Rough conversation Demis told Elon: I am working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman artificial intelligence
And Elon replies to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m turning us into an interplanetary species.
Then Demis said: Well, you know my AI will be able to follow you to Mars.
And then Elon kind of fell silent…
Thiel himself sums up this meeting of minds: “It was the stupidest meeting we ever brokered with Elon.”
An announcement in the shadow
I am certainly not the only one to raise this question about the Pope’s encyclical.
The asked the Catholic Herald“Magnifica Humanitas Against Peter Thiel’s Techno-Political Empire?”
Or as a tech blogger Simon Willison wrote, “I can’t help but be surprised that he didn’t quote JRR Tolkien The return of the king Pope threw some shade at Peter Thiel.
But I do not think that this Pope operates according to categories such as “casting shadows”. As we’ve seen, when Leo tangles with Donald Trump over his chosen war in Iran, Leo sees his job as preaching and propagandizing.
“The mission of the Church is to preach the Gospel, to preach peace,” Leo he said at the time. “I just hope to be heard for the value of God’s word.”
His Gandalf quote could be directed at Thiel, or perhaps more broadly at those who think similarly. But this is not a confrontation or an insult. It’s a way of talking across differences, using a line drawn from a shared cultural resource between the two camps. It offers a new interpretation of Tolkien’s magnum opus to those who see war, technological disruption, battles and a license for global action. These things exist in the story and are exciting, but they are also terrifying and ultimately only endured to defend community, hearth, and home.
In Tolkien’s world, it is the “little people” who finally save the world from the wars and technologies of the “big” – in fact, the poor arm is Gollum, and so the action begins and ends in the limited world of the hobbits.
In this sense, I think, the Pope offers a different perspective to the modern technology aristocrats. He plainly asks them to abandon their dreams of transhumanism and “artificial” intelligence and replace those dreams with something more truly human.
