On one side, we have the Vatican – population 806 for two-tenths of a square mile – the smallest country in the world, and one of the youngest, too, but one which is the home of the Holy See, the seat of a church with 1,313 billion members worldwide. On the other, Silicon Valley, a territory of just under 2,000 square miles, whose
3 million inhabitants include 73 of the world’s 143 tech billionaires. The former is one of the oldest and largest political and spiritual authorities in the world. In just a half-century of existence, the latter has radically transformed the lives of billions of people – for better and for worse. Is it possible to build a bridge between those two worlds, with their drastically different temporalities? Between the demiurge entrepreneurs for whom the mysteries of life and death are above all a technological problem and a venerable institution that has reached a turning point in its millennia-old history?

Eric Salobir, Dominican friar and president of the think tank Optic, which places humanity at the heart of technological development, has long pondered and built a bridge between the stakes raised by the technological revolution and the need for greater ethical awareness in the face of the current explosion in technological progress.