Chris Johns

He published his first encyclical, which I think means teaching document.

And it's really interesting about technology in general and AI in particular.

And this is what he had to say.

The use of AI is never a purely technical matter.

When it enters processes that affect people's lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status, and freedom.

Important and sensitive decisions concerning employment, credit, access to public services, or even a person's reputation.

These risks being fully delegated to automated systems that do not know compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change.

And these systems can therefore give rise to new forms of exclusion.

And on that new form of exclusion, Jim, did you know that it is increasingly common for some factory workers in India, for example, to be wearing smart glasses that now record their hand movements, whether they're packing stuff, assembling stuff, stitching,

Perhaps people doing these very manual but skilled jobs with their hands, with their bodies, thought that they were safe from AI.

But these smart glasses are recording every single one of their bodily movements with one objective.

And I bet you can guess what the objective ultimately is from these recordings of all these bodily movements.

robots yeah it's to build a robot that can replicate using this data that the smart glasses have created to replace the workers and there's a wonderful article email i'm not quite sure what the source of it from a bloomberg writer this morning who's quoting ashish narayan a factory worker in india who uses this wearable technology to capture his daily tasks

And this worker says, it feels like working in your own grave while you make your own coffin.

And I think that really resonates with exactly what Pope Leo had to say yesterday, that earlier quote.

I mean, the human condition is being degraded by what the four or five owners of all these media and tech companies.

And we're creating a monster or we have created a monster.

We're always watching out for signs that the adoption of AI is causing job losses.

It's all anecdotal at this stage, as we said many times, but here's another anecdote.

The boss of Next, which is a big retail company here in the UK, was on the airwaves this morning saying that entry-level jobs are collapsing and that his own company is getting twice the level of applications that they were getting quite recently for their entry-level jobs.