Hi friends,
Welcome back to Comparing Notes, the series where I sit down with another voice in the AI space and we get into it. Jacob Ward is a returning champion. He’s a veteran tech journalist and founder of The Rip Current.
This time we jumped straight to Pope Leo XIV’s letter on AI.
This Pope is feeling different. He named himself after Pope Leo XIII specifically because he sees AI as comparable to the horror of 19th century factory life, and the last Leo created the moral language that eventually led to the New Deal. He drove vans in Peru saving lives before any of this. He clearly reads the tech journalism and understands the human layer underneath AI. To use a technical term: this Pope is a real one.
And a transnational organization like the Catholic Church is uniquely positioned to counter these companies morally. It’s a peer-to-peer argument versus the siloing of individual governments.
On accountability, the Pope didn’t hedge.
“He literally talks about the way in which whoever designed it, trained it, authorized it, and employs it is morally responsible for what it does. You can’t hide behind the fact that it’s a black box. You can’t hide behind your role in the company.”
We got into the weeds on this plus listener questions about:
Why Anthropic was on stage with the Pope the same day Claude was part of targeting systems the U.S. military used to strike Iran. We talked about why it’s hard to tell what a company’s motivations truly are; there is always a matrix of benefit they’re calculating. In the early phase of building, principles are load-bearing. Then the weight of growth comes, and those principles get tucked deeper away. It’s not about the player. It’s about the game.
The environmental cost of data centers. The scale of what’s coming makes the current debate look small. Sam Altman wants to put them in space. These companies have a software mindset: ship first and fix later. But rural electrical grids were overtaxed long before ChatGPT existed. Anyone dismissing this as overblown doesn’t understand the scale of the ambition.
The AI doc: Pushing this conversation past the cloistered world of Bay culture into pop culture, with a more diverse set of voices than The Social Dilemma. We need as many of these as possible. It’s going to take a lot of noise to shape this conversation.
Watch the full conversation above and tell us in the comments: what should we cover in the next installment of Comparing Notes?
Check our first conversation with Jacob if you missed it:
If you’re joining from The Rip Current, subscribe to Life With Machines. If you’re here from Life With Machines, subscribe to The Rip Current. As Jacob put it: it’s clear in the data that our Venn diagram really overlaps deeply.
Stay human.
— Baratunde
Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.
