If A.I. Is Alive, What Does That Mean for the Rest of Us? | Hard Fork

As Anthropic prepares for a blockbuster IPO, the company has also been on a mission to instill morality into its A.I. models — which has involved a series of private meetings with religious scholars from across the world. Today, our guest host Max Read to talks to the Times religion correspondent Elizabeth Dias, the tech reporter Erin Griffith and the opinion writer David Wallace-Wells about the new belief systems taking shape in Silicon Valley, their differences with the Vatican and what it would actually mean for humanity if A.I. systems are conscious. 00:00 Anthropic's existential questions 02:18 Max’s AI joke 02:59 Why Anthropic is having private meetings with religious leaders 04:48 Christopher Ola, an Anthropic co-founder 07:31 What happened in the meetings? 9:27 Secrecy and signing N.D.As 13:30 The Pope's encyclical 17:21 What is Anthropic’s aim? What is their ideal outcome? Additional Reading: Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them. https://nyti.ms/3TMmiua What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World? https://nymag.com/intelligencer/artic... I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken https://www.theatlantic.com/technolog... Follow us on Instagram:   / hardforkpod   Follow us on TikTok:   / hardfork   Subscribe to Hard Fork:    / hardfork   Go deeper on our episodes: nytimes.com/hardfork Discover the journalism Times subscribers get daily, free for your first month in The New York Times app. Download app: https://nytimes.onelink.me/Xpht/a6wzplra This episode of “Hard Fork” was hosted by Max Read, produced by Whitney Jones and edited by Vjeran Pavic, with additional editorial support from Brendan Klinkenberg, Lisa Tobin and Brooke Minters. Engineering by Alyssa Moxley and original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, Diane Wong and Chris Wood. Fact-checking by Will Peischel. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Jessica Testa, Pui-Wing Tam, Maddy Masiello and Dahlia Haddad.