60 Minutes - 10/04/2026: Who Needs Humans?, The Thom Tillis Tightrope, Saint Francis In The Cloud

Episode Date: October 5, 2026

What does the AI revolution mean for the future of work? Correspondent Jon Wertheim goes inside a company at the forefront of training AI in subjects humans have spent careers mastering, and reports on the perils and promise of AI in the workplace. David M. Levine and Meghan Lisson are the producers.Retiring North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis speaks exclusively with 60 MINUTES about the political advisors he believes are responsible for undermining President Trump’s second term. In his only interview ahead of the release of his new book, "How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents,” Tillis joins correspondent Ross Douthat for a candid conversation about the ups and downs of his relationship with President Trump, the state of the Senate and the Republican Party, and how his upbringing shaped his political outlook. Graham Messick is the producer. In 1997, a pair of powerful earthquakes struck the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, the magnificent resting place of one of Christianity’s most beloved figures. The quakes cratered part of the roof leaving countless art treasures permanently damaged. Now a team of art historians and software engineers are using 21st century technologies to restore the 13th century basilica. Correspondent Bill Whitaker reports on an ambitious AI and gigapixel photography project designed to preserve the great church in the future and open its treasures to the virtual world. Heather Abbott is the producer.

As of late, the White House and tech leaders have been talking about what artificial intelligence means for the future of civilization. We love our country, and we love the world, and we want to make sure it's a safe place. A more immediate question, what does AI mean for the future of our jobs? We may indeed have a serious employment crisis on our hands. That shouldn't scare the hell out of us. It should. It's not easy to be an independent-minded senator in President Donald Trump's report. Republican Party. Do you think the Republican Senate in Trump 2.0 has acted like a co-equal branch?

I think in some cases, yes, and most cases no. Tonight, Senator Tom Tillis on his relationship with the president and what it would take to make the Senate great again. The Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi was built in the 13th century. It has survived war, fire, and flood. But in 1997, the Great Church almost came crashing down. No wonder the friars jumped at the chance to use 21st century technologies to restore their home. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Nora O'Donnell.

I'm Ross Douthit. I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. This past week in Washington, America's tech titans met with President Trump to talk about, well, the future of humanity. Specifically, will AI artificial intelligence mark the end of civilization as we know it? Only slightly less grave and only slightly less depressing, there's a related more immediate question. Will AI take our jobs? That right there?

Not me. That was AI. So it is we don't exempt ourselves in wondering, is any line of work safe? So far this year, U.S. companies have cited AI as the number of the number of people. one reason for layoffs. May I, after all, doesn't sleep or take sick days. Is this technology simply going to transform how and where we work, much the same way other workplace revolutions did? Or is this one different? Is the great job apocalypse upon us? Here in this nondescript office in downtown San Francisco, these 20-somethings are designing the future of your workplace. You may not

have heard of Mercor, but it's quickly become a leader. in a booming new industry built around supercharging the already supercharged rise of artificial intelligence. We were in January last year about 20 people. How many now? Now it's 400 people in San Francisco, yeah. Brendan Foodie is Merckor's CEO. It's now a multi-billion dollar company,

and he's now a 23-year-old billionaire. Backstory. Four years ago, ChatGPT came out, and Fudy and his two co-founders, high school buddies, saw where the technology was heading. To get better, AI needed more information than what was widely available on the internet. AI went from this high-powered search engine to all of a sudden we're in astrophysics. We've got from cutesy to holy moly in a very short amount of time.

I think that's spot on. And the core thing powering that huge transformation in the capabilities is human intelligence. It seems an overarching goal. Anything we humans can do, we want AI to be able to do. I think a significant portion of things. Everything that humans want AI to be able to do, we want to teach it how to do that. So what does Mercor do? Well, when the big AI companies want, say, chat GPT or Claude to improve in a particular field, they hire Mercor to make their models smarter. Pick a subject, any subject, finance, architecture, poetry.

Mercor has assembled an army of more than 100,000 freelancers, humans ready to use their hard-earned expertise to train the AI. I work late in the evening. We met three such experts, Shauna Miller, a winemaker, Robbie Heiser, a music producer, and Melania Punacha, a physician. When you're assigned a task,

what are you actually doing? How are you training AI? On one project, we were training the AI to be able to accurately interpret laboratory results. For a songwriting project, you might get two different versions of the same lyric. and then you go through and give feedback on it. All three have full-time jobs.

AI training is just a side gig. Long term, by spending hours teaching a computer the tricks of their trade, are they not training themselves out of a career? No, they insist. Heiser believes that great songwriting, for instance, will always require the human touch. AI doesn't have any life experience to pull from. You know, an AI never had a girlfriend break up with it. real-life inputs that impact songwriting in a way that the robots in.

There's no way to write that in? I don't think so. Ultimately, Brendan Foodie foresees a utopia, advanced AI helping us cure cancer and tackle climate change, and the untold millions of workers, liberated from the dullest parts of their jobs, they'll be more productive than ever. People still have this fundamental question,

is my job safe from AI? How do you answer that? answer that? I think the key thing to look at is if you become more productive, is there more demand for your expertise in the economy? If you're training AI to do what people have spent years and years perfecting in their careers, aren't you necessarily endangering human work? Well, I think that you're changing human work. It might not necessarily be that repuditive tasks that people have done in the past, but there's still so many other things that people could be able to do. And so I think that evolution is natural. Whether workers asked for it

or not, that evolution is already happening, and not just in the tech hotbeds. In places like Columbus, Ohio, where the law firm Vori, Sater, Seymour, and Peas has been serving client's needs since 1909. Kim Hurleyhy, a trial lawyer, is a partner at the firm. You're going into courtrooms and facing a judge and jury. How is AI going to help with that? AI is never going to walk into the courtroom and give an opening statement to the jury. But it helps us have additional tools to use as we prepare that opening statement. A year ago, Vorese worked with Stanford University to build an internal tool for the firm. Individual AI personas trained on its senior lawyers. How do they think? What kind of advice do they give?

Presto, an AI version of Avori's partner. Hurleyhi has her own, which she consulted for us. So what you have on your screen here is a draft opening statement. This is ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Now Herlihy asks her AI double to give notes. You can see it's an AI comment from my persona is saying the legal phrasing is too stiff for an opening statement. I'm just struck that people who aren't familiar with AI,

they might think, you know, it's robots, and avatars. It's just a word doc. It is. You're not seeing a picture of me. I'm not talking out loud. Not yet anyway. Still, we wondered is today's worker optimizer not tomorrow's worker replacement. So we've built this model with partner Kim Hurley-he's expertise baked into it. It's not hard to see a future in which the client just goes right to the model, is it? That's hard for me to see. AI cannot take the place of what's a fundamentally human business.

You call your lawyer because you want to look in their eye and say, what should I do about this issue? This sunny picture, it's at odds with the bleak labor predictions many AI executives have been issuing. We may indeed have a serious employment crisis on our hands. It's early, and overall unemployment remains generally steady. But mounting research shows that for the most AI-exposed jobs, take software developers, Hiring has slowed and wages have declined. The impact focused on one group in particular, 20-somethings.

Traditionally, the tasks that you might assign to a young person, maybe doing some market research or creating the first draft of a memo, AI is just really good at doing those now. Until January, Clara Shai was overseeing major AI divisions at Salesforce and then meta. You've seen how powerful this can be. Oh, yeah. I've seen us go from previously requiring dozens of people to conceive of a product, prototype it, build it, to now being able to do that with one or two or three people using AI agents.

Shai was so alarmed by what this meant for the workforce, she quit her plum tech job and founded a nonprofit, helping young people navigate this new economy. And she has emerged as an AI Cassandra. I think AI is going to have a profound impact. on every profession. There are a lot of people whose jobs it is today within companies to prepare information, research, analyze data

for other individuals in that company. And increasingly, although it's starting with the entry level, it could result in a lot of people losing their jobs. And job loss means what does you see it? It's never just about the jobs. It's people's sense of self-worth. It's the fracturing of communities. Shai knows this cycle firsthand.

Her family came to the U.S. from Hong Kong in the 1980s and landed in Ohio, where globalization was hollowing out factories, then neighborhoods. She sees clear parallels. I think what we can learn is that first we have to be honest with people about what the risks are. I think, you know, sugarcoating this AI utopia, maybe we'll get there, but there's a lot of hurt that could happen between now and there. The public is beginning to revolt. Nearly three-fourths of Americans now fear AI is coming for our jobs.

And amid this growing backlash, the big tech firms have been massaging their message. Here's OpenAI Sam Altman in June. But I think our industry underestimated how much we're going to be able to keep people at the center of everything and an economy that is in a world that is based on people. For a time, the AI companies were trumpeting that this product is going to make work obsolete. And now there seems to be a pivot and a change of tune. What do you make of this shift? I think that the AI labs have every incentive to sell what they're doing to the public now.

And I don't think that they actually believe that AI won't hurt jobs. Back at Mercor, typical trainers can be paid anywhere from $20 to $200 an hour. Not bad. We spoke with more than a dozen Mercor trainers, passed in Curran. Some were happy. Many more said that the gig were. comes unpredictably or not at all. No substitute for a full-time job with benefits.

I mean, sometimes you have experts that are twice and three times your age, and they've spent a lot of time in their field, and one thing they've gotten is a level of predictability and stability in their job. And then it seems like the hours are much more erratic here. Yeah, the hours are more erratic, but it's also something that we're very transparent with them about. I mean, it does not sound like stable work. Right now, it generally is more part-time work. is what experts sign up for, but for the high-performing experts, we always make sure that they

have work available. Today, AI training is America's fourth fastest-growing job category on LinkedIn. And just as machinists once replaced artisans, Brendan Foodie insists he's creating a career of the future. Out of work, fear not, come crane AI. Literally all of the top 20 economists in America, they would say the exact same thing, which is that there's going to be more jobs intention. years than there are today.

You're a top economist in America. What say you? No. No, not on our current trajectory. I don't saw how that could happen. What we are living through with AI is unprecedented. The first phase of the Industrial Revolution lasted for 80 years. Today it's taking place in one or two years, and it's taking place across many sectors

at the same time. Doron Osamoglu is a Nobel Prize-winning professor at MIT who studies technology's impact on labor. We were told by a lawyer and also a music producer, there are some things that humans are so fundamental, humans do them, robots can't. Do you buy that? Today, absolutely 100%. You said today? Today. In 15 years' time, what it's going to be capable of doing?

I don't know. But there's going to be this huge sector of work training these AI models. So if you're a law student, you have a hard time finding a job, you can still use your expertise. Here is one thing I'm not uncertain about. What you just described as BS. Why do you say that? Because the number of people they're employing in these positions is small relative to the number of people who will be replaced.

I mean, that's the whole point of automation. Asamoglu says we could see unemployment triple in the next decade if we do nothing and continue on our current course. I am very, very, very cautious in saying we should say no to technology. Absolutely not. But in every technological revolution, there is pushback, and that pushback takes many different forms. He comes with suggestions, designing AI that makes humans better, not expendable, a tax code that incentivizes hiring real people.

But the window is closing, and Asimoglu fears for the stability of society itself. That shouldn't scare the hell out of us. It should, and it should move us into thinking about what we can do because there is a lot we can do. Because the future is so uncertain, because the future is so much subject to our choice and agency, it is all the more important that we have this discussion. Hi, I'm Dr. Mary Claire Haver, a board certified OBGYN and menopause specialist. My new podcast, Unpaused, is the place for bold, unfiltered conversations about what it really takes for women to thrive in the second half of life. Every week, I sit down with medical experts, cultural icons, and powerhouse

women to talk about what really matters. New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen to and follow unpaused with me, Dr. Mary Claire Haver, available now wherever you get your podcasts. Is it possible to be an effective Republican senator in the age of Donald Trump? Someone who makes deals and checks the White House without becoming a political martyr or an ex-Republican. This is the tightrope that Tom Tillis, the senior senator from North Carolina, has been walking for the last two years. He votes like a reliable Republican while talking and maneuvering like a maverick. He's a caustic critic of many administration officials,

all while insisting he just wants to help the president succeed. It's been a fascinating performance, but now Tillis is heading for the exits, at the Sprightly for a senator age of 66, after crossing the White House one too many times. As his party faces a potential midterm wipeout, we talk to him about his Highwire Act, his relationship with President Trump,

and whether it's possible to make the Senate great again. Around here, if you're in motion, you're generally ahead. And if you're not, then you're behind. Keeping up with Tom Tillis on Capitol Hill is not for the faint of heart. He knows the U.S. Capitol inside out. the passageways, staircases, the Capitol subway system,

and miles of underground corridors that connect Senators' offices to the Capitol itself. When reporters manage to interpose themselves, they know they can rely on Tillis for a soundbite. Do you think that senators even understand AI? No, a lot of them can't spell it. They just don't have the experience.

Sometimes those soundbites reflect his beefs with the White House. an escalating series of fights that culminated when Tillis announced he was voting no on the one big beautiful bill. Arguing it would push too many low-income North Carolinians off Medicaid. In response, the president called Tillis a talker and complainer, not a doer. I respect the president. I still feel like we have an odd relationship where I've clearly made him angry. But it took years before he even made the first negative cuts.

comment about me. But I react to anybody on this earth the same way. If you come at me with what I think is unfair or incorrect data, I'm going to come back after you. The president threatened to find a primary challenger to run against Tillis. The senator announced that he would be retiring. Instead of fighting for his seat, Tillis has written an unfiltered, profanity-laced book. The title sounds like it's taking aim at President Trump. It's a little take on Del Carnegie, but it's how to lose friends and antagonize presidents. Any presidents in particular? Well, I mean, the more recent one, but I did a good job of antagonizing Biden and a little bit with Obama back in the day.

But the cover doesn't feature President Trump. Instead, it features unflattering photos of some of Tillis' least favorite administration officials. It should be noted that he voted to confirm all of Trump's cabinet nominees, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegeseth, a vote he now calls his biggest regret. Do you hold him responsible for the struggle in the Iran war? Because you've said that you supported the initial decision to go to war. You know, I think that they got so caught up after the immense success of the first strike that Hegseh probably didn't listen to his best military advice

and say now we should probably move to a different posture. He's calling for Hegeseth to resign. It's not the first time he's gone after big game in Trump's cabinet. Earlier this year, he helped speed Christy Knoem's departure, when the deportation campaign in Minneapolis led to the deaths of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretty, at the hands of federal agents. The fact that you can't admit to a mistake, which looks like under investigation, it's going to prove that Ms. Good and Mr. Petty probably should not have been shot in the fact.

and in the back. I'm not very often that angry, but when I'm angry, I believe there's a reason behind it and people should listen. What were you thinking then? What had gone wrong with her tenure? I was thinking about the $200 million that the Department of Homeland Security was spending on an ad campaign with her riding a horse. I was thinking about her calling people that were shot potentially domestic terrorists

that's proven not to be true. Why do you think the president picked her? I think there are some people that people who are people who are shot, and that's not to be true. There are some people that are in the cabinet because, to use the president's term, they're right out of central casting. I think Nome and Hexeth are probably the poster children for men and women who should never have the authority they've been granted. This is the Tillis Tightrope Walk.

Talk about how much you want President Trump to succeed while heaping blame on his advisors and subordinates. The problem I have with some of the people on the front page of that book and a few others is that they're not looking around. corners for him. Most of the issues that we're dealing with here have less to do with what he wanted to accomplish, but how he went about it. The president and the senator were reared in very different circumstances. Born in 1960 in Jacksonville, Florida, Tillis was one of six kids. He grew up all over the south, moving nearly every year. His father's itinerant life kept the

family, in his words, on the economic bubble. Depending upon the circumstances, We were either in a house that we rent it, sometimes we owned it. And when things got really spicy, we were in a trailer park. Do you think that your background, I don't know, does it make you different from your colleagues? Well, you know what? I tell you what, it's why I probably react so quickly to this concept of we don't have an affordability problem. You always have an affordability problem. There's some segment of our society that always does.

But denying it by definition means you don't recognize the problem. If you don't recognize it, you're not solving it. It's those bread and butter issues that now threaten Republicans with, in his words, an electoral bloodbath in the midterms. But many of his colleagues are still afraid to break with the White House. You say in the book that at least 30 of your Republican colleagues in the Senate expressed reservations about many of the president's actions in private. Why can't, in cases like Hegset, those 30 turn into

five votes against confirmation that gets you a different Secretary of Defense. Okay, there are some that just really do not want to bear... They don't want to bear the way to the president. I get that. You're up for re-election? He'll target you on a primary. And so, look, you know what all martyrs have in common? They're dead. There were probably a few instances where if we'd kind of rip the Band-Aid off early, then I think we'd had a lot better mid-term environment that we're confirmed. front it with now. Tillis was first elected to the Senate in the 2014 midterms, just before Trump and MAGA took over the GOP. What kind of conservative were you at that moment?

The same conservative I am today. Pro-Second Amendment, pro-life, limited government, fiscal restraint. The only difference between me and a lot of people that call themselves true conservatives is I got a long list of things that were ratified and they don't. Hillis's mentor in the Senate was Mitch McConnell. He even named his dog Little Mitch. He was a quick study of parliamentary procedure, vote counting, and calculated risk-taking. At 66, he seems as fit as anyone on the hill

and as competitive, as we found out waiting by the Senate subway tracks. You think you can jump and clear? I think so. I think I could. You want to do it? I'm not in your kind of show. I mean, look at you in it. If you could make it. All right.

If you can't... Oh, okay. Whoa. Oh my gosh. There was no way he could resist. 66. In the second Trump administration, though, there's been too little legislative work

for an energetic senator. Every recent White House, Tillis complains, has been eager to govern by executive order, but Trump 2.0 has been especially imperial. What don't they understand about the Senate? and Congress. That we're a co-equal branch, and they're at our best when they treat us like a peer. But this runs both ways, right?

That they're more likely to treat you as a co-equal branch. If you act like a co-equal branch, do you think the Republican Senate in Trump 2.0 has has acted like a co-equal branch? I think in some cases, yes, and most cases no, and I would say the same thing for a Democrat-controlled Senate under Biden and Obama. Look, we always make the mistake when our guys in all. office of conveying power to the White House, and I've had a real problem with that, because it almost always comes back to bite you.

Another thing that's come back to bite Republican senators, repeatedly, is the president's own words. As much as Tillis trains his fire on Trump's advisors, he also acknowledges what he calls Trump's WTF moments, threatening to seize Greenland, casting himself as Jesus, or Easter-day musings about annihilating Iran. I think he said, Open the Frikes straight. Were you worried

that we were going to start carpet bombing Iranian civilians? No. And I've told the president this before. I think you really need to understand the weight of your words and how literally people take you. But how do you tell the difference

between what people are supposed to take literally and what they aren't? You know, I'd like to think that most of the time the president would be surrounded with people who would finally say, Mr. President, if you do that, I'm walking out this door. There's a Russian expression, if only the czar knew,

which means people don't want to blame the czar when bad things happen. They want to blame his advisors. But in this case, with Trump, it's on him, right? In the end, whoever he has around him, he's the czar. Truman famously said that the buck stops here. It's a good line. I get that. But Truman had great advisors.

This balancing act extends to the events of January 6, 2021. He's still angry in a way that stands out among his Republican colleagues. Look, this was the first time in the history of this country that we had not had a completely peaceful transfer of power on that day. And that was despicable. The people that led the charge, the people that assaulted police officers, I wish they were still in prison. and serving a very long sentence.

But they were there for the president. Yeah, I think so. I found it disgusting. But he wasn't disgusted enough to convict Trump in the impeachment trial. He says it was because the process was rushed and unsanitorial. I read your book and one of your themes was

that senators need leverage. This was a moment when you, as a Republican senator and your colleagues, you had all the leverage over him. You had the power to make sure he wasn't president And again, yeah, but what you're doing is a means justifies the end rationalization. So cheapening the impeachment process to prevent somebody from running in the future, I just don't buy it. We're about to have a midterm election.

Do you have any concerns about how this same president who you've been condemning for January 6th will react if Republicans have a bad night in the midterms? I think there's a risk. I really do. It would be another political, unforced error if we do that. I found actually inspiration. Earlier this year, Tillis used his parliamentary skills to circumvent the Speaker of the House and get a long-promised plaque installed honoring the Capitol Police and other officers

for protecting Congress that day. It's mounted by the door that presidents take to deliver their inaugural addresses and handover power. As we made our way out onto that terrace, Tillis told us he hopes the plaque will be a reminder and a warning. even if the current president seems unchastened. You talk a lot in your book about the risks of authoritarianism. What are you worried about?

The executive branch with its outsized influence, threatening people in primaries, basically degrading their independence or eliminating it altogether. Then we become a one institution country, which is exactly what we fought a revolutionary war over. I mean, we will have a sort of dictator king if we're not careful. It seems like there's a step change where presidents just ignore Congress or don't even try and get things past. Oh, I agree. And all we've seen over the last four administrations is a constant escalation. I want checks and balances.

I want all three branches to have their individual role and continue to check power as they have for 250 years. And I think because we've been such a successful democracy for so long, it's hard for the American people to understand how quickly we could lose. at all. Saturday marked the 800th anniversary of the death of one of Christianity's superstars, St. Francis of Assisi. Every year, millions of visitors flocked to the basilica in Assisi to celebrate the miracles attributed to one of Italy's patron saints. That the church is still standing is a miracle itself. It has survived war, fire, and flood, but nothing left more devastation than a pair of powerful earthquakes that struck in 1997, cratering the roof and leaving

countless art treasures permanently damaged. Now, a team of art historians and software engineers have joined forces with the Franciscan Friars to try to finish the restoration, this time with the help of digital wizardry and artificial intelligence. We had to find out more. Seven centuries ago, the friars knew a good location. when they saw it. What was once a barren hill in Umbria, where criminals swung from gallows, was transformed into this. The Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, the magnificent resting place

of one of Christianity's most beloved saints. Sometimes called the original hippie, Francis rejected his family's wealth for a life of poverty. medieval masters couldn't resist the story of the radical monk and lined up to paint it. But in 1997, the great church almost came crashing down. Two quakes hit one after another. A section of the soaring roof collapsed. A thick mushroom cloud filled with the soot of priceless art rolled down the aisle. Four people were killed by falling rumble.

Everything was destroyed, was unsafe. Really, I remember, I cannot forget it. I saw the arch dancing like this. A big stone arch like this. Yes, yes, yes. I think people cannot believe it, but I saw it. Friar Giulio Cesareo, like Julius Caesar, but with an O, he told us,

was a student here at the time. Earthquakes still scared. still scare him. I am always terrified. If I have the impression that there is something shaking, maybe it's just the wind. Immediately, I feel

sort of cold coming from inside. The damage was a shock for the Italian country. It was a shock that galvanized a desperate salvage operation. Restorers worked to heal the broken bodies

of the Saints. It was painstaking work and not all the pieces fit. Thirty years later, some of the frescoes are still pockmarked, the walls bare. No wonder the friars jumped at the chance to use 21st century technologies to restore their 13th century home. Right now we are digitizing in a super high definition this fresco, which is St. Francis' talking to the arts chapter. Giovanni Borelli is leading the project to create a digital twin of the Basilica. Borelli is the CTO of Halta de Finisione, a technology company that specializes in ultra-high-definity

photography. This is no ordinary camera to take it. No, it's not. It's a robotic camera that we use to take a super high-definition images. so you can see all the smallest details of the work of art, the strokes of the painting of the brush. You can see everything that's great detail. What is a gigapixel?

You know, you have a mobile camera. It's about 50 megapixels. We are three order of magnitude above. They are in billion pixels. Wow. So you, with your camera and the pictures, can see things that the human eye cannot? Yeah.

Using cameras, drones, and lasers, Borelli's team will take hundreds of thousands of pictures, stitching them together to create the most high-resolution 3D blueprint of a building ever made. If disaster strikes this earthquake zone again, restorers will have an exact roadmap to rebuild. Are you photographers or are you computer experts? both. For Sergio Fusetti, a survivor of the 1997 quakes and chief restorer, those words are bittersweet. For him, high-tech help arrived too late. He asked us to follow him down a narrow passageway to the hidden storage rooms beneath the

church. The lock was rusted. No one had been here in months. Then another dusty hallway, another lock. Until finally, Fusetti showed us why we were here. A rare look at more than 80,000 fragments from the 1997 quakes, all neatly catalogued and in purgatory. You have no idea where these go?

No. No, he said. We have tried everything. He showed us some of the larger pieces still stored in a box. So it's like a jigsaw puzzle? Exactly, he said. Fusetti told us he'd toiled for years trying to finish the job, but despite his best efforts, he's left with a heap of plastered chips,

each an irreplaceable part of a 13th century masterpiece. When you are able to fit a piece back where it belongs, where it belongs. Does it feel like a restoration or does it feel like a resurrection? It was an ongoing gamble, he told us. Sometimes you work all day and place just one fragment. But sometimes we found the pieces and it was deeply satisfying. Fussetti says he's gone as far as humanly possible.

Here can help only the intelligence artificial. Only artificial intelligence can help us now, he told us. Upstairs, the digital cavalry was galloping on. Giovanni Borrelli told us he plans on using AI to fit together the leftover chips and to tackle other problems. Like cracks in the paintings, discoloration, layers of paint, lifting, That kind of analysis done by hand and with the eyes of a physical person would require years to just do one round of the whole building.

And with AI? With AI minutes. But Borrelli has more in mind than just preserving the Basilica. The company hopes to use AI to make art more accessible, starting by making a trip to the museum more like the movies. Coming down. The same technology is being used to open up Italy's hidden treasures. One day last June, we descended 60 feet beneath the streets of Rome.

It's a very, very beautiful. This is amazing. From 200 AD. Under an ordinary parking lot was something extraordinary, the remains of thermal baths built by a Roman emperor. So you bring high-tech to the ancient world. Yeah, exactly. A laser scanner captured details of rooms

with 30-foot ceilings and delicate mosaics. These ultra-high-definition cameras have revealed hidden chambers and passageways forgotten by history. And then there's time travel. Press crown to select. Okay. You got the menu, huh?

Yeah. We ended up in ancient Pompeii at a party. Looks like they're having fun at this party. The wine is flowing. With virtual reality goggles, visitors can look their ancient hosts in the eye. Somebody's playing the pipes. Somebody else is playing a harp. People getting drunk.

Borelli hopes to use VR headsets to allow users to step inside some of Italy's most famous paintings. What a room. It's like you want to step outside into the garden. This is one grand dining room, I'll tell you. Ah, that was fantastic. I'm back again. Nice trip to ancient Pompeii. When I founded one of the companies that built this kind of technology, I was a software engineer pretty new to the art world.

And the main question that I was focused on is a kind of philosophical one. How good can the digital representation of a physical object be? What is missing? So it sounds like you're trying to put the soul into the technology. Yeah, yeah. You can see that. Yeah, it's nice.

Borrelli admits the technology can't duplicate the emotional impact of standing in front of a work of art. Not yet. But strapping on VR goggles could make lessons like this a thing of the past. There are scenes with people sitting listening to sermons. You could actually enter that group? Yeah, why not?

You can have a walk around, even fly around. Why be stuck to the ground? You can walk on the ceiling and see how the stars feels under your feet. you can run, let your fantasy run wild. I can imagine this would have made me a much better student. Me too. As the sun set on another azure sky and Assisi,

we followed in the sandaled steps of the friars who've walked these halls for centuries. We wanted to ask friar Giulio Cesareo if he had any qualms about using artificial intelligence as a custodian for the legacy of St. Francis. The biggest benefit for me is not the technology for itself. The technology is not a purpose. It's a tool.

It's a tool to reach the goal. The goal is sharing this treasure, which is a treasure of faith and beauty. Technology helps us to go farther away, to reach more people than we could before. And in a more efficient way. The Basilica's digital twin will be complete next year and available to the public. The friars told us they are hoping it will turbo boost the spirit of St. Francis, both in the heavens and the cloud. The Last Minute of 60 Minutes is sponsored by United Health Care Medicare Plans,

a Medicare experience designed for what's next. I'm Gianna Toboni, one of the new contributors at 60 Minutes. Over my career, I've interviewed hackers in Russia, ISIS fighters in Iraq, and a cartel hitman in Mexico. I once asked my son what he thought I did for work. He said, I think you're like a police officer who writes books because you go to jails a lot? Not quite, but a good guess. My work is hard to explain to my kids because their world is full of good guys and bad guys. Everything is black and white.

But no story is that simple. One issue I've covered for a decade is the death penalty, which made headlines this past week with Krista Pike in Tennessee. Three decades ago, she tortured and killed a teenage girl and was sentenced to death. On Wednesday, two doses of lethal injection failed to kill her. How much compassion do we owe people who commit the most horrific crimes? What is cruel and unusual punishment? There isn't always an easy answer. And it's these stories I'm most drawn to, the ones that challenge us to hear and understand the other side.

You'll see us take up that task here each Sunday. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. I've always planned on dark times. On October 16th, Sylvester Stallone returns. It's a dirty business and everyone gets a little state. In the Paramount Plus hit series, Tulsa King. I want you to listen up. I'm not ready to fall.

When everything's on the line, the king doesn't back down. You can't get rid of me. Tulsa King, new season streaming October 16th, only on Paramo Plus.