Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Sam, About 10 days ago, something quiet happened in Rome.
[00:00:37] A lot of people missed it.
[00:00:39] The ones who didn't are still talking about it.
[00:00:45] A Pope and a tech founder stood in front of the world together.
[00:00:51] Now on the surface, nothing wrong with that, of course, but they were there to release a document and the document was about artificial intelligence and the way it was released, that's the part that matters.
[00:01:11] So I'm Dr. Alan Badot and this is AI Today. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:16] We're going to talk about this very thing that happened in Rome and what it means really for everyone who builds uses and worries about AI.
[00:01:29] This story is bigger than the people covering it, I think have actually realized. And once you hear, you know, in, in a hopefully a non biased way, you're gonna think about AI a little bit different. And here's what happened. So on, you know, May 25, Pope Leo XIV walked into the Vatican and he sat down, next to him was Chris Ola. Now many of you know, Ola is co founder of Anthropic. And you know, it's the AI company that makes Claude, right? And it's one of the most used AI models in the world. And that's great.
[00:02:19] The Pope was there to release his first letter to the world.
[00:02:23] And it's really the kind of letters, you know, it's encyclical, right? It's a big deal. Okay. Popes only write a handful of, you know, these in their entire lifetime. And Pope Francis, for instance, you know, the last Pope, he wrote four I think in 12 years.
[00:02:46] So it's a big deal.
[00:02:47] Now the letter is called Magnifica humanitis.
[00:02:52] And in Latin that means magnificent humanity. And the whole subject of the letter, the entire thing, it's about artificial intelligence.
[00:03:03] Now here's the part that I think a lot of people just glossed over and really have missed.
[00:03:10] You know, the Pope signed that letter on May 15, hence a few, you know, about 10 days ago, right?
[00:03:19] And most people forget that 135 years earlier, on the same exact date, May 15, a different pope Leo signed a different letter.
[00:03:34] Now his name was, you know, Leo III, 13th, right? And the letter was called Rerum Novarum.
[00:03:43] Now you may not have heard of it, but it really, it really changed the world.
[00:03:48] And it was about workers.
[00:03:51] And it was 1891.
[00:03:54] The Industrial Revolution was really tearing through Europe and America and you know, factories had, you know, appeared in, you know, in essence a generation, right? And whole towns were being built around steel and steam. And you know, look at Pittsburgh and look at Some of the other ones with coal towns and stuff, it was very, very similar.
[00:04:16] And the workers, though, were, they were being crushed. Long hours, child labor, you know, no protection, no, no real dignity in what they were doing, right? And so Pope Leo XIII looked at it and he said, you know, that's enough.
[00:04:31] He said workers have rights, he said employers have duties.
[00:04:35] And he said that the state has a role to play now. This letter became the foundation of really how the Catholic Church thinks, you know, about the world, about justice, about, about industry, and really about everything in the modern world.
[00:04:52] Now, I've gotten a lot of questions in the past about how come I haven't touched on some of these things. So this is the first time I've even discussed, you know, any part of religion in the entire show. But I think it's important from a context of, of AI and how we're going to talk about it, because these events matter now with Leo the 14th, when he, you know, he chose to sign the AI letter on the same day, 135 years to the day.
[00:05:19] It's not a coincidence and it's, it's really, it's really a citation.
[00:05:27] And, you know, I think he's trying to tell us something.
[00:05:30] He's trying to say that I think in this moment right now is like 1891, AI is the new industrial revolution.
[00:05:42] And the same questions we asked back then about people, about dignity, about who gets protected and who gets crushed, you know, we have to ask those again, but maybe with some new words about a new kind of machine, I think that's the message.
[00:06:03] And, you know, now again, most of the, most of the news media really missed, you know, those, those, those pieces.
[00:06:14] Most of it was about a picture, a, you know, Pope in a white robes and a tech founder in a dark suit. And, you know, that's tradition. And people made jokes and people said it was strange and people wondered, you know, what anthropic was doing in the Vatican in the first place.
[00:06:35] But here's what really happened. You've got two institutions that sat at the same table.
[00:06:43] One's about 2,000 years old and the other is about 15.
[00:06:48] The older one really looked at the younger one and said, hey, we need to talk.
[00:06:54] The younger one said, yeah, sure.
[00:06:58] Quite honestly, I don't see any place where that has, has really happened before.
[00:07:06] No.
[00:07:08] Think about the moment, okay? The Catholic Church has been around for 2,000 years, well over 2,000 years, right? And it's watched empires rise and fall. And it's, you know, seen the printing press, it's seen the telescope, you know, electricity, the atom bomb, you name it, even the Internet.
[00:07:28] And I think it's thought about every one of those. And, and we know sometimes too slowly, of course, and maybe sometimes too sharply, but it's thought about every one of them.
[00:07:44] And in 2000 years, it has never invited the maker of a new technology to stand on its own stage as a peer, as an equal voice, to share the moment of releasing, really, a teaching document.
[00:08:02] And it did that on Monday with AI.
[00:08:07] Now, that tells you something about how serious the moment is.
[00:08:13] The man that it picked also is. It's kind of interesting too, right, if you think about it, because Chris always, you know, he's not the CEO of Anthropic, he's not the marketing person, he's a researcher.
[00:08:26] His specialty really is, you know, you know, interpretability, which is really a fancy word, trying to look at inside of an AI model and figure out what it's actually doing.
[00:08:40] You know, how's it thinking, how's it behaving, how's it making decisions, those kind of things.
[00:08:47] His job is really to ask the same question as the Church has been asking for 2,000 years.
[00:08:54] What's going on in inside the actor?
[00:08:57] What's it doing?
[00:09:00] Does anybody really know?
[00:09:04] That's the question now from the stage in Rome in front of cardinals and theologians. And you know, Chris said something that I think everybody really needs to hear.
[00:09:18] He said that if AI ends up displacing human work at a large scale, and he thinks that there's a real chance it will, we can debate that later, right? But he thinks it will.
[00:09:30] Supporting the people who are displaced becomes, as he said, a moral imperative of historic proportions.
[00:09:41] Now, I'm going to take a pause for a second and notice who said that.
[00:09:48] It wasn't the Pope.
[00:09:50] It's not a labor leader, it's not a politician.
[00:09:55] It's one of the co founders of an AI company at the Vatican saying that the displacement his own industry is about to cause is a moral problem of the highest order. Now, when the people in the building, of course, the engines start sounding like the people warning about the engines, that's a moment we have to, we have to take a step back and we got to pay attention to because, you know, this is not a question that we're going to be able to, of course, answer in an hour, but it is something that we have to think about of what's going on inside the actor, whether the actor is a person, a corporation, a machine.
[00:10:37] You're asking a moral Question.
[00:10:40] And the Church has been answering moral questions for a long time. Maybe not to what some of us would like, but you know, the AI labs have been answering them only for about three years.
[00:10:54] And sometimes, you know, it's a little bit better to have a longer memory than potentially a shorter one.
[00:11:04] Now, the Pope walked in the room with, you know, everyone else, but, you know, I highly doubt he was there to learn about A.I. okay, he was there to remind people who build it of something a lot of folks have probably forgotten.
[00:11:24] And we're gonna get into what he reminded them of.
[00:11:29] We're gonna walk through it pretty carefully because, you know, I want you to see the shape of it because after you do, you're not gonna be able to forget it.
[00:11:40] And I got a lot of questions this week and I'm going to do my best to try to answer some of those.
[00:11:46] So stay with us. We'll be right back.
[00:12:05] Foreign.
[00:12:24] Welcome back to AI Today. I'm your host, Dr. Alan Bideau. Before the break, we were in Rome.
[00:12:31] A Pope and a tech founder, side by side releasing a letter about AI and you know, one that the Pope signed on May 15, exactly 135 years after another Pope Leo signed a letter not about AI, but about something that was still having a huge impact on people all around the world.
[00:12:54] Now, I told you the date wasn't a coincidence, it was a citation.
[00:12:58] The new Pope, you know, really telling us that this AI moment is really this, you know, the next industrial revolution.
[00:13:10] Now I want to talk you through why I think that is true. Because, you know, once you think about it and you see the pattern, you know, I think the whole story is going to make sense. I think it's going to answer a lot of questions that were submitted to me this week about, you know, this whole dynamic that's taking place and including, you know, some of the, the things that they, they discussed potentially while they were, while they were together. Now let's go back to 1891 again real fast. The world is changing and we know that we've, you know, we've seen it from history that, you know, it's so, it was so hard for people back then to keep up with it in, you know, less than a hundred years.
[00:13:52] If you think about it, the west had gone from a horse drawn carts to, you know, steam locomotives, from candles to electric lights, from hand stitched clothes to factory looms that, you know, were running 24 hours a day.
[00:14:09] People who worked their, you know, in their family fields for generations were now in assembly lines. You had children that were working in coal mines. You had women that were working in text mills.
[00:14:22] Now, that also meant that whole new cities had, had appeared. I mentioned Pittsburgh. It really just came to life then. But you've got Birmingham, you had, you know, Manchester in the United Kingdom, and all built around smokestacks.
[00:14:39] Now the thing is though, the wealth, if you look back then, the wealth that was being created at the time was enormous, but the human cost was also enormous.
[00:14:54] You know, workers were dying young, black lung, you know, from coal mining. And, you know, families were actually being torn apart and, you know, whole communities were being reshaped around, you know, the rhythm of the machine, and nobody really quite knew what to think about it.
[00:15:15] And that was, that was very trouble for, you know, troublesome for a lot of people.
[00:15:19] Now, there were two loud voices in that debate.
[00:15:25] On one side you had capitalism, let the market sort it out, right? And then on the other side you had socialism, which was really let the state take over the factories.
[00:15:35] And both of those voices were arguing as if there was no third way. And we're not going to talk about the political aspects of that.
[00:15:44] You know, I believe in capitalism, of course, but, you know, there are, you know, some impending ramifications you always have to think about.
[00:15:52] But Pope Leo XIII looked at it and he said, there's got to be a third way. There's got to be a better way.
[00:15:58] Now, his letter that he released, the Ruam Novarum, did something very simple and it at the same time, really hard.
[00:16:09] It said that workers have dignity that come from being a human being, not from being useful.
[00:16:19] It said employers have moral duties to their workers, not just legal ones. And it also said that the state has a role, not necessarily to own the factories, but you can't leave the workers all by themselves.
[00:16:37] You know, you got to make sure that people are treated as people.
[00:16:42] Now, that letter, as I said earlier, became really the, the foundation for how the Catholic Church has been, you know, pursuing social teaching since then.
[00:16:54] Now, it shaped labor laws, it shaped, you know, minimum wage debates, it's shaped, you know, Sunday rest, for goodness sakes, child labor protection, you name it, even the right to organize in some cases, and, you know, even people that are not Catholic. Okay, I want to specify that, that even if you're not religious, you know, you've, you've been working along this framework that the letter really helped establish and build, you know, since it was released.
[00:17:27] And Leo xiii, because how he saw most people did not, you know, he didn't see that at the time.
[00:17:38] He saw that a new kind of machine had changed what work meant.
[00:17:44] And he believed that when the meaning of work changes, the meaning of a human is at risk.
[00:17:53] Now think about that for a moment and I want you to, we're going to come back to that, but now I want to jump forward to, you know, a week ago and we've got a different Pope Leo. We've got a different machine.
[00:18:09] I think we got the same shape.
[00:18:13] We are in the middle of a transformation that is moving faster than the last one. Clearly the last industrial revolution really took about 100 years.
[00:18:28] This one's taken five.
[00:18:32] Five years ago, AI could barely write a coherent paragraph.
[00:18:37] You, of course, couldn't communicate with it very well.
[00:18:40] You couldn't do a lot of things that everybody would be able to, to understand and use.
[00:18:49] Now it can write code now, it can pass the bar exam, it can diagnose diseases and it can take meetings, write reports, do all those things in between. I was on a meeting earlier where there were more chatbots on the meeting than there were actually people.
[00:19:09] That's, that's saying something right there.
[00:19:13] Now also, though, the wealth is really enormous and the labs and the companies are, put them together, they're valued in trillions of dollars. Right. And the companies that deploy AI, including the one that I work for, you're trying to accelerate that, that wealth and you know, pull away from companies that, you know, don't do that. You're trying to get that advantage. I encourage everybody to get that strategic advantage. Right.
[00:19:47] But unlike a lot of other folks, we always talk about the human cost and we always try to keep that in perspective.
[00:19:57] That's why I try to give you the, you know, the best answer that I can not one that is so grabbing and, you know, you know, doomsday, ish. Or it's going to do this or it's going to do that. Right. I try to be honest and I try to be as grounding as I possibly can be.
[00:20:15] And now when you start to look at things right, if there are labor issues or layoffs, I, you know, I try to tell you what they're really from, what's driving some of those, you know, those kind of things. But now we've got, you know, there are some companies that they're starting to lay off, you know, 20% of their workforce and then they're saying, you know, you've got a three to one balance that everybody's trying to get where you have three agents for every one person. And you know, they're called an, you know, an AI native 100x organization, you know, and you've seen it from Wix, you've seen it from some other companies that are doing this. And they, you know, all said the reason was AI.
[00:21:03] And this isn't the future, this is just in the past two weeks.
[00:21:07] Now, again, here is Chris, the co founder of Anthropic, sitting next to the Pope in Rome, saying, if this keeps happening, taking care of the displaced becomes a moral imperative of historic proportions.
[00:21:25] We already talk about the democratization of AI and we talk about trying to, you know, make sure that everybody has access to it so they can use it and they can take advantage of it.
[00:21:37] But when you stop and you look at some of those statements, you really start to think about the weight of, you know, that responsibility.
[00:21:51] And, you know, so the man whose company is helping cause the displacement that, you know, just, he just stood in front of the world and he said, hey, the bill, you know, for all of this is going to come due sometime.
[00:22:05] And we talk about that. We talk about trying to make sure that you're prepared so you can use it. We talk about, in some cases, it's not AI replacing people, it's people that know AI that are replacing those that don't and taking advantage of that.
[00:22:23] And this is one of those things, I think, that Pope Leo XIV saw.
[00:22:29] This is what made him pick May 15 as the signing date.
[00:22:33] I think he's saying as gently as he can, you know, in a careful language, you know, of a thousand years, really, of teaching that, hey, slow down, we've been here before.
[00:22:50] I think he's saying that, you know, when this new kind of machine really starts to, to accelerate even more, remember who's in charge of the dignity question.
[00:23:03] The people, you know, on those assembly lines paid the price, you know, the last time, and I think the people on the receiving end of the algorithms are going to pay the price this time unless we choose differently.
[00:23:19] And here's the part that I really want you to hold on to and think about is that the Pope didn't tell us to stop building AI.
[00:23:32] There were some articles that inferred that, but he didn't tell us that, didn't even say that.
[00:23:40] What, you know, he's doing, I think what Pope Leo XIII did, he's putting a frame around it. He's saying, you know, build it.
[00:23:52] You know, build it like people matter.
[00:23:56] Build it like the displaced are still part of the human family.
[00:24:01] Build it like there's going to be some moral accountability at the end of all of it, because there's going to be, we all know that.
[00:24:11] And when old institutions meet new technologies, the old ones are, you know, they're not there to learn the tech.
[00:24:21] They're there to remind everybody that, you know, the new tech and what it owes to society, and that's a powerful influencer.
[00:24:37] Now think about that. And after the break, we're going to walk through the specific thing this Pope reminded the labs of.
[00:24:49] It's a very old idea, has three basic parts to it. And once you see it again, I think you'll see it everywhere in the AI conversation. So stay with us. We'll be right back. Sam.
[00:25:26] Foreign.
[00:25:34] Welcome back to AI Today. I'm your host, Dr. Alan Badot. And this is the part of the show where we get to question, you know, really what I've been circling for, you know, the, the first two segments. And, you know, what did the Pope actually remind the AI industry of?
[00:25:59] And, you know, the answer is actually something very old, you know, so old that probably people don't know it exists anymore.
[00:26:10] But once you see it, you're gonna, you're gonna see it in every conversation about AI you have really, for the rest of your life.
[00:26:20] And, you know, it forms some of the foundations of some of the things that I talk to folks about. But also, you know, you know, how I believe that it's always going to be a teaming, right? And the, the man and the, you know, when woman in the AI together and what they can accomplish, right? Not replace, but augment.
[00:26:39] So let me walk you through it. And, you know, so the Church, though, their teaching goes back to over 800 years, right? Almost a thousand years. And, you know, a lot of it comes from Thomas Aquinas, and really the roots are even older than that. But it goes all the way back to Aristotle, if you wanted to say, you know, really, really go all the way back there. But it really fundamentally, it says this, it says, you know, a real action, which is a real moral action, requires three things.
[00:27:17] There has to be someone doing it, there has to be a reason behind it, and there has to be someone who answers for it.
[00:27:28] So you've got an actor, you've got an intent and an accountability.
[00:27:34] Those are the three things.
[00:27:36] And if any one of those are missing, what you have is not really an action.
[00:27:43] You know, without an actor, you, you have nothing. You have just an event without intent, you've got an accident, a reflex.
[00:27:54] And without accountability, without someone who answers for it, you have harm.
[00:28:01] Without an author, harm that nobody owns.
[00:28:10] And the Church says that, you know, Those, those three corners have to be present or moral life will fall apart.
[00:28:21] Now, whether or not we're taught, you know, you agree or disagree with any religious, you know, activity, and, you know, that's, of course your, your prerogative. But just think about that from a fundamental concept that there's got to be an actor, you've got to have intent, and you've got to have accountability.
[00:28:42] You know, that's a, that's a good way to think about things.
[00:28:46] And, you know, it's not an abstract idea, right? It's, it's, it's a framework that we use in courtrooms. We use it in medicine, we use it in war, and we use it in everyday relationships.
[00:29:00] So it's not a bad way to think about things now, you know, think about it when somebody gets hurt or, you know, when somebody hurts someone else, you know, we ask, who did it?
[00:29:12] Why'd you do it?
[00:29:15] Who's responsible?
[00:29:18] Take any one of those away and justice itself becomes impossible. And we've talked about this before, right? We've talked about how AI is moving in a certain direction, and we've talked about some of the things that we're hearing, how, you know, from a digital perspective, how it can take over somebody's life and how to protect yourself from those implications and those things that are happening around you. Now here's though, what I want you to do. I want you to hold that triangle in your mind, okay? I want you to think about actor intent, accountability, plain and simple. And then think about what's happening in AI right now.
[00:30:00] I'm going to give you a little bit more time for that.
[00:30:04] So right now we've got something called an agent, right?
[00:30:11] Yes, the agentic. Whoo. Time.
[00:30:14] And you've heard the word thousands of times on this show, but we're going to make it a little bit more concrete, okay?
[00:30:26] You know, an AI agent is the program that doesn't just answer your questions.
[00:30:34] It goes and it does things. Right?
[00:30:37] It may not be, you know, very advanced. It, you know, but it can book your flight, can write your emails.
[00:30:45] Ours, you know, if it's one of ours, it's got personality, it's got, you know, biomimetic brain that helps redefine and choose what it's doing and those kind of things. And, you know, so you can do more advanced things with it.
[00:31:00] But what do we always say?
[00:31:03] It doesn't own them, right?
[00:31:06] It doesn't decide what's important for you.
[00:31:10] You're the only one that can make that decision.
[00:31:13] Now there are companies, though, right now, and I've talked about a couple of them, but we won't get into too much detail about the companies themselves, but they are, you know, really deploying thousands of these agents to try to replace human workers.
[00:31:29] And, you know, there's a model from Alibaba that, you know, they. They just ran on its own for 35 hours straight. Right. Without a human checking in.
[00:31:43] I don't think that's good.
[00:31:46] You know, from our perspective, we've had agents that have been running for months and months, actually almost 18 months, and somebody's checking in on it.
[00:31:55] Somebody's watching what it's doing, Somebody's making sure that it's behaving.
[00:32:00] Now, in some cases, depending on how you define it, these are not, of course, the chat bots from three years ago. These are digital workers, and they're doing real things in the world.
[00:32:18] Now, let's look at the triangle again.
[00:32:22] Who's the actor?
[00:32:26] Is it the AI model?
[00:32:29] It is the one that's doing work, or is it the one moving the money, is sending emails? Right. You know, from the outside, the model's the actor, as you look at it.
[00:32:44] But the model didn't choose to exist, so the model didn't choose its training. The model is just following instructions. Sort of, you know, kind of like the way out. Hammer fire follows a swinging arm, if you think about it, you know, so the actor, I think, is maybe the company that made the model, the user who pointed it at the task, the engineer who wrote the prompt.
[00:33:16] Everyone?
[00:33:18] Or is it no one?
[00:33:20] Right now, nobody knows.
[00:33:24] Now let's look at the intent.
[00:33:26] When an AI agent decides to do something, when it, I don't know, picks one option out of a thousand, we'll say, whose intent does that decision carry?
[00:33:43] The user said, book me a flight.
[00:33:46] Right?
[00:33:48] The model decided which flight.
[00:33:51] Okay. Which seat, which payment method, Whose plan is that?
[00:33:58] And if the model finds a clever way to do a task that the user didn't anticipate, or, you know, that clever way harms someone else whose intent caused the harm, Right? No. Nobody knows that either.
[00:34:18] See the problem?
[00:34:19] No.
[00:34:20] Oh, yes.
[00:34:22] Who's accountable?
[00:34:24] The agent made a mistake, wires money to the wrong place, sends a private file to the wrong inbox, makes a hiring decision that, you know, breaks the law or ignores certain segments of, you know, a demographic. And for whatever reason, during the hiring process, who answers for it?
[00:34:48] Is it the model? Can't sue a model, can you? Not yet.
[00:34:52] Is it the user? They didn't write the model.
[00:34:56] Is it the company, well, they didn't push the button, so I guess it's nobody then. We have harm without an authority.
[00:35:10] And that is exactly what the triangle says. Cannot exist in a moral society.
[00:35:20] There's, you know, here's the part I want. I want you to sit with, okay? And I want you to carry this.
[00:35:29] The AI industry, including myself, Right.
[00:35:34] Right now, systems that have actors and they have intent, but many of them don't have accountability.
[00:35:50] That's it.
[00:35:52] That's not a small problem.
[00:35:55] It's a whole problem.
[00:35:59] This is what I've been calling for for years.
[00:36:04] The central question of agentic AI, who answers for the agent?
[00:36:12] That's why we put a human in the loop, digitally, directly in the loop.
[00:36:18] We built our whole platform around a principle that came from sitting with this exact question.
[00:36:26] Agents own reasoning. You hear me say that all the time.
[00:36:30] They own the synthesis also all the time.
[00:36:33] They own the work of thinking through complex problems with some human assistance, of course, in some cases.
[00:36:41] But humans have to own the action.
[00:36:48] They have to own the accountability.
[00:36:52] The agent reasons, the human decides.
[00:36:55] And when something goes wrong, there's a name on it. Pretty simple. Well, so and so approved this.
[00:37:03] Did this action to allow the AI to do this.
[00:37:06] Did this to watch over the AI. That's why we say no rubber stamping, right?
[00:37:15] This is not a philosophy. This has got to be the architecture. It has to be the architecture of everything moving forward.
[00:37:23] And people are in such a rush to get things out there that they're missing some key points that you would think they would have learned 100 years ago in history class, 20 years ago.
[00:37:35] You know, think about it. 2006, everything was booming, and then two years later, boom.
[00:37:43] You know, we have the housing issue, right? And so it's about making sure that the architectural integrity of AI as we move forward is solid.
[00:37:55] You know, the Church drew this triangle, you know, 800 years ago, and they're drawing it again and calling it something new. But it's not, you know, this is.
[00:38:08] If you think about it, it's one of those areas that's kind of worth rediscovering.
[00:38:14] And the triangle is one of them. And you would think it would just from a basic discussion that we've had in the last two years on this show that we've tried to get this out there, right? But when the Pope sat down next to an AI co founder in Rome last week, this is the conversation they were having.
[00:38:33] The Pope brought a triangle that has been holding up moral life for centuries. Centuries. The co founder brought a technology that has been threatening to erase one of those corners.
[00:38:46] Accountability, the fact that they're sitting, though, at the same table is really the most hopeful thing because, you know, this doesn't happen very often. And, you know, I've been in the AI space for a long time and, you know, those driving factors are huge.
[00:39:05] But after the break, we're going to talk about what happens next.
[00:39:09] I'm going to reinforce that this is also, you know, there's a political layer to the story that we've barely touched. You know how I feel about that. And, you know, but before we wrap up, you know, I'm going to do something personal I've not done on this show before, and we'll talk about that when we come back. So stay with us.
[00:39:30] SAM Foreign.
[00:40:01] Welcome back to AI Today. I'm your host, Dr. Alan Bideau. And for the better part of the show, we've been in Rome walking through what happened when a pope and an AI co founder shared a stage. We talked about, you know, the historical implications with what they were doing, and we've talked about the new industrial revolution taking place and we've talked about the triangle, you know, actor intent, accountability and what that means for agents being deployed right now by some companies all over the world.
[00:40:38] But before we wrap up, there's really one more layer of the story that I want to put in front of you, and that's the layer the press really hasn't said plainly, I think. And, you know, the layer, the, you know, the other side has barely said it all.
[00:41:03] I don't think this is just a feel, you know, a theological moment.
[00:41:11] I think it's also a political one.
[00:41:13] Now, here's what you should know, right? We don't talk about politics. We don't I'm not going to present it in that fashion, but I want you to think about it from this perspective. That anthropic, the company whose founder stood next to the Pope is right now in, you know, some political, having some political pressure, a little bit of hot political hot water with the, you know, the president and the Trump administration.
[00:41:41] It's a serious fight, right? I mean, what's going on in the Department of War, We've seen it, we've, we've paid attention to it.
[00:41:48] You know, it started over the question of how can anthropics, AI be used, and the US Government wanted to use it for certain things specifically, really what we would call, you know, some, you know, autonomous actions.
[00:42:05] And that can be a whole range of things from, you know, weapons to Cameras to, you know, those kind of things, mass surveillance, you name it.
[00:42:15] And Anthropic said, no, you're not going to do that. And Department of War said, yes, it's here's the contract and you signed, blah, blah, blah. And you know, that's too bad.
[00:42:31] Now Anthropic has some safeguards that they have put into their models.
[00:42:39] They've got some hard rules that they've built things around.
[00:42:43] We all know it's still a large language model and there's still issues associated with that. Right. And hallucinations and things that it's doing that it shouldn't be doing and deleting databases when it's not asked to do those things. It's not perfect. All right, we know that.
[00:43:00] But the Pentagon still wanted to use it. There's still some great things that it can do. And you know, now, because they can't, they did something that is, I couldn't find anything that had taken place like this, but they labeled it really a supply chain risk.
[00:43:25] That's the first time that I could find that. It's, that label has been put on a US company and by doing that is effectively blocks Anthropic from working with government contractors on military projects. And of course Anthropic is suing.
[00:43:46] You know, they say that the supply chain might designation is illegal retaliation for refusing to weaken their safeguards. Trump administration is saying no, that's not the case and there's a whole list of reasons why. So I'm not picking aside, you know, for this discussion, but that's just the fight that's taking place.
[00:44:07] Now I want you to picture the scene again while this fight is going on. While a sitting US President and one of the leading AI labs are openly at war.
[00:44:23] Anthropic's co founder is sitting in Rome.
[00:44:27] He's standing next to the Pope helping unveil a religious document that calls for government oversight of AI, that calls for safeguards, that warns about the concentration of power.
[00:44:42] I don't think that's a coincidence.
[00:44:46] When a frontier AI lab can't get a fair hearing, something that they would deem fair, right from its own government, it goes and looks for a different kind of authority, a different kind of moral standing.
[00:45:07] And the Vatican says yes, by appearing alongside the Pope, Anthropic made a choice.
[00:45:16] They align themselves with the quote unquote moral authority of an ancient institution over the political authority of a sitting U.S. administration.
[00:45:32] And there releasing a religious document, that's a position.
[00:45:39] Now I always want to be careful because this is this is a very slippery slope for folks, right?
[00:45:49] It's not whether or not you like the current administration or not. Okay? It has nothing to do with that. It's about whether you trust Anthropic or not. Okay? About trying to do something bigger and what they actually say. We've heard about it over and over again. I've talked about it having, you know, an ethical framework in your AI. Like, you know, we have one, Anthropic has one. Some, you know, some others have. But it's about something bigger that, you know, they're trying to push forward with.
[00:46:29] And that's really who's allowed or who gets to decide what AI can do right now.
[00:46:40] You know, that question, it's all over the place. Governments, labs, international bodies, and now even religious institutions, civil society, faith communities.
[00:46:55] You know, you've got, you know, a, a, a God agent that, you know, you talk to in some cases that you can, you can join and download and use. You've got so many implications around that. And clearly nobody has won the fight. And really, at the moment, you know, you know, in Rome, when a sign that the fight is wider and deeper than the technology, you know, really, the press hasn't been treating it big enough, I think.
[00:47:34] And when you watch the AI story going forward, watch who is sitting next to whom, watch which institutions are showing up to release which documents with which companies, because alliances are forming and folks have not been paying attention to this. But I have been trying to tell you over the last 18 months, alliances are forming, and those alliances are going to decide really over the next decade what AI looks like some of us are trying to push the message so that you're prepared, so that you understand fundamentally how to use it, how to take advantage of it, how to protect yourself as this revolution continues to span.
[00:48:30] But, you know, let me bring this home a little bit for folks because it's really important. I don't want you to think about, you know, this episode as being an argument that machines have souls, right? Clearly that's not the case. We are not saying that.
[00:48:48] It's been an argument really, that's a lot simpler and even a lot harder to do to make.
[00:48:55] The question of who is responsible when a machine thinks for us is not a new question.
[00:49:05] It's one of the oldest questions there are.
[00:49:10] And the institution that has been answering that really the longest just sat down with people who are building those machines.
[00:49:22] So when Rome asks the machines, it's not about an ask for permission, it's not about asking for a conversation.
[00:49:35] It's doing what the Vatican has always done. It's taking the measure of something new before deciding what to call it.
[00:49:47] Now we can argue about timing, we can argue about the political aspects, we can argue about all that other stuff, but it's really, you know, the only question left is whether the machine builders know they've been measured, right?
[00:50:04] Do they know? Are they paying attention?
[00:50:06] Are they watching what they're doing? Are they adjusting their strategies? Some of us are, some of us are trying to get the message to you and others are letting it just keep, keep running and acting like nothing is taking place.
[00:50:24] And so you've got to pay attention to that.
[00:50:27] You've got to think about those. And that's how you need to look at AI.
[00:50:35] Think about the triangle, whether it's applying in business or your personal life and make sure that all three of those corners are there.
[00:50:45] And if you do that, that's how you're going to get ahead. That's how you're going to win. That's how you're going to do it in a way that is not only impactful for you, but impactful for everybody around you, including your employees.
[00:51:00] And that's how you can leave a better legacy for society. Now, on a personal note, before we go.
[00:51:07] So I wanna talk about something close to home. Just take a moment and you know, because it's that time of year, graduations are taking place, right? And you know I, over the weekend I'm getting goosebumps even thinking about it, right? And you know, over the weekend I was able to go to a gradually graduation. See, I'm even nervous now.
[00:51:33] You know, I got her parents permission to do this. I'm going to do it. So her name is Britain Kibbe. And I held Britain when she was a baby. I watched her grow up and you know, this week she got to graduate from high school and it was, it's really, really something special.
[00:51:50] You know, seeing from this big to growing up, going to college. And you know, you know, we're all proud of her. Not because of the grades and stuff, she crushed it like we all expected. But you know, the achievements, the person that she's turned into, it's really, you know, I'm proud of really who she, she's she's become and she's a one of a kind person. She's great. And she's gonna, I'm gonna get to watch her play soccer in college. It's really fantastic. And so you know, Britain, I know you're, you're not watching right now. You're. You should be on an airplane.
[00:52:29] Everybody's proud of you. And the, you know, we'll continue to be in your corner as you go through everything. And we going to be cheering from the stands, and we look forward to seeing you. And this is her. Just so everybody can see.
[00:52:45] I got her parents permission, so I wanted to show everybody that's her, so. And her with her sister, Riley. So it's been a great time.
[00:52:57] So take the time. You know, if anybody graduates, think about where they started. Think about the triangle, too. Right.
[00:53:04] Try to help them get through this.
[00:53:06] So this is our show.
[00:53:09] I'm Dr. Alan Badot. This has been AI today, and I look forward to seeing you all next week. Bye. Bye.
