[mijailt]

Somewhat related: Peter Thiel and the Antichrist [1]

> Thiel: [...] There’s a risk of nuclear war, there’s a risk of environmental disaster. Maybe something specific, like climate change, although there are lots of other ones we’ve come up with. There’s a risk of bioweapons. You have all the different sci-fi scenarios. Obviously, there are certain types of risks with A.I.

> But I always think that if we’re going to have this frame of talking about existential risks, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type of a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one-world totalitarian state. Because I would say the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance.

> [...]

> The atheist philosophical framing is “One World or None.” That was a short film that was put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late ’40s. It starts with the nuclear bomb blowing up the world, and obviously, you need a one-world government to stop it — one world or none. And the Christian framing, which in some ways is the same question, is: Antichrist or Armageddon? You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we’re sleepwalking toward Armageddon. “One world or none,” “Antichrist or Armageddon,” on one level, are the same question.

> [...]

> Thiel: [...] The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. It’s the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that.

> In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is: We need to stop science, we need to just say “stop” to this. And this is where, in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.

> [...]

> Douthat: [...] You’re an investor in A.I. You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building. Like, wouldn’t the Antichrist be like: Great, we’re not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far. Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?

> Thiel: Look, there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing.

---

We live in crazy times. The Pope is pleading for multilateralism and responsible regulation of technology. On the other side, Thiel says fear of technological progress could lead us to a one-world totalitarian government (which he relates to the antichrist, and to me seems like a straw man of multilateralism), while at the same time (arguably) building the technological infrastructure such a totalitarian government would need.

I don't know, I think I'm siding with the Pope on all future antichrist related issues.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic...

[heroicmailman]

> Thiel: [...] The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop.

Sincerely,

Guy Who Talks About Armageddon Nonstop

[jauntywundrkind]

Thiel, paraphrased: Oh no it's not my corporation that is spying on everyone and which is infecting the militaries of all the world, not the AI (that routinely chooses nuclear warfare in simulated tests) that's a danger, that everyone will hate & demand be stopped! The Edward Tellers of the future that everyone wants to stop are obviously the Greta Thunbergs! Isn't it so clear?!

[mike_hearn]

> The Pope is pleading for multilateralism and responsible regulation of technology.

According to the Economist at least, he doesn't seem to know what he wants. The encyclical sounds like a grabbag of every progressive meme and worry out there, whether they contradict each other or not.

You can't have both multilateralism and AI regulation (however that's defined). If you have genuine multilateralism then there will always be some jurisdictions that say they don't want to regulate and gain a competitive advantage by doing so. Because AI is symbolic and accessed over networks, in a truly multilateral world there is no such thing as AI regulation, really. Model development and serving will slowly migrate to jurisdictions that don't pin it down too much.

The only way to stop this is for every jurisdiction in the world to agree on the same set of rules. Which is the One World Government solution, normally in the 21st century approximated with economic pressure e.g. threatening to sanction or blacklist your country if you don't comply with some new rules. The anti-money laundering system is an example of that. And if you become familiar with the stories of its abuse, then AML can sound pretty darn Antichristy. So Thiel isn't far off.

[ordinaryradical]

Describing the pope’s proposals as progressive and anti-money laundering laws as the antichrist… this is like a parody of the most blinders-on kind of libertarianism.

For those of you playing at home, you can definitely have multi-lateral agreements without creating a one world government. We’ve had a chemical weapons ban for decades over which many of the multi-lateral parties were in hot and cold wars with each other. The nations are not going to magically combine over the presence of a treaty. Not how power works.

[Forgeties79]

Anytime the pope comes up on HN it’s always a really quick way to find out who is very happy to step away too far out on a limb as they discuss subjects they know very little about (to be clear not talking about you)

[idiotsecant]

There are plenty of rules that we apply across the board. No nuclear weapons for anyone who's not already got them is an example. This doesn't take some spooky one world government to do. This post is wild. Essentially, you're saying that any attempt to regulate AI as the existential threat that it almost certainly is the antichrist. It's bonkers.

[mike_hearn]

That specific rule is enforced by assassinating the leaders and scientists of governments that don't agree to it. See: Iran. I don't think that's what anyone means when they say multilateralism. It's effectively an ad hoc global government defined by the reach of air power.

[idiotsecant]

Then I guess all of human history is one big ad hoc global government because we've enforced the thing we want at the business end of a spear since there have been people.

[mike_hearn]

Other way around. Nothing in history has ever been enforced "across the board", including the rule against developing nukes. A bunch of countries managed to develop them, others were stopped (so far). It wasn't done via "multilateralism" but rather by killing people who were doing it.

Unless your vision for AI regulation involves drone striking offices where AI researchers work, then there's no way to enforce it globally.

[idiotsecant]

I'm not sure what point you're making anymore. The goalposts are floating in the sea. Yes, we could blow up facilities with advanced AI infrastructure. It wouldn't even be hard to locate.

[tptacek]

I think you're not reading it in the spirit it's intended. There's a section towards the end (Chapter 5, I think) that is full of policy prescriptions. But most of the encyclical isn't "about" AI, it's "about" Catholicism, and is using AI as a lens to talk about principles the church has been building up over a century. In that sense the document is less concerned with frontier models and disinformation than it is with establishing Catholic social doctrine --- subsidiarity, solidarity, the common good, etc.

As far as the church is concerned, AI as an issue will come and go, but the ordering and prioritization of human relationships is timeless, and is the important issue. The subtext of the whole thing is that if you get the principles right, the tech policy will fall into place.

You can argue with those principles, but at that point you really are just arguing with Catholicism itself, which is fine, but is besides the point.

(I'm not engaging with or disputing your takes on policy, only with your comment as a critique of the encyclical itself.)

[mike_hearn]

Perhaps, but I think that's a bit generous. Let's look at Chapter 3, titled "TECHNOLOGY AND DOMINANCE. THE GRANDEUR OF HUMANITY IN LIGHT OF THE PROMISES OF AI."

This whole section is clearly about AI and social policy. It makes occasional Biblical references but if you strip those out it sounds like any Democrat podcast. If random people were given these quotes stripped of context, how many would guess it was the Pope?

For example: > What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating

That's a demand for AI regulation.

Then take the paragraph that starts with:

> In many cases within the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power does not rest with States, but with major economic and technological actors [snip]

The whole paragraph has nothing to do with Catholicism. It could have been written by the EU Commission and you'd never know. In it he appears to argue for the nationalization of AI labs, using standard progressivist claims.

Later the Pope argues once again for the nationalization of not just AI labs but all intellectual property held by the computing industry, using an argument I'm not afraid to condemn as theologically specious. In "The principle of the universal destination of goods" he says first that things like earth and water are given by God and thus everyone has a "right" to use them as they wish. From a theological perspective this is reasonable, albeit not from an economic perspective. But then he argues that patents, algorithms, datacenters and digital platforms are exactly the same as soil and water, and thus everyone should have them for free. That's nonsense. The religious justification for the first is that God made planet Earth, but He obviously didn't invent the transformer algorithm so why would the same logic apply?

All this is just standard left wing politics. The only theological justification I could find in the first part of this chapter is that some other recent Pope agrees with him.

I don't have any problem with Catholics or Catholicism. In fact I've written a whole essay arguing that AI raises issues only religion can deal with:

https://blog.plan99.net/the-looming-ai-consciousness-train-w...

Religion has something to contribute when it comes to pondering questions like, what is AI? Does it deserve compassion and feelings, does it have consciousness and free will, or is it just a machine? Does the creation of it make us challengers to God or would He have approved of us making creatures in our own image? But the Pope doesn't engage with those topics. Instead we get advocacy for government power. The world has enough of such politics already.

[kergonath]

> if you strip those out it sounds like any Democrat podcast

The fact that the bloody Pope sounds like what appears to be a left-wing party in the US' Overton window should be a big kick in the arse. In most of the rest of the west, these are classical conservative values, and indeed more aligned with the gospel than anything coming from the Republican Party these days. As a leftist, I find Magnifica Humanitas to be interesting, because it's a view point that is rooted in a rich history and profound thinking. But that's not a socialist doctrine at all. Its situation is very close to Rerum Novarum: it was more social than what the capitalist magnates wanted, but it was really far from things like communism or revolutionary socialism. Leo XIV does not hide his admiration for Leo XIII, and he sees many similarities with the state of the society they live in. On that, I think I agree with him.

[tptacek]

The bloody pope believes a lot of things that would set a DSA person's hair on fire, and I don't just mean about reproductive freedom.

[tptacek]

So, I'm not sure about your religious background but conversing about this will get tedious very quickly if I have to hedge everything I'm saying, so from the jump let me just say I respect your writing on HN and I assume you're not Catholic, and you can correct me if I'm making any broken assumptions about you.

Also, just to get this out of the way: I said "Chapter 5" was the section full of policy prescriptions, but that was from memory, and, as you've noted, it's "Chapter 3". I agree there's a run in this where he gets pretty prescriptive! But I still think "policy document" is the wrong way to ready this.

Leo goes way out of his way, in the tradition of all Catholic popes over the last century, to ground what he's saying in a long through-line of doctrine. So in both your quotes, about the need for regulation: it's not really about policy.

I think Leo is first espousing a normie view (neither especially "left" nor especially libertarian) about regulation and risk, and then using it as an object lesson about the Catholic principle of Participation. Catholicism is big on ordering and prioritizing relationships between humans. We are supposed to be making decisions together for the Common Good, and we are supposed to recognize that decision-making happens (must happen) at different levels, from the state to local communities to families (this is Subsidiarity).

I flinched at the intellectual property bit too. But the point he's making in context is clear; it's Catholic and Christian doctrine going all the way back to Genesis. The literal named principle "Universal destination of goods" goes back to Vatican 2. The "codification" of these principles happened under Benedict XVI, not my favorite pope (I'm much more to the left than you are) and obviously no squish.

I think you're reading too much American politics into this, for what it's worth. Leo XIV took his name from Leo XIII, who in the late 19th century wrote Rerum Novarum, which was was in part a reaction to Marxist/Socialist thought and totalizing class conflict, recognizes the importance of worker welfare and the dignity of labor, but very specifically does not reject private property (private property is a necessary precondition for the agency of the family unit, which is central to Catholic doctrine). If we dig in I think we'll quickly find a lot of ideas that a doctrinaire leftist would recoil from!

But my big point is that people are all excited to read the Vatican's AI policy document, and the Vatican is uninterested in publishing AI policy; what it wants to do is continue to indoctrinate Catholics on the core tenets of Catholic social doctrine: Subsidiarity, Solidarity, The Common Good, Human Dignity.

[mike_hearn]

Thanks. I respect Christianity and feel it has a lot to contribute to the topic of AI, even if not like this, but I'm not a Catholic.

I haven't read the other chapters so will take you at your word about what they say and the Christian agenda in them.

It's tempting to describe the sort of politics in chapter three as US politics because that's roughly where it kicked off first, but there's nothing US specific about it. Leftism has always been a very globally consistent set of beliefs. We wouldn't describe communism as British politics, for example, even though Marx developed his beliefs while living in London and wrote in a British context (Das Kapital is full of references to Parliament and living conditions in 19th century Britain).

What I'd really like to see from the Vatican is engagement with the question of consciousness, and why AI should or should not be considered something with rights. I think a lot of people view this question as obvious but when I studied it, I ended feeling that it's neither obvious nor something that can be answered from first principles. A bit like animal rights, a principled answer essentially requires some kind of religious grounding.

[wizzwizz4]

In an infinitely-large "truly multilateral world", what you are saying is true under the assumption that unregulated AI provides a competitive advantage for the jurisdiction, assuming preferences are each sampled from a totally-supported probability distribution. But we only have finitely-many jurisdictions, and it's not clear that AI accelerationism is actually good for anyone (except those extracting wealth from the corresponding financial bubble), so this conclusion doesn't follow.

[watwut]

I mean yes, if we twist meanings of words enough, Pope is progressive. Except he is not, he is conservative catholic pushing for old school conservative catholic doctrine. He is not far right, he is not prosperity gosphel guy, but catholic doctrine was never that.

Of course you can have multilateralism and regulations. And no, AML is not an antichrist.

And Thiel with his plan yo create totalitatian fascist word is one of the greater danger to most of us. Way greater then AML regulations.

[idiotsecant]

That's how far the global overton window has shifted. The pope is now the voice of reason.

The world is barreling toward conditions that haven't existed for a century. God help us.

[krapp]

Plenty of people besides the Pope have made essentially the same criticisms about AI and the dangers of the cultlike influence it seems to have on our society. Every one of those people were dismissed as paranoid and ignorant Luddites who simply feared and hated progress if not humanity itself until the Pope came along and voiced an opinion on the matter. Then and only then was criticism of AI taken to be valid, or at least taken seriously, because of the invocation of religious authority. (but now all the tradcaths are sedevacantists because the Pope is "woke" and obviously a Luddite who hates progress and humanity.)

I'll take it, but I really wish we didn't need it.

[mike_hearn]

"Antichrist" is not really a serious word you can pin down, but the AML system is regularly used in ways that are very un-Christ-like. For instance, Christ said to love thy neighbour, to be the good Samaritan, that people should not be punished for the sins of their family members and he preached tolerance.

Now consider the unlucky German-Turkish journalist Hüseyin Dogru, who was recently placed under trade sanctions by the EU Commission due to his reporting. But they did it while he was living in Europe. The sanctions force everyone - including his neighbours and supermarkets - to refuse to sell him anything.

Then they realized, what if his wife buys him food? So they sanctioned his wife too.

Then they realized, what if his parents buy him food? So they sanctioned his parents as well.

Literally the entire family has been put to economic death. The state will imprison anyone who helps them and confiscate the entire net worth of anyone who conceivably might help them. All appeals have been denied.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru#EU-San...

They are now completely screwed and reduced to living on a subsidence budget of ~500 EUR/month from the government, calculated to be just enough that his family don't literally die of starvation.

https://x.com/hussedogru/status/2037859218326180064

https://diariosocialista.net/2026/05/28/alemania-recrudece-l...

This is possible because of the systems-level implementation of the AML/sanctions system and its existence outside any kind of justice system. It's the kind of thing that Thiel meant by a totalitarian antichrist. The Bible warned of the "mark of the beast" on people's hands that would prevent people buying and selling if the antichrist doesn't approve of him. Well, a revoked EMV contactless credit card is basically that. If Jesus were alive today he would presumably have harsh criticisms of this kind of thing.

[kjkjadksj]

I don’t get the hangup with one world government. So it would be what inevitably a representative government structure. Isn’t this what we already have now? I mean sure it is technically “different countries” but absolutely not in the sense of countries across the world 500 years ago. Countries across the globe trade in common currency (usd) and use common language for diplomacy and science. The question of one world government is about semantics. Functionally, we are already there. Before you say “but these countries have their own laws and such and such” how is this any different than two townships in the same country across the nation, with a different set of local ordinances and local government officials who don’t interact with the other township at all? It isn’t. It is a semantical exercise. There are common international laws as well just as there are common laws applying at the township level of government abstraction.

One world government was achieved with the petrodollar and english becoming lingua franca of earth. International agreements and trade further centralize this one world government we’ve created. Just squint and you can see it plainly already. The public aren’t told about it because they will feel disenfranchised. But it already exists.

[krapp]

Peter Thiel is just putting an ill-defined pseudo-Christian facade around his AI accelerationist beliefs because he knows that in the current American right-wing climate evangelical Christianity is what drives political power particularly in tech. His "antichrist" is merely anyone or anything standing between him and as much money and power as possible.

[mistrial9]

this argument is weakened by welding large bulky statements together.. IMO each part there is a tip of a dynamic-systems-iceburg. "He just does THIS" and "that is THIS" ... the short form medium kills inquiry.

A studied person once admonished me "avoid the word IS when comparing systems in the abstract"

[moritzwarhier]

Nobody requires me or anyone else to agree with the comment you respond to, but what you write sounds plainly confused to me and other than vague stylistic concerns weaved together with the general sentiment that you disagree, I can't make out what argument you're trying to make.

[krapp]

Did this studied person teach you how to make a salient point because it seems like you're just criticizing grammar.

[idiotsecant]

'Antichrist' is what thiel calls anything he doesn't like. He uses it so much it's meaningless.

[watwut]

Thiel is literally and openly trying to create totalitarian goverment. It is in his manifesto.