In a difficult conversation, Demis told Elon: I am working on the most important project in the world. I am building an extraterrestrial AI
And Elon replied to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m turning us into an interplanetary species.
And then Demis said: Well, you know my AI will be able to follow you to Mars.
And then Elon kind of went silent…
Thiel himself summed up this meeting of the minds: “It was the stupidest meeting with Elon we ever brokered.”
proclamation in the shadows
Of course, I am not the only one to raise this question about the Pope’s encyclical.
The Catholic Herald asked, “Is the goal of Magnifica Humanitas Peter Thiel’s techno-political empire?”
Or, as tech blogger Simon Willison wrote, “I can’t help but wonder if J.R.R. Tolkien’s quote return of the king Was the Pope throwing a little shade at Peter Thiel.”
But I don’t think this Pope works under the same categories as “throwing shade”. As we saw when Leo clashed with Donald Trump over his choice of war in Iran, Leo sees his job as preaching and preaching.
Leo said at the time, “The mission of the church is to preach the gospel, to preach peace.” “I just hope that I will be heard because of the value of God’s Word.”
His Gandalf quote may have been aimed at Thiel or perhaps more broadly at those who think in similar ways. But it’s not confrontational or insulting. It is a way of bridging differences between the two camps using a line drawn from a shared cultural resource. It offers a different interpretation of Tolkien’s groundbreaking work to those who see it as a license for war, technological disruption, forceful battles, and global action. Those things exist in the story, and they’re exciting, but they’re also scary and ultimately endured for the purpose of protecting the community, the hearth, and the home.
In Tolkien’s world, it is the “little people” – in fact, it is the wretched outcast Gollum – who ultimately save the world from the battles and technologies of the “Great”, and thus it is in the limited world of the Hobbits that the action begins and ends.
I think it is in this sense that the Pope offers a different perspective to today’s technocratic elite. He explicitly asks them to abandon their dreams of transhumanism and “artificial” intelligence – and to replace those dreams with something more genuinely human.
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