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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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Compliance Is Not Innocence
Podcast On the two ways an institution abuses its own rules, and why following the process is not the same as being right. Nobody installs a handrail before somebody falls. That is the first thing to understand about an institution’s rules. Policies, procedures, declarations of interest: none of it was drafted by anyone with a… — read more
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The Chain Above the Chair
Podcast On what Imam Ali asked of a governor, the rules an institution writes and then steps around, and why a charitable intention repairs nothing. An institution that will not keep the rules it wrote for itself is not being flexible. It is taking itself apart, quietly, with its own hands, and it will not… — 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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Islam or Muslims?
Podcast Image: folio from a manuscript of the Quran, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto An argument is circulating, and it deserves a straight answer. It runs like this. A Muslim intellectual, pressed about the crimes of the Islamic Republic, replies that there is no such thing as Islam, only Muslims. His interlocutor finds the reply evasive… — read more
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Protected: The Twin Wisdoms
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. — 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
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When Language Fails: Vulgarity, Silence and the Unfinished Conversation
Podcast I was there—present online—when Dr. Fatemeh Sadeghi and Hossein Hamdieh, speaking from London and Tehran respectively during Iran’s internet blackout, began discussing something that has haunted me for months. An interrogator assigned to question young protesters arrested during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising had confessed his bewilderment. He could not understand what they were… — read more
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Signal Through the Blackout
Podcast In a recent ninety-minute conversation with Sobhan Yahyaei for the Farsi Panorama podcast — the inaugural episode of a season titled Life in a Time of War — I tried to think aloud about the trilateral confrontation involving Iran, the United States and Israel, the predicament of the Iranian diaspora, and the cultural sediment… — read more
