00:00All that war has broken out between Silicon Valley and the Vatican over whether AI represents
00:05humanity's salvation or its impending doom. Just this week, the Pope came out with a very
00:10long manifesto that went through all of his reasoning for why he thinks that we need to
00:13regulate AI. He makes the claim that the technology could be bringing us towards a disaster of biblical
00:19proportions like the Tower of Babel. At the same time, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and
00:25Palantir, has been going on a speaking tour claiming that the Antichrist will say precisely
00:30what the Pope is saying right now. According to Thiel, the technology that he has a hand in creating
00:35is actually going to deliver humanity to its full potential. He claims that anyone who tries to stand
00:41between human beings and this utopian future actually is a manifestation of the Antichrist.
00:47It's a bizarre standoff between two totally different Christian conceptions of what AI
00:52represents. It's actually really interesting to read what the Pope wrote through the lens of
00:57Thiel's analysis. According to Thiel's prediction, someone basically exactly like the Pope, someone
01:02very popular who is a humanitarian, is going to start spreading a Luddite vision and destroy
01:07technological progress. To be clear, Thiel has never directly accused the Pope of being the Antichrist,
01:12which is just an absolutely bizarre sentence, but he has danced around it a few times. He wrote in an
01:17article that previous Popes had been floated as possible figures representing the Antichrist in the past
01:22and he's also derided Leo as a quote, woke American Pope and expressed concern that J.D. Vance is too
01:27close to him. And it appears the Pope may have shot back with a warning against the prospect of a
01:33technology that promises to free us from all weakness. This very well could be an allusion to
01:38Peter Thiel's support for a view called transhumanism, which imagines a future where man and machine merge
01:43and reach their almost godly potential. I wrote a lot more about this in my article for the New York
01:48Post recently. It's a crazy deep dive and I hope you'll check it out.
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