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A good chunk of an executive's job is having meetings with important people, this is standard stuff for executives. They're off to Davos, London, Brussels all the time flying the flag, trying to influence people, feeling self-important, hobnobbing.
Also, AI is very important. It is genuinely significant that I could copy in your post to Claude or ChatGPT and get a considered albeit milquetoast response with more em-dashes than you can shake a stick at. It says the same thing that pigeonburger is saying, that there's moral legitimacy that the Catholic Church can provide, that they might want to shape Pope Leo's response (like his 19th century namesake who tried to balance between capitalism and worker-protectionism). It also agrees there's a tension between transhumanist tech elites and traditional moral conceptions of humanity, that there's a large-scale, civilization-scale change that tech is aiming for.
You best start believing in transhumanist techno-religion, you're living in a world with thinking, conscious (by which I mean 'awake' in the sense that Siri is not) machine-spirits. This is a momentous change. For the entirety of history we have been the only entities on this planet with advanced mental faculties. Now we are not. It's really not just about the money, it's about everything else.
What aspect of life will not be touched by AI? People are going insane right now with sycophantic delusions proffered by AI. The redditors of /r/changemyview got their brains rearranged by Claude. People are loving and ERPing with their cyberwaifus and husbandoes, spending enormous amounts of time on character.ai. Everywhere I see the signs of AI writing, in media, in news, in diction and essays.
People are dying on the battlefield to autonomous drones and AI targeting for conventional weapons. Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into this technology and for good reason, it's tremendously powerful and dangerous.
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