Ftrain, by Paul Ford

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?)

Silicon Valley “disruption” is at odds with the way software creation actually works—and that’s a problem. On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich discuss Rich’s recent Aboard newsletter installment, “Maybe the Valley Could Listen a Little.” about how the dream of an “AI unicorn” who can use these tools to build a product all by themselves is a total fantasy. AI companies are promising revolutionary transformation across industries, but are they mostly just plastering over fundamental issues in processes and systems?

OpenClaw sprung up overnight—and seemed to fade just as quickly. What does that suggest about AI more broadly? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich are joined in the studio by New York Magazine tech reporter John Herrman, whose long career covering all corners of the industry has, like the rest of his peers, recently shifted to all AI, all the time. They discuss his piece for the magazine on OpenClaw—titled “My Adventures With ‘The AI That Actually Does Things’”—before pulling back the lens to look at AI on a whole. Plus: They take a brief diversion into the story John wrote immediately after his OpenClaw reporting, “The Mystery of 'Human Meat' for Sale on Temu.”

How should nonprofits actually be using AI? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich are joined in the studio by Traci Donnelly, the CEO of The Child Center of NY and the founder and president of Make An Impact—and a client of Aboard. After discussing these orgs’ missions, they dive into AI: Traci’s early embrace of the technology, how these tools can transform work in the sector, and the importance of not allowing human-to-human interactions to be supplanted by bots.

Is the AI era destined to make our software lives nasty, brutish, and short? On this week’s podcast, Rich brings Paul the framing of “Hobbesian AI,” specifically from 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s greatest work, Leviathan. Humans need some kind of order, Hobbes argued in the wake of the English Civil War, otherwise they will destroy each other. How can these lessons be applied to our decidedly order-less AI moment?