The Medieval Way to Protect Your Mind From AI
Vatican Access with Robert Duncan
Steve Metzger works inside one of the most important libraries in the world: the Vatican Apostolic Library. A medievalist and Latinist, he studies and catalogs some of the Library’s extraordinary manuscript collections, including works by St. Thomas Aquinas. In this conversation, Metzger asks what happens when AI begins to replace the hard work of reading, thinking, and wrestling with ideas for ourselves. Why is reading a book fundamentally different from getting an instant answer from a machine? What do we lose when knowledge becomes easier, faster and increasingly artificial? The discussion explores Pope Leo XIV’s warnings about AI and education, the decline of serious reading, the danger of losing control of the technologies we create, and the Vatican Library’s mission in a digital age. Metzger also explains why the Library can be understood as an “anti-Babel” -- a place that gathers the languages, texts, and cultures of humanity and puts them back into conversation with one another. Guest bio: Steve Metzger is a researcher and manuscript cataloger at the Vatican Apostolic Library in Rome. A medievalist and Latinist, his work focuses on Latin manuscripts, textual transmission, humanism, and the preservation of the Church’s written heritage.