The rough conversation was Demis telling Elon: I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman A.I.
And Elon responds to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us into interplanetary species.
And then Demis said: Well, you know my A.I. will be able to follow you to Mars.
And then Elon sort of went quiet…
Thiel himself sums up this meeting of the minds: “It was the dumbest meeting with Elon that we sort of brokered.”
Proclamation in the shade
I’m not the only one to raise this question about the Pope’s encyclical, of course.
The Catholic Herald asked, “Is Magnifica Humanitas aimed at Peter Thiel’s techno-political empire?”
Or, as tech blogger Simon Willison wrote, “I can’t help but wonder if the J.R.R. Tolkien quote from The Return of the King was the Pope throwing a little shade at Peter Thiel.”
But I don’t think this Pope operates according to categories like “throwing shade.” As we saw when Leo tangled with Donald Trump over his war of choice in Iran, Leo sees his job as preaching and proclaiming.
“The mission of the Church is to proclaim the Gospel, to preach peace,” Leo said at the time. “I simply hope to be listened to because of the value of the word of God.”
His Gandalf quote may well be targeted at Thiel, or perhaps more broadly at those who think in similar ways. But it is not confrontational or insulting. It is a way of speaking across differences using a line drawn from a shared cultural resource between the two camps. It offers up a different interpretation of Tolkien’s tremendous work to those who see in it a license for warfare, technological disruption, tremendous battles, and global action. Those things exist in the story, and they are exciting, but they are also terrifying and ultimately endured only for the purpose of defending community, hearth, and home.
In Tolkien’s world, it is the “little people”—indeed, it is the wretched outcast Gollum—who finally 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.
It is in this sense, I think, that the Pope offers a different vision to the tech aristocrats of today. He explicitly asks them to give up their dreams of transhumanism and “artificial” intelligences—and to replace those dreams with something more truly human.