Since stepping into the Papacy, Pope Leo XIV has been a forceful voice pushing back against the anti-human path we’re on with AI. In May, he released “Magnifica Humanitas,” a sprawling encyclical warning of the dangers to human dignity and agency posed by runaway AI. Tristan had the incredible opportunity to meet with the Pope ahead of the encyclical's release.

In the modern world, you’d think we would have developed governance structures to deal with powerful new technologies like AI. It's worth asking why a 2,000-year-old religious institution is the only one standing up and loudly declaring that the default path is unacceptable.

In this episode, Tristan and Aza discuss what it was like for Tristan to be at the Vatican, why this is such a critical step toward a pro-human future, and how we can build on the momentum of the Pope’s call to action.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this conversation on our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

The Pope’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas”

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The Tech-God Complex: Why We Need to be Skeptics

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Corrections:

• Tristan said that Pope John XXIII gave his radio address weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It actually occured during the crisis.
• Tristan paraphrased the full quote from Pope Leo's encyclical on AI disarmament. Here is the full quote: "Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance."
• Aza slightly misquoted Dr. King Jr. The full quote begins "The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live."
• The delegates for Bretton Woods came from just 44 countries, not "hundreds" as Tristan said.

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In the middle of the twentieth century, the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons seemed inevitable. The number of countries with nukes was climbing rapidly, and the idea of stopping the nuclear arms race seemed like a pipe dream.

But that’s exactly what happened. Over the course of 60 years, nations around the world agreed to nuclear red lines, slowdowns, and even disarmament. How did this happen? Largely because of technology.

The biggest obstacle to agreeing on nuclear red lines was that adversaries couldn't trust any promise the other made. They needed to know the number of warheads, the amount of enriched uranium, or whether a nuclear device was for a weapon or a power plant. None of that was possible until we built the tech needed to verify those things.

Today, we're in a similar situation with AI. For adversaries like the United States and China to agree on reasonable AI red lines on issues like bioweapons, cyber hacking, or the risk of recursive self-improvement, they first need to be able to trust each other. We urgently need to build the verification technology that would make that trust possible.

In this episode, Tristan sits down with two experts in this field to discuss the kinds of verification technology we need for AI, the challenges of building it, and the world it could unlock if we do. Tim Fist is the Director of Emerging Technology Policy at the Institute for Progress, and Janet Egan is Senior Fellow and Deputy Director for the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for New American Security.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. You can find a transcript of this episode on our Substack.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

Anthropic’s open letter warning about recursive self-improvement and calling for a pause in development.

The website for the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI)

Further reading on the different mechanisms of verification for international AI governance.

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures

Can We Govern AI? with Marietje Schaake

The Crisis That United Humanity—and Why It Matters for AI

Daniel Kokotajlo Forecasts the End of Human Dominance

Correction: Tim referred to the CargoScan technology as being jointly developed by the US and the USSR. It was actually developed solely in the US and administered in Soviet nuclear facilities.

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We often think of the challenges created by technology as separate and disconnected, so trying to solve them feels like playing the world's hardest game of Whac-A-Mole.

What if, instead, we tackled them at the root by identifying the patterns in design, development, and deployment that are causing these issues? Once we understand what's driving inhumane tech, we can develop a set of principles for building humane tech.

In this week’s episode of Your Undivided Attention, Aza Raskin sits down with fellow CHT co-founder Randy Fernando to walk through CHT's Seven Principles of Humane Technology. For each principle, they draw on real-world examples from the podcast and beyond to clearly illustrate how these principles (and their absence) show up in the world.

There’s so much more here than can go into a single podcast. If you want to go deeper, visit humanetech.com/course and sign up to learn more.

Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on X: @HumaneTech_ and subscribe to our Substack.

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What Happened in Vegas with Natasha Dow Schüll

Down the Rabbit Hole by Design. Guest: Guillaume Chaslot

Forever Chemicals, Forever Consequences: What PFAS Teaches Us About AI

The Power of Solutions Journalism with Tina Rosenberg and Hélène Biandudi Hofer

The Invisible Cyber-War with Nicole Perlroth

Anthropic’s Mythos Has Changed Cybersecurity Forever. What Now?

How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

Digital Democracy is Within Reach with Audrey Tang

The Tech We Need for 21st Century Democracy with Divya Siddarth

Mind the (Perception) Gap with Dan Vallone

CORRECTIONS

Aza incorrectly named Tina Rosenberg as one of the founders of Solutions Journalism. Her organization's name is the Solutions Journalism Network.

Aza stated that “chatbots are better than any human at persuading people out of conspiracy theories.” This is in reference to a study that found AIs to be very slightly more persuasive than human experts; we can’t extrapolate from that that they are better than any human. The point stands that they are remarkably good persuasion machines.

Aza referred to EO Wilson as the “father of evolutionary biology,” but the field he is largely credited with founding is sociobiology.

Aza cited Spain and Denmark as examples of countries that have banned social media for teens. However, these countries have only proposed such bans; they have not been enacted.

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