10, no 15. Let me deal with it when I get there. What I'm concerned about right now is making magnets that are powerful enough and that I can make fast enough. This is stuff that you can do in Europe much better than anywhere else.

31:02I believe that there will be a future where fusion is going to be so geopolitical that there will be a fusion champion in the United States, fusion champion in China, and a fusion champion in Europe. So the thought that we give up this to whoever gets there first just doesn't hold up to logic.

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33:03Danny Fortson: So, Mark, you're a tech guy. What do you think of our fusion-powered future? Well, it does feel like a long way off, I have to say. The thing that really surprised me was that he said, end game, 25 % of our renewable power needs. And I expected him to say more, not knowing a huge amount about the roadmap of the industry. So I think that was that was interesting to me. And obviously, given the challenges he talked about with regards to actually construction and all the kind of the building stuff rather than the physics side of things. I think that was also a surprise to me because I thought once you get this, you know, once you get through the science, then the rest of it will be easy.

33:51But actually, it does collide with the real world.

33:53Danny Fortson: It reminds me a little bit of like quantum computing. And I know quantum computing is apparently much closer than it has ever been, etc. But and I've said it before in the pod, it's like that feels like something that's five years away from being five years away. This feels like it's like 10 years away from being 10 years away. But, you know, it's a huge prize if they can figure it out. But it just sounds 100 million degrees. I don't even know what that – I can't even conceptualize that. It's like that amount of heat, I don't understand how you can create anything ever that will control that, right?

34:28Danny Fortson: And obviously it's a very, very hard scientific problem to sort out. I think that that is part of the attraction of the story is this incredible scientific physics experiment. that's playing out before our eyes. It's got out of the lab and into semi-production, you would call it. Yeah, and what is interesting is that Fusion is having this moment, and we talked about it a little bit with him, but there's been several startups who've raised billions of dollars, and the one that I knew best and I've written about in the past is Helion, which is funded by Sam Altman. Sam Altman has put personally his own money$375 million into it, and Francesco not talking out of school because he said he's said it before he's a bit skeptical of some of their claims or whatever it may be it's kind of inside baseball fusion stuff but it does it is interesting in the Sam Altman angle of just like you know you're creating this demand through one invention AI and here's your solution this other thing you're backing which is like you know endless clean power but it just feels so so far away it's and i know that francesco is a scientist and he's very excited but you know science at this scale at this type of complexity just takes it's a lot it's interesting to see the models as well playing out again which is the u.s venture-backed big money big claims europe more institute driven that gets spin outs from that with a bit of government funding and then china obviously much more state driven and you see this replication all over again but he was pretty bullish about the european and european side of things quite nice to have that and given given where we are in geopolitics it's like we had to blow the whistle you know if we are still a part of europe obviously danny i'm not Indeed.

36:23Danny Fortson: Well, look, so that was, I think that's it for this week's episode. Thank you, Mark, as ever, for standing in so ably for Katie, as I think she must be swanning around somewhere. I don't know what she's doing. But if you did enjoy the show, please drop us a line to let us know. And we'd love to know your thoughts on today's discussion. You can email us at techpodatthetimes.co.uk. Thank you, as ever, for listening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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