The race to AGI-pill the pope
TL;DR
AGI researcher John-Clark Levin and a group of experts are working to raise awareness about AI risks with the Vatican, aiming to influence Pope Leo XIV on potential doomsday scenarios.
Pope Leo XIV probably isn't the first person you picture when conversation turns to Artificial General Intelligence doomsday scenarios. But last month, AGI researcher John-Clark Levin found himself inside the Vatican on a mission to put those concerns in front of the pope.
Levin hasn't been acting alone. In the past year, he has been quietly assembling a loose network of roughly three dozen academics, scientists, policy researchers, and priests - a group he half-jokingly calls the "AI Avengers" - who meet virtually to strategize how to get the Vatican thinking more seriously about AI's more extreme possibilities.
His main worry is that t …