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One of the world's leading AI figures just spoke alongside one of the biggest AI critics, as Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah joined Pope Leo XIV in offering a warning about the future of the tech — alongside something that could threaten your job.
There has been a clear tension created in the world following the rise of artificial intelligence, with tech leaders pushing forward the revolutionary invention seemingly at all costs countered by many people who are both opposed to its overwhelming influence and fearful about how it'll change the future.
Among the latter group is an unexpected figure, as Pope Leo XIV has made AI a priority in many of his speeches and addresses following his ascent to the papacy, offering warnings regarding its effect on humanity in the present and near future.
This has been met with criticism from within the AI industry and even from President Donald Trump – who has used AI generated images as a retort on social media – but one leading name has joined the head of the Catholic Church in outlining the need for safeguarding measures in a new encyclical letter.
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Chris Olah, Anthropic's co-founder, might not necessarily be someone you'd expect to outline the dangers of AI yet he's not only aware of this internal conflict but uses it to amplify the importance of the message.
His speech alongside the Pope at the Vatican, published in full on Anthropic's website, outlines the necessity of opposition to AI as every company in the industry is constantly faced with 'incentives' that go against doing the 'right thing'.
"The pressure to stay commercially viable and to stay at the research frontier. Geopolitical pressure. And the older, plainer pressures of pride and ambition," Olah illustrates.
"No matter how sincerely any of us intend to do the right thing—and I believe many of us do—we will always be influenced by those incentives."
He continues to assert that "it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives—people who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful, critics."
He's not the first person from Anthropic to express caution surrounding the rapid and potentially unchecked development of AI, as his fellow co-founder Dario Amodei warned about the risks of models operating their own research and development.
Among Olah's three 'questions for discernment', however, exists a frightening warning for the future of employment, as the tech leader outlines how "there is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale."
This shouldn't exactly come as a surprise if you've been following the news surrounding AI – and there's a chance you might have already been affected by AI-driven redundancies – but Olah's warning comes with a desire to help.
"If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions," Olah proclaims, adding that an even bigger task will be spreading the developmental gains globally, ensuring that countries outside of a 'handful of wealthy nations' see the benefits.
"We do not have a mechanism for this. It is an unsolved problem, and it is the kind of problem the Church has historically refused to let the world ignore," he concluded.
