If, like me, you’ve been wondering lately what shape the Pope’s balls are, well - with this encyclical we’ve discovered they’re square. What do I mean by that? I was expecting something much more saccharine, much more toothless. Instead it turned out sharp.
Yesterday we did a marathon five-hour live stream about it, whose output included a vibe-coded video game of the Pope firing crucifixes at enemies inside the data centers. I’ll be posting some highlight clips of the whole thing.
We actually read the encyclical, and had Claude summarize it by structure and topic. Two points struck me, and I want to add my voice to the tail end of the content creators who’ve been talking about it positively. I completely agree with them.
The Church draws a clean line on intelligence
The first thing that struck me is how the document defines artificial intelligence and its nature. It carves out a little space for the soul - the domain of the Church - saying: this machine doesn’t have the lived experience, the emotions, the relationships and the spirituality that you have as a person. And then it glides right over the question of intelligence itself.
To me that’s a sign of great maturity. It’s a sign that they, too, have understood: when it comes to raw cognition, to pure intelligence, the machine already points us down a clear path.
And this is something I’d love to throw back at the hundreds of people who, over these years, have commented under my videos with “Ah, but human intelligence, real intelligence…”. No. If we’re talking about the soul, emotions and relationships, then maybe you have a point. But on intelligence? There’s no contest.
A deeply political message
The other thing that struck me is how political this encyclical is. The message is profoundly political, and it openly takes aim at:
- the concentration of power
- the manipulation of media
- deepfakes
It argues for using artificial intelligence to make work easier and better - not to replace it. These are very practical, very political and pro-social arguments, exactly what you’d expect the Church to make.
Where is everyone else?
Let me close with this observation. It seems incredible to me that the Pope is the one who has to say all this. By all means, welcome to it - I’m glad someone is. But the rest of them? Where is our politics, where are our representatives, and what on earth are they doing about artificial intelligence?
Goats. The lot of them.