Months after standing at the Vatican to warn of artificial intelligence development becoming concentrated in a handful of wealthy nations, AI giant Anthropic was found to have been privately asking the NSW Government to make way for massive computing capacity. Source: The Catholic Leader.
Emails revealed that Anthropic was seeking up to five gigawatts of AI data centre capacity in NSW alone, the ABC reported.
That’s three times the size of Australia’s entire data centre infrastructure, for one company, in one state.
Such “economic colonialism” is what Pope Leo XIV is calling on Catholic legislators to watch for.
“The rapid development of artificial intelligence risks creating new forms of technological dependence, with poorer nations increasingly reliant on wealthier ones,” Pope Leo said in a letter to the International Catholic Legislators Network this week.
“We must remain vigilant in this regard, lest innovation become another vehicle for ideological or economic colonialism.”
At the same time, more Australians – despite using it regularly for travel advice and personal recommendations – are growing wary of AI, a new report from McCrindle Research has revealed.
It found 70 per cent of Australians viewed AI as a threat more than a tool in society.
Anthropic co‑founder Christopher Olah said at the Magnifica Humanitas Vatican launch in May that there was a real possibility that AI would “displace human labour at a very large scale”.
“If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions,” he said.
Since January 2024, AI integration has hit junior job postings, dropping them by 29 per cent. That has left 45 per cent of Australians worrying over shrinking entry-level career opportunities.
It highlighted a severe long-term risk for business sustainability because “junior roles are the training grounds for tomorrow’s experts. If every organisation stops building expertise now, there will be a major gap in a decade,” the McCrindle report said.
Three in five Australians were concerned about the impact of AI on human connection, especially social media algorithms creating echo chambers of information.
“The world does not need an artificial intelligence that diminishes humanity,” Pope Leo said.
“It needs human intelligence enlightened by wisdom, political authority guided by conscience and technological innovation directed by charity.”
Pope Leo encouraged Catholic policymakers to promote policies that strengthened marriage and families and gave young people confidence for the future.
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Pope tells Catholic legislators to put family at heart of AI policy (By Kymberlee Gomes, The Catholic Leader)
