Thiel also said AI critics are doing the bidding of the Antichrist.
Brad Reed for Common Dreams
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According to a Thursday report from CNN, Thiel told the
Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Tuesday that the pope was inadvertently
serving as a “Chinese communist agent” when he released a 42,000-word encyclical that called for strict
regulation of AI, a technology that
the pontiff said heightens the “risk of dehumanization” throughout the world.
Thiel argued that this sort of thinking was dangerous, CNN
reported, because it could result in the US losing the “race” to build more
advanced AI to China. Because of this, Thiel continued, the pope is essentially
“working for the Chinese communists” by trying to tap the brakes on AI
development.
Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has long decried
AI critics in harsh terms. Over the last year, he has been delivering a series of lectures in which he has said
that opponents of AI development are working as agents for the Antichrist.
Journalist Christopher Hale, who writes the Letters From Leo newsletter, noted on Friday that Thiel in the past has even speculated that Pope Leo could be “a manifestation of the Antichrist.”
Thiel has said that he instructed Vice President JD Vance, a longtime
political ally who received major funding from the tech billionaire for his
2022 Senate campaign, to ignore the pope’s moral guidance despite influencing
Vance to convert to Catholicism, Hale added.
“Thiel seeded the vice president’s Catholic faith,” Hale
wrote, “and he now tells wealthy festival audiences that the leader of that
faith works for a communist government.”
In addition to his attacks on the pope, Thiel also warned
about “a democratic-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party,”
pointing to recent victories in New York and Colorado of candidates backed by
the Democratic Socialists of America.
Thiel said that this “takeover” would doom the US, arguing
that “when the Democratic Party goes, this country is over,” according to CNN.
The New York Times reported in May that Thiel has grown so concerned
about the political situation in the US that he’s created a “foothold” for
himself in Argentina, which is currently being governed by ideologically
likeminded libertarian President Javier Milei.
“Thiel, who has a history of collecting backup countries as
he hedges his bets against the United States, is
considering making Argentina another Plan B,” the Times reported. “Born in
Germany and raised in the United States, he received citizenship in New Zealand in
2011, and applied for a passport in Malta in 2022.”
