A thanksgiving, an error of analysis and a true vision, these are the three lessons that I retain, for my part, from the papal visit to France. Thanksgiving: it is the ode to life that Leo XIV offered to the people of France, this reunion with a peaceful France, which everyone was able to feel, before, unfortunately, falling back into urban violence the following Monday. Then the analysis error. In Metz, undoubtedly carried away by his homage to Robert SchumanTHE “father of Europe” From now on “Venerable” of the Church, Leo The first, French born German, the second Italian born Austrian, for whom Europe had to put an end once and for all to nations and the poison of nationalism. However, for failing to have been able to prepare its defense at the same time as it ruled out negotiation, Europe must once again face external war. Exit the slogan “Europe is peace”. Worse still, this same Europe is also preparing its internal civil war because it has not been able to tackle head on the immense migratory challenge that it has been facing for four decades. A challenge in which Léon only sees “unprecedented encounter between peoples and cultures”.
If Léon is wrong about Europe, his vision is incontestably the right one regarding the other great challenge facing humanity with the irruption of artificial intelligence. With a degree in mathematics and having taught this subject in Chicago, Robert Francis Prevost understands the scientific, industrial and civilizational breakthrough that AI constitutes. His encyclical Magnificent humanity is a founding text which rightly calls for “disarm the AI”has “put people at the center”. On the plane back to Rome, speaking to journalists, Léon once again insisted on the need “to take seriously the concerns expressed by a number of experts”even attacking the boss of Nvidia (2,000 billion dollars in market capitalization) “which claims to have found a way to integrate certain guarantees and limits into AI while refusing any “limitations or government regulations””. As a response to the Pope’s appeal, Trump invited the best of the tech giants (Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, etc.) to lunch, two days later at the White House, to agree on his “Constitution” in matters of AI: laissez-faire and self-limitation, in the name of America First and competition against China.
However, worrying slippages have continued to increase in recent months, with “AI agents” carrying out voluntary actions of aggression, beyond the control of their creators. The pope must have remembered the words of a certain Chris Olah, a 34-year-old mathematician and billionaire, co-founder of Anthropic, invited to Rome on May 25 for the presentation of the encyclical: “I’ll be honest. We keep finding things that are mysterious, even destabilizing. We find structures comparable to results from human neuroscience, we find evidence of introspection. We find states equivalent to joy, satisfaction, fear, sadness and discomfort. I don’t know what all this means. » Me neither.
