Philosophy & Ethics

The Pope's first encyclical is about AI: Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas argues AI must serve humanity rather than concentrate power in a wealthy few, calls to "disarm AI" by removing it from military and economic interests, and demands stricter regulation. It promptly did 1,650 points on Hacker News, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write about an encyclical.

Dario's media week: Amodei told Bloomberg he has exactly one direct report ("incredibly freeing") and told ABC News he wants the government to have the power, "in a narrow way," to block deployment of unsafe AI, plus the bluntest line of the week: "I don't trust China at all." A CEO asking for the power to be stopped is either deeply reassuring or deeply alarming, and the debate over which was the point.

Hassabis on AI layoffs: companies blaming AI show "a lack of imagination… If engineers are becoming three or four times more productive, then we just [want to] do three or four times more stuff." He'd happily take the laid-off engineers; he has "a million ideas".

Sources: Vatican text, RNS, HN thread, TechCrunch, ABC News, policy post, Yahoo/Wired