In Silicon Valley, A Priest and the Thinking Machines
During an age when tech executives are closer to playing God than ever before, executives from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have all sought out Father Brendan McGuire for his counsel on ethics and AI.
Reaching for a metaphor to describe AI and today’s moment of technological upheaval, the Rev. Brendan McGuire picked out a whopper.
“When fire was first discovered, it changed humanity: We learned how to reward ourselves,” hunting and then cooking over the flames, said McGuire, pastor of St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, Calif. “And it became essential for human life.” Just then, he stopped and briefly reconsidered himself. “Ok, maybe it’s not quite that we’re rediscovering fire,” the priest said with a laugh. “Maybe that’s a bit too much, but we’re certainly discovering something massive.”
Quite a few members of his congregation would agree with him, and so would much of the Silicon Valley elite. For almost 30 years, McGuire, 60,has been a quiet spiritual counselor to some of them—and even as they sought him out, he wanted to get more of their attention: McGuire is a tech enthusiast, and he hoped a time might come when the Bay Area’s titans and moguls would more actively seek out the church’s moral guidance as they toiled over their innovations.
In the last several years, McGuire has gotten his wish. The AI boom has made Silicon Valley stop and think about matters usually confined to Sunday homilies— life and death, right and wrong, good and evil—more than ever: Never before has the technorati had such a chance to play God. More and more lately, McGuire has enjoyed an increased number of requests from executives and employees from companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic for advice as they pursue their quest to develop artificial intelligence.
