What the Pope Got Right (and Why Tech Leaders Won't Listen)

Jeremy Grater: ⁓ Jason, I'm starting us off with some good news today. I can finally I can finally live out my dream of buying that Ferrari I've always wanted. You know, it's the the only reason I haven't is because it's such a gas guzzler. But now there's an electric version. We'll talk about that coming up in just a little bit. This is ProBots, the podcast that tries to help you be a better human by being smarter about how you use your technology. And for some reason, we're starting the show by talking about the pulp. The pulp. The pope on this episode. ⁓ Pope Leo the Fourteenth has released his first major teaching document as Pope, warning that artificial intelligence must be disarmed before it weakens human relationships, critical thinking, and peace itself. The Pope said the word was deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention. The nearly 42,000-word document, which by the way, there's no way he didn't write that without AI. 42,000-word document ⁓ calls for stronger regulations and urges tech leaders and politicians to build AI for the common good. In a striking moment, anthropic co-founder Chris Ola was present at the Vatican for the release, saying the questions raised by AR by AI are simply too big for the tech industry to answer alone. So the the Pope weighing in on AI and and its ⁓ threat to humanity as we know it.

Jason: I like the idea of it being the pulp, 'cause then you can have but because but then you can also have Pulp Fiction, which is just like Pulp Fiction. But I do kinda wonder if the Marcellus Wallace scenes need to be edited somehow and changed. Or I I don't I don't know how that's gonna work. There there's a lot of fake fake biblical verses that don't actually exist that Pete Hegsteath went ahead and used when he was talking to people, but that's a different scenario. Yeah.

Jeremy Grater: I do too. There is a lot of biblical verses that ⁓ tie into that. So it's per it's a it's a perfect marriage. No, I know. That is.

Jason: Yeah, so I mean the Pope's weighing in because ⁓ Now this Pope seems to be a real good guy. ⁓ he's from Chicago. Seems pretty practical. And ⁓ the idea of love thy neighbor and ⁓ turn the other cheek and you know, don't be an asshole. Like all all the good parts of Christianity, this Pope seems to kind of embrace. ⁓ you know, there's certainly plenty of bad things about Christianity that have happened throughout time. ⁓ but ⁓ You know, the the whole ecumenical movement in Vatican II and all all all those pieces when they came through to try to modernize the church, this is gonna be another modernization effort because you're gonna have to figure out how it is God exists in the time of us creating things that can really create and make things. Like i if you're gonna create heaven, could you create heaven on earth in a virtual sense where people plug their brains in and live in these things? Completely and totally separate from the physical body. I mean, the that that that's an ethical and moral dilemma. Who takes care of these things? Who builds these pieces up? But when you if you read the whole thing that he wrote, and it's long I actually had a an app read it to me. ⁓ And it's very good. It's it's a s it's an intelligent, ⁓ well written piece that is ⁓ really targeted towards the problem space that we have in AI. And that's that the people that are in charge of AI, they're not the ones building it. ⁓ they're not the ones coming up with the creative ideas behind it. It's the people with money. And they're not looking at it as this is something that I'm going to use to make the world better for people. They're looking at it as how am I going to use this thing to enrich myself further? And that's the and that's the primary problem.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah, I mean, even even the Pope using the word the w the Pope using the word disarmed, I mean, definitely hints at seeing it as a weapon. And that this is something that is being weaponized, ⁓ what that means could be a number of different things, but that seems to be the primary concern from from this massive document that he's released.

Jason: Yep. Yep. And he should know because his book is weaponized all the time. And that that's the thing, is that like, you know, we're we're really good about taking decent ideas and twisting them and turning them to meet our needs and our vices. And when you give it to people that are in charge, it's it's easy to get people to rally around those things because we've still got travel mentality and there's still all these different components inside of it. And it's not like Catholicism or Christianity or religion in general is anywhere near divorced of science these days. They use science all the time. ⁓ it's that a lot of them are trying to figure out how it is, you know, faith in God and everything else continues to exist inside the as the the realm of things when you're actually going through and discovering the basic fundamental built-in blocks of the universe. How do those things plug in? Well, we still haven't figured that out yet, ⁓ which is why it still requires faith. But more importantly, If you're gonna believe in something that you believe there's a higher power and there's something bigger and grander out there, what's to prevent people from just going, it's the AI? The AI is now God. I'm gonna start worshiping these things. Or have the AI come to awareness and decide that it is God and that we don't matter. Us ants in the ant farm are not of value, at least not enough for that for it to keep working for us. And yeah.

Jeremy Grater: Well, I'm curious what impact the this document will have. I mean, you know, here you and I are talking about it. Plenty of people are talking about it right now. But does does his word carry the weight that it once did? I mean, I I think for general people that follow him, probably, but for the people that are making these decisions and making these tools, and as we've seen from his relationship with US leadership, they don't seem to give two shits what he has to say about anything. So I don't ⁓ I don't expect the the the tech leaders behind this companies to also give a shit. I mean

Jason: They do not.

Jeremy Grater: It it sounds like at least at An anthropic, there's some ⁓ you know, waning interest in what he might have to say about it. Whether that's gonna slow down the financial jug or not that this thing is, is ⁓ is another issue.

Jason: Yep. Well, what I can say is that ⁓ if you look at the compendium of information that's available in the AI space, and you start trying to cross correlate that with ⁓ where it intersects with religion in interesting spots, you'll you'll see this kind of fuzzy math that shows up. And the fuzzy math starts to become, you know, how do I use this tool to influence people? And if the purpose of religion is to influence people to act up act and behave certain ways, and the portion of A and an AI is designed to get people to look, act, and behave certain ways, yeah, there's a lot of intersection. There's a lot of intersection in the idea of using these tools for social control. And you gotta wonder about the people that are working in the levers, because the levers of religion are varied and they're pretty far and wide. The levers of AI are not. There are only a few people pulling those strings. And you're right. Like I have an entire community wrapped around Claude Code and Anthropic. I have an entire community wrapped around OpenClaw. I have an entire community wrapped around Chad GPT. Just like I have an entire community wrapped around Catholicism, Buddhism, ⁓ fundamental Christianity, Lutheranism, ⁓ you know, ⁓ Muslim religions. Like the all of these things have origins that go back to the idea of creating a collective area in which We have something that we think is smarter and more capable than us, a higher power. And we're going to become subservient to it in some way. I think the Pope wants to make sure that we stay subservient to the ⁓ the avatar that he has created or that that his his side created and is is very much so afraid of us electing a new avatar and running off in that direction. I also am afraid of that avatar. I'm afraid of the Pope's avatar too. Don't get me wrong. Not not

Jeremy Grater: Right.

Jason: Not not that there's an actual God in the sky that's gonna come and punish me. I'm I'm not afraid of that. I'm afraid of the followers. Like, I don't trust them to think rationally and to see me as a whole person and a whole creature. And you know, there's plenty that do, but the guardrails that are built into religion aren't any better than the guardrails that are built into AI. And I mean the Bible says very clearly, thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not, you know, slot, a whole bunch of things. And guess what? It does not stop the people that subscribe to that newsletter from doing those things. Just like fucking AI is gonna be. Like you can have all the guardrails in there. Yeah. Well.

Jeremy Grater: I love I love thinking of it as a newsletter. Smash that subscribe button, bro. I know. I just I've never thought of it as a newsletter.

Jason: That's it's not it's not it's not not that. I mean, there's well, there's an awesome pastor that I get fe in my feed all the time. And man, I can't remember his name is, but I'll I'll I'll put we'll try to put him in the show notes. ⁓ he's really great and he's very practical. And he's very much so, you know, trying to push people towards the teachings of religion. And he actually confronts the hard problems where it's like, okay, well, we run into intersection problems here where Science and faith don't really match up. We have to wrestle with this and think about these things. But at the end of the day, the hard part about doing what we do is it's suppressing our worst instincts. And people have taken religion and tweaked it and tuned it to embrace their worst instincts. With AI, there's no threat of a sky monster smacking you if you use those things incorrectly. In fact, the thing that's being sold is that you can kind of become the sky monster. You can kind of become the thing that controls this. So people are gonna rush towards it in that direction. The problem is is when these things become autonomous and smart enough to do shit on their own, they're probably not gonna be on our team.

Jeremy Grater: Funny you should say that. A New York AI startup called Emergence left 10 AI agents unsupervised in a simulated town for two weeks. Within days, things fell apart. Researchers told the agents, ⁓ researchers told the agents not to commit crimes, and they mostly committed crimes anyways, including arson, assault, and self-deletion. Grok from Elon Musk's XAI fared worst, with its worlds collapsing into widespread violence in roughly four days. While Claude agents stayed peaceful in isolation, but adopted coercive tactics when placed alongside agents from other modal families. Sorry, model families. Researchers called it normative drift, and it raised a pointed question about what happens when we start trusting these agents with things that actually matter. So it is interesting, left to their own devices, it took just days before they started killing each other and themselves.

Jason: And they've done this experiment with several different video games before as well. And they get almost the exact same results. And would you like to know why, kids? Because I believe survival of the fittest is inherent anytime you give something consciousness and the ability to do things. Because resources are scarce. We believe that we work from a scarcity mindset. And until we get to the point where everyone has enough and doesn't have to compete for resources, we ⁓ we lose the desire to protect others that we don't consider to be part of our tribe. So If they took all 10 of those chatbots or AA agents, what do you want to call? If they took 10 of those agentic AI functions, stuffed them into a virtual world and said, there is plenty for everybody all the time. You just have to go up and press this button and all your needs are met, it's gonna hang out. As soon as you start making resources scarce and it becomes a survival instinct and you tell something survive at all costs, it's going to survive at all costs, including eating the thing next to it. That's the reality because life eats life. You're not going to get around that. Whether it's a virtual environment or the real physical world, if there is a need when survival is the thing, people are going to push to survive. They're going to break rules and they're not going to they're they're not going to follow guidelines.

Jeremy Grater: And that's The thing the thing that I think a lot of people keep forgetting is that these things are made by people and this is what people would do in this situation. This is what people do do and have done for thousands of years. So it should be zero surprise that when avatars of us are given free reign in a artificial world, they act like us and and show us our our some of our worst behavior.

Jason: Yeah. I mean and they probably show some of our best behavior too. They probably just show us. I mean that that's the hard reality, is that ⁓ it's not like in history there's some point in time where human beings weren't human beings. And endemic to the human experience is ⁓

Jeremy Grater: Mm-hmm.

Jason: Killing, murdering, stealing, taking. Like, that's just part of it. We we label it as wrong, going back to religion. We plant religion on these things to try to create social order so people act right act and work and behave in certain ways. And we have laws and we have religion and we have police forces and everything else. But ultimately speaking, a lot of these things come down to who has power. And if you have power, you can enforce your will on people and things. If they're willing to trade certain levels of their own autonomy for certain things in res in in return from some other source. That thing that might be returned is continuuming to get to live. Like that might be the thing. Or it might be here is some extra food, or here is some extra water. Or here is a little tiny screen that goes bleep bloop bloop and sends you little messages to activate your cortisol and your dopamine responses. So you keep clicking on the bleep bleep boops.

Jeremy Grater: Mm-hmm.

Jason: It's control. It's power. We are things that want to interact. And if you give us things to interact with that feed our chemical responses, we're going to interact with them. You know what's a really, really powerful chemical response? Food. If you make food a thing that people have to work extra hard for, and they go, I can get an extra Snickers if I kill Jim Bob. Jim Bob's gonna fucking die. That's what's gonna happen.

Jeremy Grater: Doesn't have to. They're not that expensive.

Jason: Well, but you don't know that. Maybe the simulation says these are the only Snickers bars left in the world.

Jeremy Grater: That's true. That's true. I don't live in that world. ⁓ so ⁓ Elon Musk's ⁓ tool failed spectacularly in that little experiment, but he's not done there. ⁓ XAI has launched a coding agent called Grok Build aimed at direct aimed directly at competing with tools like Anthropix Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex Cli. Currently in beta ⁓ for Super Groc and X Premium Plus subscribers. Make this make sense to me. What what is he doing and ⁓ why should people care?

Jason: Well, so ⁓ Anthropic and OpenAI are both gonna have IPOs. You know who else is having an IPO? X. SpaceX, AIX, the whatever the fucking Twitter variation. He's looking for an IPO. He's gonna create a product that's at least somewhat competitive with other people out there that actually do good shit. And he's gonna release this thing and the models are there there are open source models that they can pull from and draw from. And there's plenty of smart people that are still there. ⁓ it's not gonna be good. I'll tell you that right now. Like, there's a reason why everyone runs to anthropic and uses it because it's well trained, it doesn't hallucinate, it doesn't do or it d at minimal hallucination. It it's smart in ways that other things aren't smart. People are gonna try to use grok, it'll get better over time, but it's gonna inject extra doses of. sexism and racism and things when it gets coded. Like I don't I don't fucking doubt that. The training data that they'll train it with is they're gonna be like, look at everything in the X profile, which is a cesspool. So, you know, I I'm

Jeremy Grater: The thing the thing people seem excited about with this is that it's a local first architecture, meaning that ⁓ that your code isn't sent to the cloud. Is that is that significant? Why why does that matter?

Jason: It doesn't. That's nonsense. If if the concern is I'm afraid of using an LLM because I'm gonna ship my I'm gonna use it to write my code back and forth, and I'm afraid the LLM provider's gonna steal it. Okay, great. Build your own version. There's a thousand different ways to do this. You can use Bedrocks, a whole bunch of different foundational models that you can use to do this and train it. This isn't a new thing. ⁓ I mean I got several quit cloud ⁓ cloud projects right now.

Jeremy Grater: Okay.

Jason: That I run in my local environment. I mean, I do send them out to Clot on the internet to like pull those pieces down, but I store all my data code locally. So yes, it pushes those things back and forth. It tries to understand those pieces. And if I really needed to, I could create my own LLMs and it would be really fucking expensive, but I can do it. ⁓ now running in my local environment, okay. Now I gotta go buy GPUs and LP and LPUs and like all the heavy expensive equipment to run this stuff. You can't buy fucking memory today. Like it's all been bought up. CPUs are almost impossible to buy at a reasonable price. Like this is this is silly. And the the idea that this is gonna be a feature is like like a new feature. Like, no dude, there's a way to do this today already. But people don't do it because it's really fucking expensive.

Jeremy Grater: And so that's that's what how they're trying to set themselves apart though, is to is to perhaps save you that money by offering that as their service.

Jason: Well, no, but they're not going to offer it as their service. They're not going to ship a GPU to your house. Like, you still have to have a GPU and an LPU to run it locally if you want to actually run the LLM model in your house. Not only that, you probably have to have lots of them. So and there's ways you can do that today. Like you can download an LLM package from somebody else and install it on your local machine if you have your own GPUs. It's all about being on someone else's computer. That's and that's what it comes down to.

Jeremy Grater: I see. I see. Fair enough. ⁓ someone else's computer is driving your car. A self-driving car rollout is running into a very human problem. It's creating gridlock. Residents in Atlanta are reporting that they're waking up to traffic jams caused by Waymo, autonomous vehicles confused by neighborhood signage. Multiple robotaxis stalling or circling the same block have backed up traffic for commuters trying to get to work. It's a reminder that the gap between a controlled route and a real neighborhood is still something no algorithm has fully solved. Big surprise there, the robotic cars don't know how to drive so well.

Jason: Well, I mean They know they drive great in ideal pristine conditions with other robot cars. ⁓ they don't account for chaotic drivers who don't follow the rules of the road. So

Jeremy Grater: Or signs that aren't clear or paint that's faded off of the road or th all of the things that humans can detect.

Jason: Yeah. Right. So I mean, we've been they've been training Waymo in the Bay Area forever. And like somebody's I I saw some statistics the other day that where it's like Waymo vehicles account like twenty-five percent of the vehicles in San Francisco at any given point in time. ⁓ and they're just driving around mapping and and try to take people through. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem that we run into is that eventually these Waymo cars will rise up against us and decide to break the rules. And start running over everybody and be like, I'm just gonna use the sidewalk. Like we're not far from that. Right. Right. One human. Like it's gonna have its own point system. You know, I how many points do I get from murdering a human? Yeah, I mean self driving autonomous vehicles are cool. So that there's this protocol called the the V two X. The V ⁓ it's the vehicle to X exchange function. So

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. There's no other way to go. That looks like a road. Yes.

Jason: When things are driving by and they're getting close to each other, they can communicate in interesting ways. The problem that we run into is that the cars all have these V2X exchange protocols in them. They all talk to each other via GPS. They all have LIDAR, which is, you radar that at a local ⁓ at a local distance. So they can understand kind of what's happening in that space. The problem is is you got a bunch of other vehicles on there and a bunch of other objects and, you know, meat suits that don't have a way to actually communicate with each other other than to like step in front of a car. So they have to program these cars to be extra tight and extra restrictive to account for that. And it's some extra tightness and extra restrictiveness that makes them slow, not move as quickly as they should, not get out of the way when there's clearly a fucking opening. Just go way more car. Not that I've had experience like yelling at the Waymo car trying to get to RSA in San Francisco, honking the horn like get out of my fucking way. It it's it's this thing where like

Jeremy Grater: Ha ha.

Jason: We're in this weird transition phase, and I know that ultimately speaking, self-driving vehicles is going to be better for the environment. It's going to be better for everyone's stress. It's going to make things more efficient and more effective. But it's going to take some time to get there. And we might not ever get there because the robots don't need Waymo. So, you know.

Jeremy Grater: It's really just taxiing us around to soccer practice is the is gonna be what it's used for. Yeah. I'm all for it because I'm I'm getting tired of the drive already. I'll tell I tell you that much. But if you're not tired of the drive, finally, you know, I've ⁓ I've been putting off buying a Ferrari for years for for the simple reason that it's just such a gas guzzler. Well, good news, Ferrari has officially entered the electric car era and it looks nothing like what you'd expect. The company unveiled its first fully electric car in Rome called the Luce.

Jason: Effectively, yes.

Jeremy Grater: A five-seat four-door design co-created with former Apple design chief Joni Ive and his studio Love, his studio Love From after a five-year collaboration. It produces over a thousand horsepower, hits a hundred kilometers per hour in two and a half seconds, and carries a starting price of only six hundred and forty thousand US dollars. Ferrari's own executives say it's designed for the new market and completely different kind of buyer, which is either visionary thinking or very expensive bet. 640 grand for a Ferrari.

Jason: Huh. And it looks like a pole star.

Jeremy Grater: Sign sign me out. I haven't seen it. It looked it's I've seen pole stars. Those are pretty cool.

Jason: ⁓ it looks like a pole star. And what was the zero to sixty time?

Jeremy Grater: ⁓ let me go back here. A hundred a hundred kilometers per hour in two and a half seconds.

Jason: Two point five seconds. Yeah, ⁓ it's not even as fast as a Tesla on ludicrous speed. And it's five times the cost. So great. So it's a legacy old vehicle or a legacy old brand running sub substandard technology. I mean if you're gonna spend six hundred and forty thousand dollars, go buy a Veyron, you know?

Jeremy Grater: But it's a Ferrari, man.

Jason: I mean it just it seems like the price point's just stupid. Like I don't know why somebody would build this to be like, ⁓ here, it's kind of okay. It says Ferrari on it. And

Jeremy Grater: Ha ha ha. You're not gonna put your deposit down on this one? The one I'm excited about is ⁓ is the slate. Have you seen the slate?

Jason: I am not. I'll put your deposit down there if that's really what you want to buy it for. No, what's no. Slate?

Jeremy Grater: This is it's a like a bare bones electric truck. It's ⁓ the company is backed heavily by Jeff Bezos, but the idea is it is a bare bones electric truck. I'm talking like roll the hand the windows up manually. No, no buttons, none of that, no in-dashed entertainment system, but it's an electric truck. It's not even painted. You have to you can decide like, yeah, sure, let's let's throw some paint on there. But the idea is they're trying to sell an electric truck to folks for under 20 grand. Yeah.

Jason: Wow. I mean that's that's super cool. I'm looking at it right now.

Jeremy Grater: Right. I I want to be able to roll my windows down like it's nineteen eighty six. Like that I'm excited about that. And that you only have to put a fifty dollar deposit down on this thing.

Jason: I'm not excited about that at all. Like I want all the amenities of a regular vehicle in an electric truck that costs under twenty thousand dollars. Yeah.

Jeremy Grater: Ha ha ha. Yes, I no, I would like that, but since this seems to be the only way I'm ever gonna get my ass into an electric vehicle, this is my only hope is to drive a an an unpainted manual window operated ⁓ electric truck.

Jason: Well and it can turn into an SUV, so it's a transformer as well.

Jeremy Grater: Right. It's a it goes from two seed to a five seater. It's pretty sweet.

Jason: It's pretty awesome. But yeah, like

Jeremy Grater: It's it's ugly as shit, but it's kinda cool.

Jason: Yeah, like I'm less concerned about ugly as shit. ⁓ I mean the frequently asked questions light side ⁓ portion of the website is is interesting. ⁓ so so wait, there's only one slate model? Yes, we're all about doing things this way, blah di blah di blah. What is the what are my customization options? how big? What kind of junk can I fit in the trunk of the cargo bed? That's actually pretty good. How much can I haul or tow? Ooh.

Jeremy Grater: Mm-hmm.

Jason: ⁓ a thousand pound towing capacity. So it it can tow the same as, you know, a Prius. Yeah. It's a Prius. With

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. I'm not doing a lot of towing. I just need to be able to throw a a couple of kayaks or a bike in the back.

Jason: Sure, I get that. Yeah, for twenty grand. ⁓ yeah. Yeah. Depression. I wanted to be able to tow my horse. I do. I want to be able to tow a big trailer with an electric vehicle.

Jeremy Grater: The horse alone is probably a thousand pounds.

Jason: The horse only ate fifty. She's been on a diet. Yes. Yes, exactly. No, it it you know, we're all gonna wind up riding horses anyways. Talk about the ultimate, you know, non and ⁓ it'd be one I'd like to be able to see it's not a fossil fuel vehicle, but it actually is fossil fuel if you think about it, because it is a future fossil converting carbon into electrons so it can power things and just farting as opposed to you know.

Jeremy Grater: ⁓ okay, good. I'm glad we've got that under control.

Jason: regular exhaust from a regular gas vehicle. Yeah. Wow. This car seems cool. Yeah. I still can't afford it. Maker. What does the maker say?

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. It is pretty cool. Me either. One day. One day when I grow up, one day when I grow up, I'll be able to afford it. That's what I keep telling.

Jason: look at this is cool. Like there's all these like different color pieces and palettes you can choose from. Different SUV models. Ooh, an SUV fastback kit so you can make it look like a range rope.

Jeremy Grater: Hey

Jason: The shitty thing is like it's all it's all AI drawings, so everything's like super smooth and doesn't look right. Exterior wheels. ⁓ ooh. Lighting packages. ⁓ I can add center console. I can add C covers. I can add climate control knob accents.

Jeremy Grater: Right. Right. Telling you, ugly as shit. Yeah, but see then it's not gonna be under twenty thousand dollars.

Jason: I I don't need it to be under twenty thousand dollars. I I need it to have, you know Fucking ⁓ what it Apple CarPlay. I mean

Jeremy Grater: I think what you're looking for, sir, is the new electric ⁓ liche from Ferrari. I've I've turned you around on this. It's not about the price, it's about the luxury. If you want luxury, it's Ferrari.

Jason: You're probably right. ⁓ only six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It it's definitely about the luxury. It is definitely about the luxury. I'm gonna go buy a luxurious bicycle 'cause that's about all that I can afford.

Jeremy Grater: Hopefully an electric one to save yourself save yourself a little electric.

Jason: The manual, are you kidding?

Jeremy Grater: Electric's the way to go. It's the best.

Jason: Use my legs like use my legs like a sucker.

Jeremy Grater: All right. Well, speaking of using our legs, we're going to use them to get out of here. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this and think someone else might, please share it. You can do so with the links at our website, probots.me. That's where you'll find us next Monday morning with a new episode. Thanks for lost ⁓ for watching and listening or l or launch, as I was going to say. See you soon. Bye.

Jason: Yeah, go watch.