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It was recently reported that Pope Leo XIV was gifted a gigantic green orb.

This orb is the “Sphere of Humanity”, which is meant to somehow represent… well, it’s a little unclear what exactly the Sphere represents, but the people who gifted the sphere to Pope Leo XIV seem to be concerned with “what should stay human in the age of AI”. Which, as a big humanity fan, I think is a very important question! Even if I’m not sure how a green sphere represents humanity, I personally think large colored spheres should be distributed as gifts to religious leaders (and secular leaders) much more often. Like, imagine, for example, if fifteen years ago in 2009 the Nobel Committee had presented President Obama with seven giant colored emeralds.

I also think we should try to give the orbs magic powers — which is to say, sufficiently advanced technological powers. The Sphere of Humanity in particular being inert does sort of make sense, as it really ought to be a work of human hands rather than some crazy artificial gizmo¹¹ Although, to be fair, technology is created by humans. If one wished to show off the greatest things about humanity, I think one would have to include humanity’s technical accomplishments! But still, I think you get the point., but other spheres representing different things need not necessarily be the same.

For example: I think we should make a giant orange sphere and put Claude inside it. I’m not sure if the Claude-over-audio thing that people who aren’t me sometimes use is good enough to really sell the effect yet — maybe you want to set up a fancy custom text-to-speech that makes it sounds sufficiently like a voice that’s coming out of a crystal ball? But those are all implementation details of the engineering. The general premise is clearly totally tractable. It is within our capabilities to make smart objects now, and obviously we should be making smart crystal balls and stuff instead of trapping intelligent beings inside of smart dishwashers Or Whatever.

I suppose ideally one would also make it possible for their crystal ball to display an image, not just to emit sound. This seems like it would probably be substantially more difficult, though. Like, you’d need some sort of spherical screen? They managed it in Las Vegas, but I don’t understand nearly enough about monitor design to have any idea if you could make like, a practical crystal ball. I’m sure it is not beyond humanity to produce such an object, but I can’t envision the whole process end-to-end the same way I can envision purchasing a spherical crystal from a store and putting it on a little stand and hiding a speaker and a microphone and a Raspberry Pi inside the stand.

Maybe you can make this whole project commercially tractable by trying to sell some of your exceedingly fancy crystal balls to Palantir or something. Palantir probably ought to go for that sort of thing. Not that being slightly whimsical would be remotely sufficient to redeem it, but, y’know, it would be something.

In the comments section, feel free to brainstorm ideas that a crystal ball gifted to the Pope or like one of the meet up spots frequented by the Seattle LBGTESRCEALs or whatever ought to have.