The Aboard Podcast
Father Brendan McGuire: Bringing AI to Church
How is Silicon Valley engaging with ethics and religion today—and how is the Catholic Church responding to AI? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich welcome on Father Brendan McGuire, a former engineer and current Catholic priest who serves at St. Simon Parish in Los Altos, California, aka the heart of Silicon Valley. He discusses his long work speaking between the tech industry and the Church, as an advisor to Anthropic as well as an early commenter on Pope Leo’s recent encyclical on AI, “Magnifica Humanitas.” (Don’t worry, Paul asks the question on everyone’s lips: In what file format does a pope distribute early copies of an encyclical?)
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Show notes
Links from this episode
- Father Brendan’s website
- “Magnifica Humanitas”: Pope Leo’s AI encyclical
- Claude’s Constitution
- The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speech that Father Brendan is referencing is his 1967 address “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”
Transcript
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