Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

It is 2025 and Donald Trump is president once again of the United States.

We will, of course, be following the moves of the Donald and his second administration very closely.

However, it won't just be politics for us this year.

We'll also talk a lot and cover American culture, life and the arts.

I should also remind you, because my producer, Natasha Natasha will not let me hear the end of it,

that we are on Spectator TV.

So head to our YouTube channel to watch that.

Today we are going to be talking about AI, which, as you may already know,

is the subject of our latest edition, the August edition of

Spectator World. It's a hell of an issue. It's obviously the most important subject of our time

in many ways, and journalists often struggle to cover it well. An exception, however, is Paul

Wood, our wonderful contributor, who's written a great piece for the issue about whether artificial intelligence will soon have rights, as in human rights, for machines.

Paul, let's start with how did you get involved with writing this piece? Because initially, when we discussed it, this wasn't the piece, but it sort of took on a life of its own well as you know I went to live in Rome and tried to burrow into the

Vatican as an interesting place but came across some of the very interesting work that the

Vatican has been doing in AI they've really been cutting edge for a number of years now. And met a priest, one of the

philosophers who's contributed to this discussion, who said, you know, it's possible that a machine

could have a soul. And I said, wait a minute, I did not expect somebody from the Roman Catholic

Church to say that and said, no, it goes back to Aquinas. And the idea that you can have a physical

matrix into which God places a human soul. That matrix is

biological, but it's not impossible that it's machine as well. So then I started looking at machine

consciousness, which is what the piece this week is about. We're all very used to discussion of the

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