He really offered, I would argue, the middle road. The middle road. He says that tech is inevitable. AI is inevitable. But what the church wants is a profound influence over and ensure that the human person is put at the center of it.

It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Renee Duresta, contributing editor at Lawfare, and I'm here with Christopher Hale, who writes the substack letters from Leo and ran Catholic outreach for President Obama. Pope Leo says, no, we should talk a lot about guard routes. We should like a lot about this place for our jobs. We should talk about how it's that facts those in the margins. Today we're talking about the Pope's new AI encyclical,

which may sound like a departure from lawfare's usual terrain, but it isn't.

The antical touches on national security, autonomous weapons, information integrity,

and the question at the center of AI governance,

who gets to wield technological power and under what constraints.

So I think maybe we can start, since people were asking actually in the chat, what the

encyclical is and why it matters. Maybe you want to just sort of start with the basics?

Yeah, so I think that the word encyclical is Latin in roots. It means to encircle, to encompass the entire globe. And the idea of an encyclical is Latin in roots. It means to encircle to encompass the entire globe.

And the idea of Encyclical is it's a document that the Pope sends to the entire globe.

For Second Vatican Council, it's really meant for bishops, which in the Catholic Church

are a teaching authority of the Catholic Church. After Second Vatican Council, we moved on to say that it's also for the

laity under Pope Francis. He said even more so, it's for the entire world, for non-Catholics

itself. Some people say it's kind of like the state of the union address, where the Pope kind of

gives what his priorities are for the year to come that's a little bit inaccurate because

it's not just like really one year it's several years at a time that it's supposed to go out and

so really in pranth francis pope for 13 years and there's four and cynical so it's um i think what

we're seeing here is pope leo the 14th articulating what he thinks is at the forefront that the world's

facing, that the church is facing for the next three or four years. I think this will have a shelf

life he hopes well into the future. And one of the comparisons that I've seen making the rounds

in the commentary is that this was released, it was two days ago I think on the 25th signed

signed on May 15th this was when I think we started talking about it which was the 13th

...