Oz Veloshian

Welcome to Tech Stuff.

I'm Oz Veloshian, and this is The Week in Tech, where I'm joined by the most plugged-in reporters to break down what's really happening in tech right now.

Today, we're joined by Natasha Tiku, tech reporter for The Washington Post, and Kyle Chaker, who writes the Infinite Scroll newsletter for The New Yorker.

And later on the episode, we're going to be joined by Chris Giamali, host of the podcast Superhuman, which I'm proud to say is part of the Kaleidoscope Network.

He's been in Las Vegas over Memorial Day weekend to attend the Enhanced Games or the Steroid Olympics.

But Natasha, I want to start with you and the 42,000 word papal encyclical titled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, all caps, might I add.

Your story had a great headline, which was, can AI be a child of God, right?

Oh, interesting.

It's all the user's effect on the technology.

Well, I want to come back to the anthropic angle.

But Kyle, I want to hand over to you for a moment, because I think in 2023, one of your seminal pieces was about the deepfake pope in the Montclair white puffer jacket, no?

Well, fair enough.

42,000 words is pretty long.

Who was writing those?

I want to come back to the anthropic angle and what on earth is going there and the kind of AI consciousness angle.

But that wasn't the only thrust of what he said.

I mean, Natasha, as you said, the encyclical was released to the world, you know, around May 28th, but it was actually dated May 15th, which was a very conscious choice because 135 years ago on May 15th in 1891, a previous Pope Leo announced

released an encyclical called On New Things that kind of addressed the harsh conditions of the industrial revolution vis-a-vis the working classes.

So that was interesting.

I mean, there's a kind of strong concern for the effects of technology on humanity in how the Pope is setting this up.