Peter Thiel Vs Pope Leo — Silicon Valley and the Vatican battle over whos the real antichrist | Latest Tech News
A cold battle has damaged out between Silicon Valley and the Vatican, as they accuse one another of jeopardizing humanity’s future.
In a Monday encyclical letter, Pope Leo XIV warned mankind is dealing with the “risk of being misled by deceitful goals” in the age of AI and called on regulators to stand up to its creators.
The 42,000 phrase manifesto comes after Peter Thiel has repeatedly argued in a global talking tour — including in Rome, proper exterior Vatican City — that a highly effective determine making an attempt to stymy technological progress will end up to be the antichrist predicted by the New Testament.
It’s a frankly weird standoff between two very different Christian predictions about the future of AI: one in which AI delivers us to our maximal human potential, and the other in which AI represents an existential risk to our very humanity.
While the pope warns AI’s creators are taking part in god and flirting with catastrophe, Thiel has been arguing that anybody who stands in their means is a “legionnaire” of the antichrist.
Pope Leo XIV warned about the risks of AI in an encyclical letter printed Monday. Getty Images
The New Testament predicts that a seemingly compassionate false prophet will seduce humanity with false guarantees of peace and prosperity but finally trigger struggling before the true Messiah returns.
Thiel, a protestant, believes that this biblical second is imminent. In his view, AI is on the precipice of delivering humanity to its pinnacle, and an antichrist determine will soon rise up to oppose this techno-utopia.
“In the 21st century, the antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science,” he warned in an October lecture. “In late modernity, where science has become scary and apocalyptic… the antichrist has somehow become anti-science.”
Thiel has been delivering his message about the antichrist in speeches since at least 2023. He has never publicly named who he believes the antichrist is, though he’s said the antichrist has many “legionnaires,” including AI doomsayers like Eliezer Yudkowsky, creator of a ebook sub-titled “Why Superhuman AI Would eliminate Us All.”
Peter Thiel has argued that the antichrist will oppose technological progress. Getty Images
In an article printed a number of months after Leo’s appointment Thiel also famous how “various popes” had been suspected of being the antichrist.
He has derided Leo as a “woke American pope” and said that he worries about the fact that Vice President JD Vance, whose political campaigns he has contributed to generously, is “too close to the pope.”
“The slogan of the antichrist is peace and safety,” he said in December 2024 at the Hoover Institute, where he predicted the antichrist “probably presents as a great humanitarian” who will inform his fearful followers that “the stakes are so extreme.”
In his Monday encyclical letter, the pope said just that: the stakes are, certainly, excessive. He warned AI may trigger mass unemployment, the dissolution of household items, and unprecedented warfare.
Thiel expressed considerations that Vice President JD Vance is simply too close to the pope. via REUTERS
Leo advocated for “the protection of employment” in the face of AI, arguing household “is a fragile social good immediately affected by the economic and technological transformations reshaping the nature of work.”
The pope also warned that it’s “not permissible to entrust lethal” warfare choices to AI, such as automated focusing on for missiles and drones and predicted doing so would “only bring about conflict more quickly,” decrease “the threshold” for violence, and cut back “victims to data.”
He called out Silicon Valley giants like Thiel straight, accusing them of “[monopolizing] expertise, data, and decision-making authority” and imposing energy “from above in an opaque and unilateral manner.”
Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah spoke in assist of the pope’s warnings at the Vatican on Monday, though one ought to ask whether or not Anthropic is in any means different, or just posturing; billing itself as the “good guy” in a crowd of unhealthy actors, yet in actuality offering precisely the same product.
The pope also advocated for AI rules including impartial checks and transparency about algorithms.
Pope Leo argues that builders of artificial intelligence have a obligation to shield humanity. AFP via Getty Images
Thiel has warned that the antichrist will call for global regulation and deliver about a “one-world government.”
The pope also appeared to be critiquing the pseudo-religious savior complicated of some Big Tech execs. He warned humanity to resist being seduced by “the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness” and emphasised the “pressing duty to remain profoundly human” in the age of techno-optimization.
This could also be a response to “transhumanism,” a imaginative and prescient for humanity’s future popularized by some Silicon Valley execs that insists man and machine must merge to develop into cyborgs to attain our full potential.
In addition to being a Christian, Thiel identifies as a transhumanist. He defended transhumanism in a July New York Times podcast, where he explained his imaginative and prescient of a “radical transformation, where your human body, [your] natural body, gets transformed into an immortal body.”
“We want you be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body… [and] to transform your whole self,” he said
While the pope suggests deviating from our humanity is harmful, Thiel argued during the podcast that transhumanism aligns with “Judeo-Christian inspiration.”
Thiel advocated for a transhumanist worldview in a current New York Times podcast interview. Interesting Times with Ross Douthat/YouTube
Pope Leo XIV advocated for regulation of AI and transparency about its algorithms. Getty Images
“It is about transcending nature. It is about overcoming things,” he explained. “People are fallen… You are supposed to transcend that and overcome that.”
But the pope isn’t having that.
In his encyclical letter he admonished “any effort” that “sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.”
Each man is utilizing his Christian religion as a lens to analyzeAI, and they each have come to the same conclusion: that the other may very well be theharbinger of catastrophe.
While both paint apocalyptic visions of the future, AI has yet to flip the world utterly upside down. For the second, hundreds of thousands of mundane and routine duties have been automated. Perhaps AI will continue on to displace significant human labor, or possibly its assist will free up our time and unleash new frontiers of creativity.
For the second, we’re still a long means off mass destruction or a cyborg-filled techno-utopia… let alone proving the existence of an antichrist.
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