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Episode Description
After an iconic statue of St. Junipero Serra went missing from a freeway in South San Francisco, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone joins to discuss what he knows about its whereabouts, and how the city is not being truthful about what happened. California state officials claim to have reported their intentions to remove the 22-foot high statue, but the Archbishop says his office had no forewarning or input on the devastating loss of a beloved cultural and Catholic emblem.
With AI flooding into every aspect of our lives including the classroom, Ari Schulman of The New Atlantis joins to share his greatest concerns about these new technologies, including the dangerous ways smartphones have completely changed our social landscape. He explores whether social media is dehumanizing us, undermining relationships, and robbing humans of creativity.
Father Thomas Petri joins to mark six months since the election of the first American-born Roman Pontiff and discusses the developments of Pope Leo XIV’s papacy. Pope Leo has demonstrated a continued commitment to social justice with a renewed openness toward traditional liturgy, and made history by joining in the historic prayer meeting with Britain’s King Charles last month.
Plus, we celebrate the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica with Msgr. Roger Landry. The event commemorates the dedication of the first public church ever built for Christians following the religious freedom granted by the Edict of Milan, and celebrates the Church’s unity and history.
Catch the show every Saturday at 7amET/5pmET on EWTN radio!
Bios
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone is the Archbishop of San Francisco, a position where he has served since being appointed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. Cordileone was born and raised in San Diego and first ordained as a priest in 1982. He went on to earn a doctorate in canon law from the Gregorian University. Prior to his installment as Archbishop of San Francisco, he served as Auxiliary Bishop of San Diego, followed by a period of service as the Bishop of Oakland. Archbishop Cordileone is well known for his work on canon law, beauty and music in liturgy, and for being an outspoken voice for reproductive rights and advocate of support for the poor.
Ari Schulman is the editor of The New Atlantis, a journal dedicated to covering the social, ethical, and political implications of modern science and technological advancements. His writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Atlantic, First Things, and numerous other publications. He was a contributor to The New Atlantis’ Futurisms blog – a site which covered critiques of transhumanism, and he previously served as a research assistant at the New York Times. He also worked as an ontological engineer for Cycorp, an Austin, Texas based company that developed a machine reasoning AI platform aiming to provide common sense reasoning to software applications. He earned degrees in computer science and English from the University of Texas at Austin.
Monsignor Roger Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard and the Pontifical North American College in Rome, he served as Attaché to the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission to the UN in New York. In 2024, he was appointed the new National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the USA by Pope Francis. He writes for numerous publications, speaks on radio and TV, and served as executive editor for the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River. He is the author of the book, Plan of Life: Habits to Help You Grow Closer to God, and he leads pilgrimages to Rome, the Holy Land, and other sacred destinations. He was an on-site commentator for EWTN’s coverage of the 2013 papal conclave that elected Pope Francis. He is national chaplain for Catholic Voices USA and New York Chaplain for the Leonine Forum. Father Landry traversed the full 1500-mile Eucharist Pilgrimage in 2024, an event which coincided with his 25th year in the priesthood.
The following transcript is machine generated.
Episode 342 Transcript
| Mary/Ashley | Welcome to conversations with consequences here on EWTN radio. I am your host, Asbury Fiorito, and I'm Ashley McGuire. And today we have the special privilege of having with us the Archbishop of San Francisco, Archbishop Salvatore Corleone. And Your Excellency, thank you so much for making time for us in your busy schedule today. |
| Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone | You're welcome. My pleasure. |
| Mary/Ashley | Well, first, we'd like to discuss with you the latest news regarding Saint, you know, Paro, Sarah, and specifically the statue that, was along, California's Route 280. I guess it was, which just south of San Francisco. So this beautiful 22ft statue went missing, as I understand it. And Caltrans said that they had reached out to you to discuss it being removed and destroyed. But that actually wasn't the case, was it? |
| Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone | I didn't receive any communication from them. If they did send something that must have gotten lost somewhere along the way. This I learned about this when I read about it in the newspaper. They also said they reached out to different, religious organizations to get their input before making the decision, but they never asked us for our opinion about it and and what our perspective would be and which religious organization, more than any other, would be affected by this decision. |
| Mary/Ashley | And the Catholic Church. Yeah. I went and read a little bit, more in depth about this particular saint that Pope Francis canonized ten years ago in 2015. And one of the most consistent sort of themes or statements about him is that he had a consuming love for the people he brought to Christ, the people he converted, and that was expressed in a particular way, given the culture and the time, etc. But why do you think there's still so much controversy about him? |
| Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone | Really, it's all part of the black legend. You know. |
| Mary/Ashley | What do you mean by that? |
| Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone | The Black Legend is specifically about Spain. You know, the rivalry between England and Spain and which morphs into all of these, attacks on the Catholic Church because of our historical record, which are either distortions and misrepresentations of history, although there is a basis of truth to it or they're completely made up. So you can go through the whole list, right? The Crusades, the Galileo affair, the Inquisition. You know, people don't think about the fact that at that time, everyone in Europe tortured. Torture was a standard practice back then. And Spain had rules that were more limiting of its use, versus other parts of Europe at the same time, nearby in England, anyone acting against the king was hung, drawn and quartered. Right. And that included a just a priest celebrating a Catholic mass would want to go into the graphic details of what that means, but it's about the most horrendous death imaginable. So it's an example of how things are kind of taken out of context and distorted, even though there is some truth to it. I mean, it's any torture is horrendous to us nowadays. It was a thought that way then you could continue going down the list. The church and science, Pius the 12th and the whole situation with the Jews and the Nazis. That's completely something completely made up. The attack on his character. So Sarah fits into this scenario of this, this black legend. So it's really comes out of a what originally was an anti-Catholic sentiment. And now it's kind of grown into just anti-Christian in general. Anything Christian is now seen is portrayed as something dark and negative, when actually the opposite is the case. So I think the sentiment is coming out of that. And again, it's example. When we understand the history, we understand it's the completely the opposite of what they portray. Although yes, there is a kernel of truth there, right? Yes. The Indians did suffer. They they were did not have immunity to the diseases that Europeans brought. That's true. Their their population was decimated because of disease. However, what do people think was going to happen. Right. This encounter between people in the European continent and people on the American continent. It was bound to happen. The world wasn't going, going on indefinitely without these two continents discovering each other. And given their advances in technology and their ability to navigate around the globe, it's inevitable the Europeans were going to be the ones who discovered this continent and not vice versa. And this is the story of human history. When two civilizations come into contact, there's often a clash and one tries to dominate the other. So there was the diseases and but Europeans weren't going to discover and then go home and stay home. Obviously, they're going to explore and kind of expand their interests. Then there were the soldiers, right? The soldiers. There were a lot of abuses of the soldiers on the part of the natives peoples. But Sarah was very upset about that. So I can go on and on and on about stories about what Sarah did to protect the people. But just to give a few examples. The first mission they started in Alto, California was in San Diego. I grew up actually just about a little over three miles from that mission. And, the there was an uprising when they first established there because the Indians, were protesting because of the abuses they were suffering at the hands of the soldiers, especially the women. Right. So they burned down the church. They, one of the friars was shot with an arrow and killed and, and Sarah and pleaded, pleaded for clemency for him because he understood why the Indians were upset. So as I like to say, he was the first Californian to speak out against the death penalty. And, and so they, they realized that they needed to get the Indians away from the soldiers. So in San Diego there's a bluff overlooking the bay that's called Presidio Park. That's where the Presidio is, the barracks for the soldiers. The mission is about four miles or so further inland, what is now called Mission Valley. So you see the mission church, the school for the Indians, and the friary. So these are able to people can try to rewrite history. You cannot rewrite buildings. And there are three other missions where there's a military outpost at Presidio and a mission. And we see that they're miles apart. Here in San Francisco. We have the, the mission is in the heart of the city. The Presidio is miles away. It's right at the foot of where now, the Golden Gate bridges. So wherever there's a presidio attached to there, miles apart. The Sarah understood they needed to keep the Indians away from the soldiers. He was so upset with the abuse they were seeing from the soldiers who had they had the civil government or temporal governance of the Indians. He had the spiritual governance. He famously walked with his sore leg, ulcerated leg. He was, bit by a scorpion when he landed in Mexico, and it was painful to him the rest of his life. Walked from Carmel all the way to Mexico City to meet with the Viceroy and obtain faculties for temporal government. So the Indians, in order to take that away from the soldiers. So Sarah, did, these truly heroic things. Now, not all of the Franciscans were so benign. And the ones who were harsher, he had sent back to Spain. And again, there was the standards of the time. Corporal punishment was something that was a standard practice. So there was some of that. But Sarah made heroic sacrifices to, to defend the people. But there was abuse. There was a lot of death because of disease. Then the other thing is people kind of telescope all three eras into the Spanish colonial, we were called evangelization era. So this is another thing. Why did Sarah go in the first place? Not to to dominate and decimate a population? He wanted to save their souls, wanted to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he did so by educating them. Right? They established schools. They taught them the trades, how to build buildings. You know, how domesticate animals, grow crops, so many ways. And then then eventually his plan was this was the plan of the Franciscan. There was the whole vision of Spain. And in building the New Spain, it's an expansion of of of the Christian civilization that they would eventually be capable of self-governance. And when that happened, they were handed the the lands back to them for their own self-governance. So they build in this way a new Christian civilization. So we see protesters here holding up these signs, give the land back. Well, that was actually the plan of the Franciscans. But it was obliged because after Mexico obtained its independence, Mexico secularized the missions in 1834. So they expelled the Franciscans. They closed the whole mission system. So the Indians were dispossessed of everything. The Francis's had given them, all of their education and so forth. The schools were closed. And, then after the Mexican period when when the what is now Alta California went into the United States in the American period, there was actually there was actually a literal genocide perpetrated on the Indians. Easterners were paid to go out and kill Indians. So there's all these horrendous no question. They suffered horrendous abuse, but in different ways in the different eras. And this somehow gets all telescoped onto Sarah as being the symbol of the horrendous abuse that the Indian people suffered when he was the one, more than anyone else is trying to defend them. |
| Mary/Ashley | Your Excellency, can you tell our listeners who are familiar with the story what happened to the statue? The. |
| Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone | So this is another very disturbing thing. The statue was destroyed. So the, Caltrans that the responsible for this, said that the, statue no longer meets the criteria for, graphic or sculptural artwork, which, which the criterion as it expresses, they say unique attributes of a community's history, resources or character. Well, I don't know how Sarah cannot fit into that. Sarah really is the the father of California. He is the apostle and father of California. Another aspect of his history here. When he had to call for more soldiers, he asked for soldiers who were married who would come with their wives and their families, because he thought in this way it would minimize the abuse of the women. So these families came in, these pueblos started to build up. And this, this was the beginning of the whole, political, economic infrastructure of California. So I don't know how you could say he's not a part of our, our history or our character. And then they now Caltrans said that, they first offered the statue to the descendants of the man who sculpted it, the de Bois family, who were not interested. And then they said, another reason they gave for taking it down was that it was frequently targeted with vandalism and graffiti. Well, when that happens in public places, you don't destroy the public place you protect, right? That's no reason to tear it down. But they said they had to, They had to, destroy it because, it was, to, to fragile to to be moved. It couldn't be moved. Well, why would they have offered it to the double family if it couldn't be moved in the first place. So there seems to be a lot of doublespeak going on here. |
| Mary/Ashley | Yeah. Well your, Your Excellency I know our time is short and if, if someone wanted to read a balanced account of what happened with Saint Unit Parish. Sarah. And as you've mentioned, his legacy is kind of complicated. What what kind of resources would you point people to who really just want is accurate? A reading that would take into account the historical, context that you've mentioned here? |
| Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone | As far as I know, probably the most comprehensive and objective history was written by two, history professors at Santa Clara University, Robert Robert Saint Louis and Mary Bible on the history of human. Sarah. Excellent. I would recommend their book. |
| Mary/Ashley | Okay, wonderful. And next week you're off to meet with your brother bishops in Baltimore. And I can't imagine that the new Holy Father who's from Chicago, where I'm from. So I have to bring that up. Archbishop, where were you when you found out that Pope Leo the 14th had been elected and that it was an American and a Chicago? |
| Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone | And so we were just, beginning our federal county, council meeting. So I was in the meeting room with all the priests on the council. We were about to start the meeting when the news arrived that there was white smoke. |
| Mary/Ashley | So how exciting. Were you surprised? |
| Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone | Yeah, just like everyone else. Yeah. So I knew. I knew, I knew the name, but I wasn't expecting him to be elected. And I was especially surprised because, well, he's an American in the true sense. |
| Mary/Ashley | Correct. |
| Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone | Most of his priesthood has been in South America. Right? I even at that, though I didn't think they'd elect someone who came from from our country. Yeah. |
| Mary/Ashley | So. Well, it was a very special time and just a very exciting thing for the American church. I think. Well, Archbishop, many blessings on you and your ministry to learn more about the Archbishop of San Francisco in the diocese he leads, you can visit SFR church.org Archbishop Quarterly or. We thank you so much for being with us today. |
| Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone | You're welcome. Thank you for having me. |
| Mary/Ashley | God bless you. |
| Betsy | Welcome back to conversation with the Consequences, Brant, where I'm joined by Monsignor Roger Landry. And we're going to talk about a special feast this Sunday that supplants our normal, Ordinary time Sunday readings. Monsignor, tell us about our special feast this Sunday. |
| Msgr Landry | So November 9th, every year, Betsy, is the feast of the dedication of Saint John. In the latter, an arch basilica which is the Pope's cathedral in Rome. It's the most important church liturgically in all of Catholicism. More important than Saint Peter's. It's where Pope Leo's Cathedral, which symbolizes teaching, authority, rests, and a lot of Catholics are confused about it, and they don't have much of a chance to get to know it unless they go to Rome, because November night normally falls on Monday through Saturday rather than on Sunday, but because it's the most important church liturgically, that Rome is the most important Catholic diocese, and this is the most important church in Rome when it falls on a Sunday. It supplants the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, which would be ordinarily November 9th this year, in order for all Catholics throughout the world to be able to celebrate the latter in and what it means. So first, as somebody who's been a tour guide in Rome and brought thousands of people to Saint John in the latter, and let me just explain a little history and terminology. I sometimes quiz people. Can anybody tell me who Saint John Lateran is? And the smart Alex in the group, like my mom, whenever she's with me on a pilgrimage, raise her hand and says, wasn't an early martyr. There's no such saint to Saint John Lateran. The original basilica there was dedicated to Christ the Savior was the first church Constantine built after the legalization of Christianity, and he built it for the Pope right out there on top of what formerly were the equestrian stables of his arch enemy and brother in law, Maxentius, who he defeated in the battle of the Milvian Bridge. So, in order to wipe out the vestige of his predecessor there, he built the first cathedral for the Christians right out within the city walls, but on the periphery, so that he wouldn't alienate a lot of the pagans in Rome. And that became the place where the Pope lived for the first thousand years of Christian legalized Christianity, all the way up until 308. And so it was dedicated to Christ the Savior. But eventually, 400 years after it was built, it was destroyed by an earthquake. And the Pope at that time thought that it would be good to, dedicated to Christ or saint. And he had been baptized Giovanni Battista or John the Baptist. So he said, we're going to dedicate it through the intercession of Saint John the Baptist. 400 years later, it was destroyed by a fire, and the Pope at the time, Sergius, who was originally named after John the Evangelist, the writer of the Fourth Gospel, named it after Saint John the Evangelist, too, so technically it's dedicated to Jesus the Savior. Through the intercession of both Saint John's the Baptist and the evangelist in the Lateran. Because the Lateran is just a geographical term, it's built where a Roman senator from the 60s A.D, the time of Nero, the time of Saint Peter's crucifixion, there was a senator named Plautus a lot Toronto's who owned that entire property. So just like the Vatican isn't a religious term, but a geographical term. So the latter one is a geographical term. So the technical name of the church we're going to be celebrating this Sunday is the Arch Basilica. It's the only arch basilica in the world, the Arch Basilica of Saint John in the latter. And and it's a symbol of the church universal. It's been it's been destroyed four times and rebuilt. So this is actually the Fifth Lateran destroyed twice by earthquake, destroyed once by fire, destroyed by looters and neglect over the course of centuries. But boy, is it brilliant today. And many of the pilgrims who go through its holy door during this jubilee of Hope, are able to see by far the basilica with the most light in Rome. And so people who love a church being super bright, they love the ladder and and so it goes back 1700 years. As of last year. We celebrated the 17 hundredth anniversary in, on November 9th, last year of the dedication of the ladder. And, and so we'll be hearing beautiful readings about the church and how the church is not a building, but the church is first, Jesus's body that we enter into through our baptism, and we're called to be a holy temple of God by the help of the Holy Spirit, just like the churches in which we worship. |
| Betsy | I remember the doors are pretty spectacular in that church, aren't they, man senior. |
| Msgr Landry | So there are two doors that people notice. One, the central door is about 40ft high, made of bronze, and that was the door built and gifted by Julius Caesar for the old Roman Senate House in the forum. And Pope six is the fifth in the 1580s. Took it from that building and made it the front door of the Lateran. And so that's extraordinary. And it's so well balanced that despite being that. |
| Betsy | Huge. |
| Msgr Landry | And obviously that heavy, one person can move it basically with a finger because it's just so greatly weighted. And then the Jubilee door was given there. The holy door was given there by Saint John Paul the second, 25 years ago, for the Great Jubilee of 2000. And what's beautiful in that is as you enter through the door. The door is a cross where Jesus is being crucified. Mary's at the foot of the cross, basically under a mantle, taking in all the sons and daughters entrusted to her by Jesus upon that new tree of life, so that she'd be able to raise us to become like Jesus. And so it's a symbol of the church as a whole that welcome it, that is welcomed by Mary and prayed for and helped and guided by Mary's prayers and example, so that we might, in fact become the true temple of God with the blessed fruit of her womb reigning in us, especially through the sacraments, most especially the Eucharist, just like he for nine months reigned in her. |
| Betsy | That's really beautiful. As Pope Leo did, he began his pontificate with a particular ceremony at that church. |
| Msgr Landry | So he, the day after he was elected, you remember, went back to the Sistine Chapel to celebrate mass, according to custom, with the cardinals who elected. And then he had his inaugural mass at Saint Peter's, square, where world leaders came the very next Sunday, though, he went to the Lateran and he celebrated the mass. And he basically took up the cheer in the air, which is the sign of his teaching authority. And proclaimed a beautiful homily. They're all about the nature of the church and the nature of the papacy. So he he was elected on May 8th. He went there on May 25th. And, he's gone back there several times to meet with those, from the church in Rome. Most spectacularly, he was back there on Corpus Christi in order to celebrate mass outside the Arch Basilica and then carry the Lord on foot, like any priest in the world, in a Corpus Christi procession from the Lateran to Saint Mary Major Basilica, where Pope Francis was buried. |
| Betsy | Thank you so much for another Catholic history lesson and inspiration for, going to our readings this Sunday and and again, just absorbing the richness of our, our beautiful Catholic heritage. |
| Msgr Landry | It's a wonder. It's a it's a great joy for me to be with you. And let's be filled with wonder as we celebrate the feast of the only arch basilica in the world this Sunday worldwide. |
| Betsy | Thank you. Welcome to conversations with consequences here on EWTN radio. I am your host, Mary Fiorito, and I'm Ashley McGuire, and we are happy to have with us today Dominican Father Thomas Petri. He is a well known voice to EWTN radio listeners and a known face on the broadcast side of things as well. And father, we'd love to chat with you today about some very interesting facts about our new Pope, Leo the 14th, who is from Chicago as a Chicago. And I'm now required under canon law to mention that every time. We are thankful that you could be with us today. |
| Father Thomas Petri | I'm always happy to be with you. It's great to be here. |
| Msgr Landry | So, father. |
| Betsy | I think we have to start with, This really incredibly important fact is that you and the Friars had kind of a bracket going on, and that you won the name contest. You were able to guess the name correctly. That's really interesting. Why did you think the new Holy Father would choose that particular name? |
| Father Thomas Petri | Well, we did have a bracket going on. I think other religious houses do the similar thing. I think it's illegal under canon law to gamble on who might become pope, but there's nothing against trying to figure out what the name is going to be. So yeah, I, I chose Leo the 14th. It was a combination of both wishful thinking and an educated guess. No, it was wishful thinking because, it seems to me that the last several pontificates since the Second Vatican Council. So John the 23rd, Paul the sixth, John, Paul the second, Benedict, and now Francis have been in some ways rehashing and interpreting the council. And there's been different factions associated with each of them, and sometimes even operating out of 1960s or 1970s theology or a reaction to those theologies. And quite honestly, I just wanted to get off the merry go round. I want, you know, I want to go back somewhere before the council not to discredit the council, but just to say we got to move on at some point here. We can't. We got to stop the navel gazing. So that was the wishful side of things. But the more educated side was that and hopeful, I think, was that Leo the 13th was Pope during a very difficult time in both the church and in the world. He was he was the first truly modern pope. You know, he was the first pope to live really, in the Vatican voluntarily. Pius the ninth was the last pope to have the Papal States lived at the Cranial Palace, as most previous popes before him did. And Pope Leo the 13th was the greatest, probably the one of the greatest teaching popes in the church's history, and really outlined at a time when the world was experiencing a lot of political upheaval, revolutions, and the church was diminished in its influence in the world, just really highlighted how Catholics are supposed to move forward in the modern world. And it seems to me that we're kind of at a similar place now, you know, with the world in upheaval, a lot of confusion in the church. And I daresay even some probably at the late 19th century as well, some despair, perhaps about the state of things, the state of the church or the state of the world. So I was really kind of prayerful and hopeful for a Leo the 14th, and I was obviously thrilled. I mean, I was listening to the album was pop, and I missed the lion's part, but I caught the number in Latin and so I heard I distinctly heard 14. I was like, oh my gosh, it's Leo the 14th. That's awesome. |
| Betsy | Well, father, we just have, about a minute and a half left. But I'd like to ask you because, Ashley and I were in Rome when all of this happened. So we didn't get to see some of the video of different religious communities and schools and stuff, finding out where were you when you heard the news? And who were you with and what was it like? |
| Father Thomas Petri | Well, I was in this very seat. I was in my office, and I was actually doing an interview for a major secular news outlet. And, I had the Vatican camera on my, on my computer so I could see what was going, what the smoke stack. And I noticed it before the anchors did. And they were they were outside on one of the roofs and they turned around. He's like, he's right. It's there is it's smoke. It's white smoke. So it was really, really remarkable. |
| Betsy | Well, Father Thomas Petrou, thank you so much for giving us so much time this morning. And if you'd like to learn more about the Dominican House of studies, please visit dhs.edu and you can follow Father Thomas Petri on social media at Petri. That's Petri hope. And make sure to visit the Catholic association.org to learn all about us. And thank you for joining us. Welcome to conversations with consequences now on EWTN radio. I'm your host, Betty Fentress, and we are grateful to have with us Arie Shulman, editor at The New Atlantis, a science and technology journal that some have described as the study of how technology changes what it means to be human. His writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, First Things, The New York Times, and many others. He was previously. He was previously a research assistant in the opinion department at The New York Times, and an ontological engineer at Sci core, and has degrees in computer science and English from the University of Texas at Austin. And we really want to do a deep dive today in the world of AI and transhumanism. Thank you for coming, Ari. |
| Ari Schulman | Absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here. |
| Betsy | So your journal, The New Atlantis, has had a lot on artificial intelligence. And we're going to go back to 2023, where you wrote a piece, why this AI moment may be the Real deal. And talk about what you wrote then and how things have accelerated even in the last two years. So for our listeners who don't really know all the ins and outs of ChatGPT, the acronym Chat generative Pre-trained Transformer, can you explain how the word transformer is sort of at the heart of some of the deep concerns about what ChatGPT does? |
| Ari Schulman | Yes. Let me step back and just sort of talk synoptic about the kind of the arc of AI over the last few decades and I'm sure on the title of that piece why this moment may be the real deal. I came to writing about artificial intelligence. It was actually what diverted me from the career path that I was on, which was to be a computer scientist. We were learning a lot about artificial intelligence and about transhumanism, which I think we're going to speak about a little bit later. And I thought that it was a lot of snake oil, and I learned about a lot of thinkers, including a lot of people who've been developing AI, who also considered it to be snake oil, which is to say the capabilities were real sort of sophisticated pattern matching, but there was nothing there that could really be considered to resemble intelligence. And when you try to dial in on what the nature of human intelligence was, you would really understand the Gulf. You know, so many words. What we had with AI for 50 or 60 years was basically, if you go into an Excel spreadsheet and you, do like an x, y coordinate plot and you put a linear regression plot line on there, it was kind of just more and more sophisticated versions of that, with millions of parameters instead of zero. And there were a lot of very sophisticated critics like Hubert Dreyfus and Joseph Rights and Bohm, who wrote these very persuasive books about how the nature of human intelligence is actually very embodied. It's situational, it's contextual. It's not primarily analytic and mathematical. Early AI systems were able to beat mathematicians at solving formulas, but they couldn't replicate what four year olds could do stacking blocks in the real world. And the more that you understood this critique, the more that you could see it to apply to the AI at the time. So that was the the context that I had for understanding AI for about the first 11, 12, 13 years that I have been writing about AI. And, when ChatGPT came along and generative AI, it's now more general, now more often called generative AI. I was sort of calling it Transformers in that essay. When that came along. It was able to do all of these things that AI and a lot of AI critics had basically promised that I was never going to be able to do. And one very basic one was the ability to understand natural language and its holistic context. If you think about the default way that we would think that computers are work, they are going to work, they're going to be very analytic. They're going to be thinking about words in a kind of numerical sense, an actual human language, a natural language, as computer scientists call it. Language is very, very contextual. If you shift the position of a word one place in a sentence that doesn't just change its significance by 10% or something like that, it can completely transform or invert the nature of a sentence. The meaning. Right. AI systems really were not able to understand that they were stuck in this more kind of, rote statistical and numerical mode of understanding language. So if you asked an AI system a question like, if you were to state the sentence, I put the umbrella in the bathtub because it was wet, and you would ask an AI system, what is the word it referring to? A person will almost instantly be able to tell you that it refers to the umbrella, not to the bathtub. AI systems. There was only really one system in the world that could do that, which was the one that I worked on that you mentioned at the top. It was called psych or and they did that by having people manually program all of the knowledge that's encoded in natural language into the system across tens of thousands of man hours. It was incredibly laborious. And there was no really simple, elegant way to get an AI system to understand that. This was one of the first things I checked for when ChatGPT came along, and the early iterations of the program failed at this problem, but the later iterations got it right. So just the ability to have an English conversation with a computer? Yeah. Sometimes that sounds a little bit kind of phony and like a customer service agent or a PR spokesperson, but the fact that you're getting complete sentences that understand the significance of the little contextual clues in a sentence, you're asking it, I think decades of, people who are paying close attention to I would have said that that's not possible. And it is possible. And I think that's a generational breakthrough. |
| Betsy | Well, I'm glad you brought up Joseph VI's and Bomb because he was the inventor of Eliza at MIT, and he wrote, that he was really you wrote that? He said he was alarmed to find that users would ask to have privacy with the chat bot and then spill their deeper secrets to it. They did this even when he told them that Eliza did not understand them, that it was just a few hundred lines of dirt. Stupid computer code. He spent the rest of his life warning of how susceptible the public was to believing that the lights were on and someone was home, even when no one was an area. Now we have instances where people were are using chat therapy. Excuse me ChatGPT as a therapist and the subsequent suicides that have resulted in that talk about that. |
| Ari Schulman | Yeah, I I'm find myself a little bit ambivalent about this, actually, because I myself and I know a lot of people who have gotten a lot of value out of these, these chat bots, I use them myself to solve lots of logistical problems. Paperwork. You have to file things. You have to work through with your car, repair the kinds of things that would normally you'd have to sit down and spend hours, like just finding the right information, the fact that it has it all at the ready and that it can instantly respond to the specific question you have. And you don't have to match the question you have to the one that's written in the how to book it. It's hugely useful, and I know people who have put their, relationship problems to the chat bots and gotten go to answers back that have actually helped them achieve breakthroughs in their own understanding. So I suppose when I think about myself and the friends that I have, close friends and family members, I'm reasonably optimistic about these things, about the new, the new possibilities that are opened up for just solving problems more quickly. When I think about the world and the next generation, I feel a lot more pessimistic. And I think part of the difference is, you know, I'm just old enough, for example, to have remembered what the world was like before smartphones. Before you had the internet in your pocket all the time. I was actually fairly old before we had a computer in my house at all, and I was in college before I even had a cell phone, and I was well out of college before I had a smartphone. I was always the last adopter among my friends is kind of a what I protester. I think being trained in that world where you don't have these tools available, is very, very useful because it gives you some sense of intentionality and it can give you kind of a sense of what you stand to lose if you use these tools in the wrong way. I guess it also helps if you're like a professional tech critic for a living, as I am. I don't know if if everyone kind of thinks about these things in this way, but they have the frame of reference for it. I think we can already see with smartphones that Zoomers are in a much more difficult position because they don't have that frame of reference of what the world was like without smartphones and the nature, the very nature of smartphones is to be omnipresent and all pervasive, and to allow for no limits on the context in which they're being used. That's the thing that I would want to worry about and want to look at most closely with ChatGPT, and with generative AI broadly. I don't know if we want to pass a synoptic answer on whether it's good or bad. The question is about the ways in which we are using it and what intentions we're bringing to it. And the worry would be that we have a society that doesn't really know and doesn't offer people the training for how to be intentional about technological use in that way, and therefore the default will be that it will become omnipresent and it will take over everything. My, you know, my general advice on this is that we have to really preserve the areas of life and carefully protect areas of life from the creep of these technologies in order for the technologies to be useful and in order for our lives to still be our lives, and for us to have ownership over the technology. |
| Betsy | Well, it does seem more realistic to say to use it carefully. I have definitely benefited from it. When I had some editing questions about punctuation and grammar and word choice, but then at certain point it seems like, it just also just tells everybody that they're wonderful. And I know that my friends who teach in college or tearing their hair out about it, writing essays for people, and that's where it just seems to be at cross hairs with the development of the intellect. What do you think about that? |
| Ari Schulman | I think that's right. I mean, to me, it seems like there's a there's sort of been a slow brewing fire in higher education for several decades, and this is coming along and dropping a bomb on that. So it's accelerating things that were already the case, but dramatically and in the wrong direction. If I were a professor in college, I would be establishing hard limits around AI. An AI use AI would be, requiring essays to be written by Bluebook by hand in the classroom. Yes. Creating these kinds of, very hard, firm boundaries around the use of AI. Again, for the sake of both sides. It's not necessarily because AI is bad, but it is because it could the default tendency is going to be to shortcut everything. There's a writer and scholar named, I believe this is Jordan Whales, who I'm drawing on here, who has talked about when you go to the gym, when you're in a warehouse, a forklift is a really useful thing. There's no great virtue in having people in warehouses just use their muscles all the time. The tools are really useful for the work of a warehouse worker. When you're going to the gym. A forklift is really useful. If you want to lift 1,000 pounds, the forklift is going to help you, but that defeats the purpose of going to the gym. So the task is to figure out, first of all, to have the presence of mind as a culture, to recognize the difference between these two kinds of cases, and then to figure out how that applies in, in, different contexts. And I think for children and for young people, the first and most crucial task is to preserve a world that is the gym and not the factory where they are understanding the intrinsic value of doing things on their own, both because that is where the real value actually is, and because they're not going to be able to use AI fruitfully unless they have that that kind of basic understanding. |
| Betsy | Well, how about as it relates to things like photography and video, where it can create very scary, scarily realistic? Versions of a person and have them saying things that they don't even say. Is that a different area versus ChatGPT that you have deeper concerns about? |
| Ari Schulman | It is concerning. Again, almost all of these trends, the ways in which they are frightening and worrisome, are continuations of things that were already the case before I came along. So think about the, was that the Covington Catholic case? This is like 3 or 4 years ago, you know, the case that I'm talking about. |
| Betsy | Oh, when the kids went to the Supreme Court. |
| Ari Schulman | Kids went to the Supreme Court, and, this whole media controversy over supposedly these kids were intimidating these Native American protesters. |
| Betsy | Right. |
| Ari Schulman | And then it turned out that actually, the protesters had been kind of encroaching on the kids. So, I mean, that was a case where we had reliable camera evidence and video evidence. There was no manipulation involved there, and yet it still produced a complete split in public understanding of what was actually the case. So we already have these profound divisions where we are. Nobody can really reliably trust what the other side is saying or what, like what media accounts are, in part because that's just the nature of media, is that it? It presents itself as being objective and it actually everything has its own perspective. There's a great I think it's a Susan Sontag, I say about this from 50 or 60 years ago. |
| Betsy | Right. |
| Ari Schulman | Photography can lie. So we faced that problem already. In a way. I it's sort of an improvement in that we may have no more illusions anymore, that we're getting the objective truth from the media that we're consuming. That's probably a too cynical take. I would say it's just objectively worrisome when you can have really persuasive facsimiles of like, you know, somebody could produce a video of, President Trump, or Benjamin Netanyahu or something saying that they're invading a country. You can take right things that could go wrong there. And it is it is worrisome. I'm tentatively hopeful that there may be some sort of technical solutions to this that will allow for verification of, which media has been produced by AI, in which not but so far, that's just a kind of a theoretical intervention that hasn't actually happened yet. |
| Betsy | Are there any other worries that you have about how AI is being used? In terms of politics, in terms of surveillance, of what people do? That seems to me increasingly concerned that that some people have. |
| Ari Schulman | Yeah. Surveillance. I haven't thought about the surveillance question as much. I would say adjacent to that, a general concern that I have about AI is of I'll put this this very broadly and then try to state what I'm meaning, okay, loss of meaning and purpose and of agency and control over our lives. In my view, a kind of a paradigmatic situation of our current sort of technological state is trying to pay for something by an app where you're required to pay for the thing through a payment app, and the app doesn't work, and there's no one you can go to to get help. And that each step of that is if you think if you compare that to the way that we made payments 5 or 10 years ago with credit cards and 50 years before that with cash. It's not just that we have a more technically complex situation, and that it's harder to pay. I find it harder to pay through payment apps than it was through credit card and cash. It's that the the nature of the interaction when you're paying with when you're paying with cash, you're there in front of the cashier. It's a classic, like an economic model of a class or a model of a transaction. Two people exchanging value, the credit card you have, the bringing in at a kind of inter mediator, when the transaction works, you don't really need to think about that. You're still just kind of handing payment over. And then at some later date, you're involving the third party where you pay them back for the money that you borrowed. The payment app is accelerating that down very far down a path where the people who are involved in that transaction, who are determining how it goes, you don't even know where they are. And they may be 5 or 6 different companies. They may be maybe the app doesn't work because they don't actually really care about collecting the money. They care about collecting your personal data and selling it to someone else. We don't really know, but I think so many of the problems that we're confronting in modern life have to do with this fact that the decisions about everyday things in our lives are being made by very distant forces that are very hard to identify, and much harder to even ever get on the phone and ask for accountability. I think about AI primarily through this lens, about whether it's going to make that problem better or worse. I could come up for you with scenarios of how it can make it better, but I think the default is that it's going to make these kinds of problems worse, because it's going to increase the power of these kinds of decentralized and distributing forces, where we can't locate who is making decisions about us. I could see surveillance and increasing as one kind of small part of that sort of broader trend of like big distant forces that are that are kind of running our lives almost, like a sort of a schizophrenic, you know, paranoid fantasy becoming true. |
| Betsy | So you were on a panel at the center for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, and without doubt it as the moderator and you brought up something called the fourth dimension. Can you talk about that? And and how that relates to all of the things we're talking about today? |
| Ari Schulman | Yeah. So I was borrowing this term from a book called The Four Dimensional Human by a terrific technology writer named Laurence Scott, who I really highly recommend. Okay. What he means by this is, he was talking about primarily about the smartphone and about digital technology you think about before the smartphone. The dimensions of experience of our everyday lives were the three dimensions of physical space. You go left, you can go right, you can go forward and back. You can go up and down, really even more like two dimensions, because it's hard to go up and down. But these are the kinds of these are the dimensions of our physical possibility and therefore of our thought world. So when you're at the dinner table with your family, if the vibe is off, if there's awkward family tension, you're stuck in that situation. You have to be there and and confront it. Which is bad on the one hand, because sometimes we want to get out of a bad situation. But it's good because sometimes we need to be forced to confront bad situation and deal with it. What Scott was arguing is that the smartphone opens up a fourth dimension that extends from you and where you are to potentially everywhere. Now, if you're there in that moment with your family and things are going awkward or a little wrong, you can pull out your phone and see. As someone I'm romantically interested in, texted me, has a major world event happened? What's happening on my social media? I think that's a useful way to kind of sum up the odd nature of the smartphone, which is that it is this portal we're carrying around. It opens up potentially the world everywhere to all of us at any given time. And in a very in an earlier, more optimistic, naive moment of thinking about the internet in the 1990s, this would have sounded great. We're on the information superhighway. We can connect to like minded people. And instead, I think what we're seeing now, this kind of sense of, anomie and and adrift ness and loneliness that we have is actually because of, I think I present a lot of ways of the opening up of that fourth dimension. It's because we, we can never really be where we are anymore because we're we always have the option to opt out and to be psychically someone else somewhere else. And we probably all remember this the moment that smartphones came around, and suddenly it was like the people who are around us in body aren't there in spirit anymore. I remember this happening when all of my friends got smartphones, and then I finally got one and I was doing it too. And now we all just do it all the time and we don't even recognize it anymore. |
| Betsy | Yeah, it's a real lack of presence to be with the people who are right in front of you. |
| Ari Schulman | That's right. |
| Father Thomas Petri | Yeah. |
| Ari Schulman | Yeah. Go ahead. |
| Betsy | I just wanted to touch briefly before we close on the word transhumanism, which I think a lot of people don't understand. Can you just give us a little overview of that and then just kind of wrap up, on a hopeful note, on on how we go forward with this, you know, to be cliche, brave new world. |
| Ari Schulman | Yeah. Transhumanism. Is the idea of turning humanity itself and human nature into an engineering project. So humanity, for as long as it's existed, and especially for the last 300 years since the scientific revolution, has been turning more and more of nature under our rational control and under our instrumental control. We are separated from the cycles of day and night and of the seasons. Now, because of, indoor lighting and because of all of our advanced technology that can allow us to kind of live the same lives no matter where we are, you can go through all of these different elements where we have become separated from the given ways of nature, the last frontier that we haven't, but we've only sort of just started to penetrate is human nature itself. So transhumanism is a collection of ideas like radical life extension and like genetic engineering of children and designer babies. It includes sort of more fanciful, kind of weird alt culture, things like. |
| Ari Schulman | Implanting wings, radically extending your legs, whatever you might want to do to modify the human body to suit your whims. That's what transhumanism is. The note of pessimism, all sound is that the culture seems to be more and more marching down this path, and this this, ideology has ever more appeal. When I first started writing, this was primarily a kind of extension of the way that the left was thinking and relating to science and technology. It's now much more an extension of the way that the right is thinking and relating to technology. It's a Silicon Valley phenomenon. It's a tech right phenomena, and it's a kind of, anti-establishment, anti denuded, liberal way of thinking and living phenomenon. The optimism that I can offer is that it's I think people are more, more aware of it because it's becoming a bigger deal. It's not a it's not a sleeper issue or a sleeper subject anymore. And more and more people know about it. And I do think that most normal people, the vast middle of 80% or even 90% of the country, wants to be human and not to be a cyborg. And my hope is that we're going to reach a kind of, a it's going to rise to a crisis point, and the crisis will eventually be resolved in the right way, where this trend is defeated. That's my hope. Anyway. |
| Betsy | Thank you so much for joining us, Eri. And to learn more about Eri Schulman and read all of his work at the New Atlantis, make sure to visit and subscribe to the New atlantis.com and to learn more about the Catholic Association and follow everything we do, please go to Catholic association.org. Thanks for joining us. |
| Ari Schulman | Thank you so much, Betsy. |
| Betsy | Welcome to conversations with consequences here on EWTN radio. I'm your host, Ashley McGuire, and we're happy to jump across the pond to check in with Edward Penton, who is a senior contributor for the National Catholic Register and an EWTN News Vatican analyst. Edward, welcome to the show. |
| Father Thomas Petri | Thank you. Good to be with you, Edward. |
| Betsy | We have both written articles about a man named Jimmy Lai who, for our listeners, if they're not familiar, is a former newspaper publisher and media mogul who has been in jail unjustly for four years now in a maximum security prison in China, in solitary confinement, where he has been detained on bogus charges of violating national security. And in fact, really, he's become the sort of global face of conscience rights, the conscience rights movement in that he refused to kowtow to the Chinese Communist Party and allow his newspaper to become just a propaganda rag. And he's he's an incredibly inspiring man in that he is quite wealthy. He could have hopped on a plane and left the country and been, you know, living as an expat somewhere. And instead he chose to stay back and stand shoulder to shoulder with other members of the resistance movement of Hong Kong. I think, Edward, the thing that's really burning in the brains of so many people who are following this case, he's he's he's attracted a real following in, as you know, in in the article that you've written, there's countless leaders from other countries who've spoken out. You have even entities like Amnesty International that are decrying his unjust detention and his real kind of kangaroo trial. But we're not really hearing anything from the Vatican. And Lai is a convert to Catholicism and really is his deep Catholic faith is what, you know, he and others attribute to the strength that he gets to endure. And yet we're not really hearing anything from the Vatican or the Pope. Well, what's your take on that, Edward? |
| Father Thomas Petri | Yes, it is rather peculiar. And it's really all to do with the sort of US politic stance the Vatican is taking in lots of areas, and actually not just with China. It's really because they're trying to to take this approach, which actually failed during the Cold War, which was to try to be I have a sort of reconciled, a conciliatory approach to, to communism and to try to just deal with them with dialog in the hope that they'll come around and support the Vatican's way of thinking. Excuse me, but it is rather unfortunate, because I think, as I say, that the strategy failed. And I think the Vatican, though, especially with the current leadership, especially with Cardinal Paladin as secretary of state, they're very much champions of this, this approach, and they think it works. And the interesting thing is that Cardinal Parolin gave a speech as the Cardinal, Stephen Chow, the bishop of Hong Kong. They spoke at the same conference in Rome last week, basically outlining why they why they take this approach, which they feel is a way to better engage the Chinese because they're they've been trying to pursue this policy of cynicism since ancient policy of trying to incorporate everything into Chinese culture. But since 2014, it's it's stepped up the gear with, President XI Jinping. And so their view is that to try to ruffle feathers, as it were, but to try to go along with, with Beijing in the hope that, they will get some concessions from Beijing by doing so. They think they have done that by getting this provisional agreement, which they signed with Beijing in 2018. The Vatican did, in order on the appointment of bishops. But that provision agreement, it remains secret. We don't know what it contains, obviously. And it's the fruits have been mixed, to say the least. So again, there's this great question mark about whether this approach is working. And then you have someone like Jimmy Lai, of course, who's being left in jail without any moral voice. The strong moral voice of the Vatican coming to his aid, even as you say, he's a Catholic convert. |
| Betsy | Well, certainly we all should be praying for him. And and thank you, Edward, for coming on the show. Thank you for your journalistic efforts to shed light on this important case and to learn more about Edward Patten. You can catch all of his writings at the National Catholic Register by visiting NC Register. Dot com. |