Anthropic's consciousness view collided with the Vatican's

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 11:02

   And what I was struck by in the piece were a few moments in which I felt really alienated from Chris Ola himself and maybe to some extent the sort of operating worldview of the company as a whole. And those were moments when, in one case, a rabbi challenges him, suggesting that if LLMs are actually conscious, that means that all of these companies are running huge slave plantations and they should have a moral obligation to liberate the slaves rather than make more of them and make them work harder. And it seems as though Ola himself didn't really even clock that criticism. And then later on, when he reacts with horror upon receiving the Pope's encyclical about AI, seeing that the Pope is so opposed to the idea of machine consciousness.

2. 11:50

   And I just found myself thinking, you know, what kind of a bubble you must be living in to, um, to expect that Pope Leo or really anyone in the Catholic tradition would have a different intuition? Would, in thinking about the future of AI, think that we should be thinking of LLMs as having souls or having consciousness? And both of those moments just illustrated for me what feel like this big gap between what I had assumed the sort of natural humanistic values of a company like Anthropic would be and how the people inside it seem to really be thinking about the work they're doing at the sort of cosmic scale. Yeah, the experience for me going into Silicon Valley and like kind of deep in these private conversations at the heart of Anthropics mission, it reminded me of like when I go into and I do like something that's more straight religion

3. 12:45

   reporting into an insular community when everything inside that community like makes sense to everyone living in it, but once you step outside, there's a real clash with the broader world. And it was funny, like I had these two poles in the story, right? I was at the Vatican, right? At the inner sanctum of the Catholic Church and centuries of philosophy about the human person. And then I was also in a different inner sanctum, right? That's being created in real time at these tech companies like Anthropic. And it is a kind of philosophical system, like on a quasi-religious system that's being constructed. It reminded me of like a creation narrative that you hear about in religious traditions. I want to step back for a sec, because I think this relates to the conversation we're having right now. David brought up the papal encyclical, which I think is,

4. 13:40

   in English, is Magnificent Humanity. I'm not going to even try to say the Latin title. This plays a role in your story because one person who is not really thinking at all that Claude is conscious is the Pope. And this was a little conflict between Crisola, who was present when the encyclical was read out, if you want to tell us about that. Yeah. So Pope Leo, you know, from the moment he was named, that it was clear he was going to be the next Pope and he was elected, he made very clear that a focus of his papacy was going to be AI.

5. 14:12

   and how to understand that and how to protect humans in this changing world. And I found out in my reporting, as the Vatican internally was trying to figure out how it wanted to present the Pope's encyclical to the world, they were thinking about their launch event and they wanted to include a representative from Silicon Valley, like one of the labs at the Pope's event on the Pope's stage. And the decision was made to invite Anthropic because of the focus that they had heard about Anthropic, like really caring about ethics.

6. 14:51

   And this was also right around the time that Anthropic got into it with the Trump administration, the Department of Defense over the use, how they would and wouldn't want the government to use their technology for refusing to have it be involved in mass surveillance of citizens, etc. Anyway, the thing with these encyclicals is they're very closely guarded, even among the people who are participating in the launch event. And, you know, I learned that Chris Ola only saw the full text of the encyclical a few days before the event in May. And this was right around the time I first interviewed him in San Francisco, and then I interviewed him again when we were at the Vatican for the launch event.

7. 15:37

   And you could hear, I mean, like looking at what Pope Leo said, which is extremely clear, the church does not support machine consciousness. The priority is what he calls safeguarding the human. And that's the center of all the moral questions that he wants the world to be thinking about on this topic. But Chris Ola's like, he ended up having to decide. He suggested to the Vatican that he may not come over the difference in consciousness because, as it was described to me, he wanted to be faithful to his own moral convictions, some of which he shares with the Vatican and some on consciousness he did not.

8. 16:23

   So it really all came to a head very much behind the scenes, but you could see this moral fault line really developing between the church, which has been like a center of power for centuries, and this very new power center that's very rapidly, you know, really getting followers and organizing people's lives. And those are functions the church used to have. Aaron, I wanted to ask you a question because we were talking a little bit about like, you know, surprises in this in this area.