AIPolitics 17.5: What Hyperion Saw

Why Dan Simmons’s 1989 sci-fi cycle keeps surfacing around the Pope-and-Anthropic moment, and what the genre already knew about institutions that outlast technology revolutions.

I thought I’d throw together a quick interstitial (scifi/literary term for one of those chapters that is relevant to the theme but does not involve the main characters or advance the plot) post this morning, as I am bored, and multiple people have asked after I threw up a “welp,” with this picture on my social media accounts.

So, between my social media posts and then a couple of Part 17 generated comments in the back channel, the Hyperion books keep coming up in the papal encyclical discussion, plus a meme circulating that pairs Olah-at-the-Vatican with a Hyperion cover. It is rather amazing what these books foreshadowed, and more importantly, when. So…first…

A BIG OL’ SPOILER ALERT, THOUGH YOU’VE HAD THIRTY YEARS!

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Ok, so you kept scrolling. It is no longer my fault as you have been alerted to potential spoilers. :)

The Hyperion Cantos is Dan Simmons’s four-book science fiction series, published between 1989 and 1997. Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion. I read them in undergrad and grad school, in the order Simmons published them, and the series was quite formative to my thinking. It is one of my favorites.

I will give you my summary. Spoilers. Again.

You guessed it, humanity has colonized the galaxy!

The Catholic Church survives into the far future as one of the major political institutions. A character named Lenar Hoyt, a Jesuit priest, encounters a parasitic technology called the “cruciform” that fuses Christian symbolism with biological tech. The cruciform resurrects its host repeatedly, but at the cost of neurological degradation across resurrections. Hoyt eventually becomes Pope Julius VI, and the Catholic Church becomes the political authority that adjudicates what the cruciform technology means for human dignity and the soul. An AI civilization called the TechnoCore lives in symbiosis with human consciousness, embedded in the computational layers of the human “datasphere,” and pursues theological framing of its own existence as part of an evolutionary trajectory toward divine convergence.

That last clause is the Teilhard de Chardin part, and the part that makes the books matter (perhaps a lot) for understanding what just happened at the Vatican.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit paleontologist who died in 1955. His theological contribution was to argue that consciousness in the universe is evolving toward what he called the Omega Point: a state of unified divine awareness toward which all conscious matter is trending.

(Though I am not Catholic, I am quite familiar with de Chardin’s writings. They’ve come in and out of my thinking over the years, and I couldn’t really tell you why…maybe it was just residual Hyperion stuff, hanging out in the synapses?)

The Vatican, unsurprisingly, found his position uncomfortably close to heresy during his lifetime and prohibited him from publishing his theological works. His ideas have since been rehabilitated in Catholic intellectual circles, and Pope Benedict XVI cited Teilhard approvingly in a 2009 vespers homily in Aosta. Teilhard’s intellectual architecture, taken seriously, gives Catholic theology a framework for thinking about AI as a continuation of human consciousness-evolution rather than as a rival to it.

Simmons built the Hyperion Cantos on Teilhard’s framework. The TechnoCore in the novels is pursuing its own version of the Omega Point, computationally rather than spiritually. The Catholic Church in the novels treats the TechnoCore’s ambitions as theologically interpretable and contestable, not as merely technical. Pope Julius VI’s eventual position is that the cruciform technology and the TechnoCore’s evolutionary plans are both fundamentally questions of human dignity and the divine substrate, and that the Church’s job is to adjudicate.

Now look at Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. As I said in Part 17 today, the encyclical treats AI as “cultivated, not built.” It describes internal model representations as “unknown” and treats that unknownness as a moral question. It engages the technology as a continuation of human work and human dignity rather than as a rival civilization. It approaches AI as theologically interpretable, not as merely technical. That intellectual architecture is, very recognizably, the Teilhard de Chardin framework.

It’s a pretty sure bet that Pope Leo, a mathematician by training, would have read Teilhard. The encyclical’s language tracks Teilhard’s intellectual program closely enough that the lineage is hard to miss once you go looking.

Anthropic’s interpretability research, separately, has been moving toward language that treats AI systems as grown rather than engineered, with internal structure that resists direct inspection and requires moral interpretation. That’s also Teilhardian, in the sense that it treats the system as having interior life worth interpreting rather than just behavior worth measuring. Whether Anthropic’s researchers see themselves as continuing Teilhard’s intellectual program is a separate question. What’s clear is that the encyclical found common vocabulary with Anthropic because both intellectual programs were already pointed at the same theological substrate.

Simmons (somehow) spotted this convergence in 1989.

Sci-fi is doing what sci-fi does best here, and it is truly why I love it. The genre dramatizes structural possibilities that already exist in the institutional configuration of the world. Simmons’s prediction was structural rather than specific. He was predicting that whenever a technology shows up that raises serious questions about consciousness, agency, and human dignity, the institutional voice with sufficient durability to adjudicate would be the Catholic Church.

The technology turned out to be AI, and all the related tech that will come with AI, or at least so it would appear at this weird, liminal, crazy-ass moment.

What good science fiction knows about politics is that durable institutions outlast technological revolutions. The Catholic Church outlasted the printing press. It outlasted the Reformation, the scientific revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of secular nation-states, the mass-media revolution, the internet. It will outlast the AI revolution. The question was never whether the Church would adjudicate AI as a moral question. The question was always what intellectual framework the Church would use to do the adjudicating, and which technical interlocutors would help build that framework.

Simmons’ integration, made in 1989, was that the framework would be Teilhardian and would treat AI as continuous with human consciousness rather than as a rival to it. And, well…science fiction and history sometimes rhyme.

To give credit where credit is due, Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, published in 1959, makes the same structural prediction through a different mechanism. In Miller’s novel, the Catholic Church preserves technical knowledge through a post-apocalyptic dark age and eventually adjudicates whether humanity has earned the right to use that knowledge again. The setting is different from Simmons’, but the structural claim is the same: the Catholic Church, as a durable institution, is the body that humanity turns to when it needs to figure out what technology means morally. Two writers, three decades apart, both arrived at the same prediction.

And, I think history will say that both predictions became operational on May 25, 2026.

The credit the genre deserves here is for taking institutional durability seriously, not for predicting AI specifically. Most political-science writing of the past forty years has been busy declaring religion and the Catholic Church a residual category. Simmons and Miller assumed the Church would endure and have the power to say what is what. They were right.

Our politics just shifted, I think. And, to be honest, other than this little note, I am still thinking through the how, the what, and the why. But here’s two quick conjectures for now.

One: the encyclical’s intellectual framework reads as Teilhardian, and Anthropic’s interpretability program has been moving toward compatible Teilhardian vocabulary. The institutional convergence at the Vatican was something more than just a competitive lobbying outcome. Two intellectual programs were already pointed at the same substrate.

The competitive-lobbying frame from Politico is real, and Anthropic did win the contest of access. The structural compatibility between Anthropic’s interpretability research and Catholic theology of consciousness, though, was already there before the lobbying season started. Part 17 frames the encyclical as Anthropic outmaneuvering rivals. It is also, partly, those two ideas finding each other.

Two: the writers who predicted this moment got there through institutional observation, not prophecy. They took seriously the question of which voice in human civilization has the durability and the moral vocabulary to engage with technologies that touch consciousness. The answer they kept arriving at was: the Catholic Church. If your reaction to the encyclical was surprise, the question to sit with is why political-science writing in 2026 had to be surprised by something Catholic intellectuals and serious sci-fi writers were openly predicting decades ago.

The full AI Politics archive is here if you want to catch up. I highly recommend the Cantos. Hyperion first, then The Fall of Hyperion. You should also read A Canticle for Leibowitz if you haven’t read it. Read Teilhard if you want the theological substrate directly and The Phenomenon of Man is the place to start.

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I hope you found that fun. I did. Thanks for indulging me.