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The Atheist’s Soul
Podcast — read more
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The Angels Were Right
PodcastArtificial intelligence, the objection to creation, and what a myth can and cannot settle Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, c. 1511, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican City. Photograph: Burkhard Mücke, 18 October 2017, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. The objection arrives before the creature does. God tells the angels He is placing a khalīfa on earth,… — read more
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A Ladder Is Not a Home
Podcast On the declaration of qiyāma at Alamūt, the doctors who stopped seeing, and the one gift we cannot afford to hand over Across four endoscopy centres, a piece of software was switched on. It watched the live feed of a colonoscopy and drew a box around anything that looked like a polyp. It worked.… — read more
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Riding on the Shoulders of the Machine
Podcast AI, ego, and the question the warnings skip For some months I have been turning over a hope. People routinely outgunned before bureaucratic systems – who lose for want of the right form of words rather than the right case – might climb onto the shoulders of these machines and see over the wall.… — read more
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Neither Rogue Nor Obedient
Podcast Two positions on artificial intelligence, and the question both leave standing In Brief The alarm has hold of something the reassurance waves away. Artificial intelligence is an invention rather than a discovery, and the opacity is real. That is a reason to bind the makers, and it is no evidence that nobody is in… — read more
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Not by the Back Door
Podcast Pluralism, universalism, and the difference that both relativism and perennialism would erase When I argued recently that pluralism is not relativism, a reader replied with a smile: “Unless you bring in universalism through the back door.” The objection is sharp, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a defensive one. If pluralism… — read more
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Pluralism Is Not Relativism
Podcast Sada Cumber is right that Magnifica Humanitas is “a strategic signal,” and right again that “societies cannot be secured by capability alone.” Where I want to press him is on the post-fact ground he names so well. He warns that AI-generated disinformation “attacks the social fabric,” that it “corrodes trust, fractures shared reality.” True.… — read more
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Tools Don’t Flatter
Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical and the Regulation of AI’s Makers Presenting his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, Pope Leo XIV called for artificial intelligence to be “disarmed” — a word, he conceded, that was strong, but deliberately chosen to awaken consciences and to release the… — read more
