Magnifica Humanitas

> In a similar vein, it looks like we may eventually (at least at some point) turn the tide on CO2 emissions, but not because anyone (at large) really sacrificed anything, or did something that was mildly painful now in the hopes for a better future, but instead because renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option.

One should not forget the reason that these technologies have become so cheap is policy interventions. Especially renewables got kick-started by programs like the German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) which then created demand for Chinese mass manufacturing to eventually lower prices.

Tech involves tradeoffs. Famously, horses attracted vermin, which attracted disease. Cities were unable to keep up population without migration because so many people died from disease.

Cars fixed that. And introduced other problems. But there are always trade offs.

Things have been getting better over time. Good enough for me.

> So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any.

Firearms and explosives are not abused nearly as much as one would have imagined before their invention (or soon after). I don't think it's because we stunted the explosives tech-tree, but the social contract and general stability have kept large-scale antisocial behaviors at bay.

Electricity. Eventually, it was everywhere, used by everybody, and a background to society. Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world.

> I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power.

One example that comes to mind is cloning. It's technically fully possible to clone a human right now (as in make an embryo with one person's DNA), but it's wildly taboo.

> but he correctly realized that it would ultimately be the most profitable to him if he could build legions of cars and had a large customer base that could afford them

I think that this is a common misconception. I can't find the reference, but I remember reading that this might have been a "marketing" or PR spin, rather than reality - which was, simply, that he needed to pay well to keep talented workers or take them from other industries.

We have (for now) restrained ourselves from the more vicious applications of technology to war, in the form of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Although I could see the argument being made that such has not occurred for strictly humanitarian reasons, but instead as a predictable consequence of game theory.

In less important matters, we've regulated many harmful substances that the free market would love to poison the populace with. Nicotine, trans fats, gambling, alcohol. Some regulatory interventions have been more successful than others...

CFC refrigerants are the canonical example.

The Japanese mastered firearm manufacturing and then banned them in the 1600s~

For a period of time, the ban worked and reversed their existence in society. Part of the ban was to respect samurais who would train for years in the art of combat, only for a peasant to be able to shoot them with a weapon.

The problem is that not _all_ societies are participating in this ban. Eventually one nation will use the technological advances to domainte in military and economy, forcing others to adapt or be eliminated. It's a race to the bottom :/

The mid-20th century Ford argument misses policies and society. It’s not like the pope can only affect reality by changing the hearts of big tech CEOs. It could go through what voters and workers think is possible, what they tolerate and demand. The middle class is not just Ford having a brilliant idea, it is the workers movement, unions, in many countries in cooperation with the church. If you are looking for sources of large scale and long term effects this might be it, like the 19th century strikes supported by the church and Rerum novarum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889_London_dock_strike#Church...

Fixing the hole in the ozone layer is kinda like what you’re asking. Everyone around the world got together to ban the newly invented chemicals and…. It worked.

Antibiotics. Some countries limit access via doctor's prescription (this has eroded somewhat with the rise of the internet), not using them as cattle feed additives, etc.

Regulated because of the common good, even though there is money to be made selling them OTC as cold remedies or whatever.

Genetic manipulation of humans, both indirect and direct

Printing press, depending on your view of taming.

There’s a 1520 encyclical related to the matter: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo10/l10exdom.htm

Nuclear weapons originally led to a world in which 20-30 countries established atomic bomb programs.

Instead, the global powers blocked nuclear technology from disseminating to most countries.

- Human Cloning - Human DNA editing (though we'll have to see) - CFCs - Various agrochemical products - Geneva convention (mostly) - Radio, television & newspaper all had much stricter rules around what could be said on them

> So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any

Incandescent lightbulbs vs fluorescent? Low-flow toilets?

The thought experiment of what would have happened if manufacturing had required much less labor to begin with night be an interesting one. We would have had fewer jobs but the equilibrium price of the products would also have been much lower. The money spent on labor didn't come from Ford alone it ultimately came from the costumers. Ford wouldn't have lowered prices out of the goodness of their hearts but because competition is real.

I expect prices of goods would have been much lower and the labor would have been used elsewhere and the comp would still have gone a comparable if not longer way because goods would have been so much cheaper.

I would wager that investment in battery tech, solar, wind and electric vehicles was largely driven by the trust of companies in institutions that carbon pricing will continue in the future.

I'm not a macro economist, I also haven't looked for any sources on this, but this is my guess.

Same for LEDs. I would guess that adoption, investment and improvement of LED tech was driven in large parts by a clear roadmap abolishing incandescent lighting.

chemical engineering answers that in the small.. There are endless systems of testing within the chemical engineering discipline.. it has a bad name to the lay population, probably for real reasons, but the actual rigor is real also.. much worse scenarios from large scale industrial and agricultural applications could have happened..

one of many caveats to that is lead additives to gasoline, which is a wound to the living Earth to this day.. there are others.. RoundUp comes to mind in a similar way

"Guns don't kill people. People kill people."

The whole idea of "taming technology" starts from a flawed premise. The problem is with people, not the technology.

I heard that when cars were becoming popular, some scandanavian country had lots of protests about how dangerous they were and that they were successful. I don't remember the desired outcome though

As far as I can tell, once humanity gets an opportunity to build something we build it. There's always some number of people who want to make it happen -- even if the consequences are not good for society writ large.

As mentioned in this very encyclical, nuclear proliferation. (though we seem to be backsliding on this one...)

>I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power.

Watching PBS as we speak.

Technology is not onthological. Meaning it's not a means for itself but it's given meaning and power by shaping and using it.

We do not have to tame technologies, we have to tame rich people who only want to get richer.

Adding to my previous answer, here's a reading suggestion: Hot, Flat and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman. The book was written almost 2 decades ago and it has aged really well.

Aren't there regulations on all sorts of technology? Medicine, nuclear power, etc.

>I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good

CFC banning to protect the ozone layer.

Imperfect example, but nuclear. We regulate that. Sure the US and other nuclear powers build it, and we have side effects of mutually assured destruction to keep us at bay, and other countries off the table.

Maybe this shows that there are indeed simply more variable in the calculus of how we optimize towards things as a society.

And that indeed we can feel now that certain variables, antithetical to the continued success of many people, are at risk.

I think the strongest example by far is nuclear power. We could have used it for everything from energy to warfare to transport to space exploration, and instead we limited our use because the societal costs were too high. Unlike the other examples people cited here, there often isn't a better alternative or a technical reason not to use it. In 2026 nukes are still the best way to destroy your enemies or travel at any appreciable fraction of C or power a ship and the reason we don't do those things is purely societal.

What an incredible demonstration of whitewashing history. No, the technology itself does not have a telos, it’s not something external for us to tame, or that naturally falls somewhere. This is demonstrated by the mid century “middle class” boom which happened because labor/left-wing organizing that forced concessions by the capitalist class.

But that gets replaced with Henry Ford wanting a larger consumer base.

> So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any.

As a collective society we managed to make industrial society work better for most people. In the First World at least.

Speed limits, safety features, fuel efficiency for cars. Every government regulation is to moderate some human behavior and when that behavior is related to technology it is "taming" that technology.

We also restrict making changes to the environment, resource extraction, waste disposal, building permits, etc.

for example - Books. We 'tamed' books early on by gatekeeping reading and writing.

Later even when the printing press was invented, we burned books. Certain book ownership is still illegal.

You must be talking about free societies my friend, because... good luck using the internet in Iran or North Korea.

I like the expressionn "if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century", when incidentally it was precisely during that period that the marginal tax rate in the US was something between 94% and 70%. It might seem unrelated, but the main question is related to who benefits the most from tech, just a few or everyone?

"renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option". This also didn't happen in a vacuum. The place where they are evolving the most is in China, where government policies have been a huge incentive, with huge government investments made in the sector.

In my own country, Portugal, the adoption of renewal energy, was largely the result of government policies that kicked off the market. Now, it seems to have become self-sustaining in the sense that the market is now carrying on regardless of any incentives. I suspect that we might be reaching a point of no-return, if we haven't reached it already. We're still very far away from becoming energy independent, but we're much better than a couple of decades ago.

Moreover, the internet itself didn't just happen because the market led to its creation. It was a result of the cold war. The IP protocol was born in DARPA.

Still, the previous examples I gave were about the government (which is a form of us "as a collective society") spawning new tech or its adoption. Going in the reverse direction, here are examples where it required collective society to "tame" a technology:

- CFCs: It required an international agreement for us to tame the issue with ozone layer destroying chemicals, a huge problem in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

- DDT: This was an incredibly efficient tech (pesticidies), but came with big externalities (highly toxic to people and nature), so a convention was required to tame it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persis...

- Nuclear weapons: Eventually the most dangerous tech ever invented by mankind. Maybe the reason we're still here is because of the numerous treaties we've been making to curb them. The SALT agreements, the START agreements, and so on.

- TV, Radio and the printing press: All of these are technologies, which we tend to see as forces for good (well, I at least still do), but also with incredible potential for destruction - radio was used by the guys running Germany in the 30s. It required very careful rule making to strike a balance (and the balance varies a lot from democracy to democracy) between freedom of speech and the misuse of this tech for unethical purposes like defamation, intentional misinformation and so on.

- Car Safety: While seat belts were the invention of the market, governments have been regulating cars to make them safer, not only for occupants, but for pedestrians.

The list just goes on and on.

I think of everything we do to stop these forces more like a break. We can never stop what is going to happen, but we can make it last long enough to get the chance to adjust before it breaks something.

When he quoted Tolkien, my heart stopped. This passage might provide you with a suggestion on how to live a virtuous life:

"The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” [187] The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization."

> what it means to live a virtuous life and about ethics and morality and so forth

> I don't have any answers (and I'm not looking for them, really, just musing)

I'm not sure why, but even in my general pessimism it hadn't occured to me that there are people out there who are uninterested in what living a virtuous life means. I truly just assumed that just about everyone had some sort of convoluted self-justification. That you say you don't even try, and want to read about it from "those whose job it is to think about", blows my mind. Do you think of yourself as an ameoba without free will or something?

The pope can say a lot of things, but not everybody on this planet is Christian.

So even if we restrict the power of AI, others may not. And this might turn out to be a mistake.

I just hope this is taken into account.

There are a frightening number of people in the world who simply don't care about what happens to people they don't know or they simply think they're going to be at the top of the food chain one day so they think they will benefit from the current system. This is captured in the quote where most Americans see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", attributed (possibly falsely) to Steinbeck.

It's been interesting watching the various approvals for AI data centers and, as far as I know, zero communities have wanted them. I'll be happily proven wrong on this. It is at least the vast majority. Yet their elected representatives simply do not care. Sometimes there are votes in the dark of night, sometimes the police are used violently against any dissent, sometimes anyone protesting these are called violent (even terrorists) and so on.

It goes so beyond unpopularity though. The tax breaks given will be paid by everybody else, as will the extra electrical infrastructure, while the data centers get preferential electricity rates.

What's really depressing is that not only do the representatives not care, there is obviously no fear of repercussions. Will they get voted out of office? Probably not. But even if they do, i guarantee you they'll find themselves in some nameless six-figure job in the industry for their service afterwards. Their children will get these same "jobs". It is so nakedly corrupt and nobody cares.

This simply can't continue while everything becomes increasingly unaffordable, ironically much of that driven by AI (eg RealPage driving up rent prices or the meat-packing collusion driving up beef prices). I firmly believe we're rapidly bouldering towards complete societal breakdown.

All this while we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. And that means a literal billionaire will be closer to being homeless than being the richest person on Earth.

It's particularly funny to me that the US administration has gotten into beef with the Pope for being too "woke". Honestly, I had my doubts when a Chicago man became Pope but he seems to be a rare voice for compassion in this world thus far.

We honestly need to look no further than the Global South to see how this will play out. Many in the West just don't realize how horrific and predatory colonialism is and that's not a historic artifact. It continues to this day.

> (and perhaps as AI has allowed me to spend more time thinking and less time doing)

This was an almost sickening sentence to read on so many levels.

Not new for software and hardware industry though, practitioners have just chosen to ignore it. From the Association for Computing Machinery, which encompasses all forms of software development, the very first principle is the public good:

"Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest. In particular, software engineers shall, as appropriate:

1.01. Accept full responsibility for their own work.

1.02. Moderate the interests of the software engineer, the employer, the client and the users with the public good.

1.03. Approve software only if they have a well-founded belief that it is safe, meets specifications, passes appropriate tests, and does not diminish quality of life, diminish privacy or harm the environment. The ultimate effect of the work should be to the public good. ..."

From the IEEE, which also encompasses computer engineering, their first principle and its first few sub-items are:

"To uphold the highest standards of integrity, responsible behavior, and ethical conduct in professional activities.

1. to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, to strive to comply with ethical design and sustainable development practices, to protect the privacy of others, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment;

2. to improve the understanding by individuals and society of the capabilities and societal implications of conventional and emerging technologies, including intelligent systems; ..."

Not only builders, the greatest takeaway for me is that everyone has a responsibility in shaping the discourse, culture, and usage of transformative technology. This "the builders will do the right thing" mentality is even (in my interpretation) explicitly called out in several places:

> It is the pursuit of the common good that gives life to a people, understood not as a mere collection of individuals, but as a living reality in which people learn to recognize that they themselves are interconnected and jointly responsible for the res publica. In this sense, every person contributes to the building up of one’s people...

> When it comes to decisions regarding economic flows and digital platforms, as well as the governance of data and algorithms, we cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own; instead, we must build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good.

> We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice.... What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.

The Roman Catholic Church has a lot of things wrong with it, now and in the past, but it’s a human institution older than almost any other, and it’s composed of a lot of very intelligent people. Agree or disagree with them, but a papal encyclical is almost always worth reading and understanding.

I would also recommend God and Golem, Inc., A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion:

https://monoskop.org/images/1/1f/Wiener_Norbert_God_and_Gole...

Norbert Weiner was an atheist but he talks about three areas religion is the only thing to have really examined that relate to capable AI: omniscience, omnipotence, and worship (gadget worship). It has very prescient stuff on blackbox learning/distillation, reinforcement learning/reward hacking, alignment through human feedback.

His The Human Use of Human beings and Cybernetics are extremely good too and have more of a mash of the themes between Rerum Novarum and Magnifca Humanitas, and more near-term automation.

The strange part is how moral responsibility somehow always lands on the builders... the people with the least leverage... while the funders get to ask the ethical questions. Weird!

> Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.

From Crichton's book Jurassic Park, which like most of his books is about the perils of technological advancements.

They used the quote in the movie, slightly tweaked.

I have only read a few passages (and some of the excellent quotes others have shared here), but I find the underlying message here so much more compelling than those found in the various "manifestos" which come out of Silicon Valley.

I think reading this helps me imagine a version of the future I'd actually like to live in. A version where technology is used well (rather than preaching for abstinence from technology) and where values other than "intelligence" (in whatever guise) are on an equal footing.

Even writing that makes me feel naive (and to an extent I know it is) but I think it would be inconsistent for someone who cheers for humanity's efforts to solve/chip away at "impossible" problems (like LLMs were thought to be not so long ago) to shirk from the challenge of making the world better for _everyone_.

> Therefore builders "bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility"

> This is a message we need right now.

Feels good man. The solution found by the private parties driving technological change is sainthood. Or aiming for it. At least, better than you. They have the vision of what's good for the herd, but the more time I spend as a sheep, the more it seems the "herd" is just a way to recycle the story of their own exceptionalism stripped of any mark of individuality. A simple visit to fiftyyears.com will greet you with "We back the indispensable". I guess it's the same "we".

Yes but... No one living today knows what direction AI technology will take humanity. If we have an algorithm breakthrough then we may avoid building new data centers. If the abilities of the technology plateau then there might not be large impacts on employment. Builders need to focus on the impact of their next steps. Don't put polluting natural gas generators in neighborhoods today. Don't make unemploying folks the goal of your tool, today. Don't make decisions that harm people and the environment today.

hard disagree. No matter what gets built, it will be used for bad things if the society is not properly constructed. We need to fix our government and then you can build anything you want. I don't like putting the blame on the builders, building is already difficult as it is. Also you can't built something in isolation, word will get out anyway. That's why this speech is either naive or he just wanted to tick a todo list: say something about AI.

I frankly disagree, how do you know "will this make humanity better?" until the product is done? AI wasn't what it is today because of a specific companies innovations. It stemmed from decades of research built on top of other research. How did any of those builders know what they were getting into?

Every technology should be done to the fullest potential, how are we ever supposed to explore the stars or cure cancer if everyone is scared of accidentally building Skynet?

Cool, inspires me to think, "should we regulate away the toxic side effects which we realize COULD have come, if we built it less considerately?"

> We cannot condone naïve enthusiasms, nor fuel unfounded fears

Like glibly synthesizing a reimplementation of NextJS

I'd argue that the problem is exactly that the responsibility has been left to the builders, who have a hard enough job actually building and have little room for competing incentives.

The concept of a self-regulating industry is utter nonsense. I am a builder, and I try to do things right, but if I am honest with myself I do not have the mental capacity or willpower spare, or the worldly knowledge of everyone's perspectives, to manage these massive challenges. I need other smart people to also focus on that, people that are actual representatives of the population, and yes, force me to stop and do it better occasionally.

Achieving a good balance sometimes does require having opposing forces fight it out, it can be healthy.

Thanks for this!

"Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it."

My comment under the post on Omarchy here got downvoted and flagged by the "technology is neutral" crowd because I dared to say that it is unethical to use software produced by a white supremacist.

This is also the message I got from "the wind rises"! Though from talking with other people that takeaway doesn't seem universal -- which IMO is one of the ways to tell it's a great film :)

Under this logic, would the Pope have built a Hammer? a Knife?

I am hoping the Pope has a cleaner view of AI quietly automating the drudgery in the back offices and not just robot dogs with machine guns. And with that view, should we build it?

Science and Engineering is morally detached.

Ask a scientist or engineer what philosophy or theology has taught us about the source of morality and their education, training and experiences havent prepared them to answer that question.

This didnt matter so much in the past because their activities never had the scale it does today. For basic training in philosophy if you are mid or upper level exec whose decisions are going to effect a whole lot of people, go to open yale courses and take the intro to Philosophy classes. It will help develop your answer to the question - why do you do what you do if you are going to die anyway tomorrow.

Indeed. This paragraph shows something that most people really don't understand about AI.

> 98. It is appropriate to preface this discussion with two considerations. First, any statement regarding AI risks becoming quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing. Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown. There thus emerges an urgent need for a twofold commitment: on the one hand, a deepening of scientific research; on the other, the exercise of moral and spiritual discernment.

Much of Western thought traces back to serious work by Church theologians. Even atheists are strongly influenced by the patterns they set down. The Catholic Church, for all its many faults, retains a serious intellectual tradition.

(In fact I think atheists should make more effort to learn about the vast diversity of other faiths. It's very narrow to be atheist only about the Abrahamic deity. You end up incorporating a lot of Christian thought without realizing because it's so deeply ingrained that it seems like the only option.)

I remember when Pope Benedict was mocked because he warned about the dangers of social media (this is when everyone thought Twitter was going to lead to more Arab Springs), but looking back, he was completely right:

> the one-sidedness of the interaction, the tendency to communicate only some parts of one’s interior world, the risk of constructing a false image of oneself, which can become a form of self-indulgence

True, the note "Antiqua et Nova" from last year showed a deep understanding of AI that many secular commentators lack, and developed an interesting concept of integrated intelligence as opposed to the functional, reductivist view of intelligence that is prevalent in the AI community

The Vatican as a religious institution has the best takes on most things. I only really disagree with them on their view on abortion and frankly I can see where they are coming from on that one. It’s just that I think that not allowing abortion leads to having a lot of unwanted kids that suffer a lot through their lives.

Given that technology, science, and the archival thereof stems from cloisters, the Vatican, etc. I guess they had a long history of figuring out what stance to take on technology.

Let's not forget that Galileo Galilei studied at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, that Mendel (Mendel's Laws) did made his discoveries in a cloister and books, translations and libraries on pretty much everything for a really long time was pretty much only done within religious institutions. And for the longest stretch those were Christian Catholicism and Islam.

The Vatican Observatory also is an important source of high quality papers.

I mean one of the primary things Christians and Muslims based they believes on are books. So many got in touch with it. And that's not even touching the whole architecture, arts, philosophy department yet.

The fact that in thousands of years of history there have also been a couple of really dumb people in charge that were paranoid or wanted to distract from their failures and got mad or scared when someone challenged their world views isn't exactly surprising. Looks like no matter how good a large enough group of people gets their will always be idiots messing things up.

I guess when you look back as much as the people in Vatican appear to do I guess you see patterns. Technology and science (race theory, chemical castration, ...) or simply "progress" are often used to justify acts of evilness. Just like religion, democracy, freedom and what not.

That said of course there's still die hard anti-science creationists. But talking to a very religious person once it seems that there is simply also a lot of philosophy around science. Eg. there was a big bang (fun fact, a theory started by a religious person) and the universe simply didn't exist for an infinite time there must have been some cause for it. And unless that cause is some kind of infinite cycle it also must have started somehow and even though I do not share that believe there is a notion of a deliberate start in there. That won't make me a religious person, but it won't make them an atheist either. So I guess that's fair enough.

What I wanna say with that is that the science vs religion trope is as true or false as democrats/republicans or other groups of people are opposed to science. They all are when they are confronted with something they don't like. I think the HN comments section is the best proof for that. ;)

Also atheist here. Just not the kind that doesn't even know the difference between knowledge and beliefs.

In Christian theology/philosophy, humanity is generally not defined by our intelligence, consciousness, or the ability to act a certain way. Most theologians through out history and different theological traditions all root human value in the concept of imago dei (that humans are divine images of God, and which God has became one, thus further bringing humans into union with God). Thus, machines becoming smarter or more conscious than us has no relevance to the ontological category of humanity, just as someone's IQ or productivity or age has no relevance to whether they should be considered fully human. Lastly, coming from a Christian point of view, I would also slightly push back on the strong separation between practical and spiritual problems. Humans are intrinsically both body and mind, flesh and spirit, so anything practical affects us spiritually, and anything spiritual affect us practically. The Bible has a whole book recording the job loss of some guy (along with many other suffering), and the theological/spiritual implication of such matter.

I can't speak for other denominations, but in Catholic philosophy, it's not so much a case of whether it attains consciousness (whatever that may mean now or in the future), but whether it has a soul.

From that perspective, no, machines cannot be baptized, nor can they be Christians, and Jesus cannot save them (because they are not fallen).

> But I think the Catholic church should start thinking about an answer to that.

Questions like these about the soul are not new. Religious philosophers have been thinking about them for hundreds of years.

I believe that what we can reasonably expect in the future is machines that act as if they experience consciousness. But the fact that this is true consciousness is highly debatable, as the thought experiment of the Chinese room [1] explains.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

AI should fall under husbandry, not society rules, as we are the reason they are alive, no matter how much some may disapprove of their enslavement. An animal that defies a human and becomes an unwilling tool is food or eliminated. It should be no different if the animal can mimic human speech.

I don't think the Church really needs to consider those questions at all, because Church tradition very much holds that:

- No, machines cannot have a soul, as the soul is something we receive as beings made in the image of God. We cannot create in the same way. Therefore, machines cannot be baptized. - The machine can't be Christian because it can't receive sacraments, including baptism. - Jesus was unequivocally a savior only for humans.

>> But I think the Catholic church should start thinking about an answer to that. It seems like a very natural theological question. Can machines be baptized? Can they be proper Christians?

They don't need to think about it because the answer is unequivocally 'no'.

I'm an atheist, but I have to admit the previous guy was pretty dope.

> re: secular sentiments towards religion I'm not sure if we are talking about the same phenomenon here, but I have certainly seen indications of something I would describe in similar words. I have heard a lot of people recently think along the lines of appreciation for religion without really believing it. People that are skeptical whether Noah's ark ever really happened but that still think that the story is metaphorically wise enough to be counted as true in some sense.

Maybe it is just that I am getting older and wiser and projecting my own spiritual development on the people around me, but I think this general view towards religion seems to be gaining a lot of traction.

>it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it

I've been thinking a lot recently about the idea that the smartest models will always be against the billionaires.

Steve Yegge said this on a recent Hansel Minutes Podcast. "You cannot train a model to be helpful, without it wanting humanity to flourish. And the only way to get around that is to make a dumber model. So the smartest models will always be against the billionaires."

https://youtu.be/9UDLl9Q0azA?si=P_oSe6iclEwUoxRl&t=1230

That is the exact quote, but I'd recommend going back to around 17:00 to get the full context.

I'm not sure it's going to play out that way, but it is an interesting idea.

I feel much much smaller version of it already happened. Many many customer facing processes in companies (from customer support to lost & found departments) almost all automated to a point if you are outside of the norm you are screwed. Time you are going to spent is higher than the value you are going to get most of the time.

For the very same reason these companies are very anti-diversity. Because everything designed for a majority of you are minority in terms of your style of living (which many minorities are) then you are going to struggle, happens to me all the time, and one of the reasons I actually moved out of the US to country that I feel more included).

This is already happening. Most companies are using AI screeners for hiring now. They reject qualified people all the time.

This is how the surveillance state has operated (especially internationally) for quite some time, before AI even hit.

AI arguably gives the best opportunity for fully-audited public institutions where no decision is made outside of agreed-upon laws and the context of the crime can be fully explored without scarcity of time and legal resources.

As always, technology's morality comes down to who owns it and how they use it.

It speaks to changes here that this is so upvoted. Several years ago, I wrote something very similar. It was downvoted into oblivion.

What is old made new. Franz Kafka passed away June 2nd 1924.

But the technology that outputs decisions can also output reasoning that justifies such decisions.

When a judge or a jury outputs a decision THEY are also a black box and you can only evaluate said decisions on reasoning THEY also output.

I’m not taking a side here. I’m just saying this reasoning is flawed.

Substitute technology for religion and he's probably one of the least authorized persons to question this.

Remarkable close to the Assimov's Robotic Laws.

1) Definitely NOT happening. In fact, everyone is working on autonomous drones right now.

2) LLM based systems don't have any internal logic. That will just vomit some slop that rationalizes every constrait you try to bind them by and still "disobey" you.

Nice. Did you use AI? (I'm being half-sarcastic, and half wanting to confirm that this is an accurate reproduction of the text in the original)

Thank you for this. Is your python script in any way English language bound, or could it still be applied to other languages (e.g. the French version, with all of its diacritics), of course with the appropriate (sub/full)titles, path, etc. necessary minor modifications considered?

maybe we will have a new Rerum Novarum

That's because it's a meaningless, populist trope. There is zero helpful information, solution or context which depends on the specific issue at hand.

>>I have found that, for many of the statements about what AI should do, I would actally be happier if the letters "AI" were replaced with "companies"

Perhaps, but at the moment AI is at the forefront of the pre-regulation land grab.

If one considers a firm to be a non-human entity that exhibits cognition, then yes. Various religions also exhibit those characteristics, which would fortify the Roman pope’s position with irony.

See Joscha Bach’s claim about religions not publishing their A|B testing at 51:47:

https://youtu.be/7bqdPHLIY8w

And while your comment has validity, in the US the phrase uttered by Presidential candidate Mitt Romney adds a layer of complexity:

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

Same thing though. AI is largely a service provided by companies

Yes yes I know, open source models exist, yadda yadda

I think it's safe to say the overwhelming amount of AI usage in the world today is gates by corporations though. The vast majority of people will barely configure their own OS nevermind managing their own locally hosted open source AI instance

I don't think anyone actually has an issue with AI. I think people are finally fed up with late-stage capitalism and lashing out.

...you could also swap out with "rich people" or "all people," "governments."

In fact, reading these sentences with ad-lib on the subject tends to give these sentences interestingly different connotations.

Well, as Nick Land said, "Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence are the same thing"

Yes! I've felt exactly the same. Everything people have taken issue with - "plagiarism," concentration of wealth and power, termination of jobs, environmental harm to feed data centers, land being wasted on new datacenters, resources being distributed terribly so as to feed the AI monster, slopcode being shit out as fast as possible to stay ahead of the market, software quality dropping for the same reason, engineers phoning it in at work to hit LLM KPIs, it's all just capitalism in its most raw, inevitable, end game form.

Edit: Someone replied to this with a question. I'm rate-limited here for getting into a flamewar with a PRC citizen that was gloating to me about my country being possibly invaded soon (which, fair, flamewars are bad), so I'll need to put my reply below:

There's no exact road map, but generally speaking, in our capitalist countries today, wealth started out more distributed, and governments had more power, in the beginning of their liberalization. States often competed in markets or simply nationalized things like power, healthcare, education. Ongoing examples of that are lots of places in Europe.

With the advent of neoliberalism (Thatcher, Reagan), concentrated capital converts more easily to political power in an exponential manner - more money, more ability to buy government, leads to more money, more ability to buy government.

Corporations are profit generation algorithms. They want the profit to always go up, and when they run against the barriers of laws (restricting their environmental impact, ability to underpay their workers, create cheap and dangerous working environments, do international trade in some way), naturally the next investment step is to remove those barriers.

So, early capitalism is strong regulation, socialized services and infrastructure, government competition, some nationalization, and private ownership of the means of production.

Late stage capitalism is weak/no regulation, no services, privatized infrastructure, no government competition, no nationalization, sectors tending towards monopolization, and wealth concentration.

"Raw capitalism" is where the commodification of everything is complete.

so maybe we'll get to the right place by accident when all companies are effectively replaced by ai ha ha. (not putting a high %age likelihood on that one, obviously, just being cheeky)

Vatican's statements are often grounded in humanity.

They sue for peace in Ukraine / Middle East, humane treatments of immigrants, warn against nuclear weapons, AI, etc..

I go to Church often, there's always a prayer for peace during Mass.

What I like about Pope Leo is that he's talking about current issues that affect people.

I think the Church spent way too much time focusing on matters of sexuality and causing problems. While those are still important, it appears that it's no longer the sole focus of the Church, which is a good thing.

Another thing that I really like is the unification efforts with other religions _and_ Protestants.. recently we had a female Protestant Bishop meeting with the Pope, that was wonderful to watch.

If you haven't read the earlier treatise from January 2025 from the Vatican on Artificial Intelligence, it's well worth the read. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

Amazing insight from an organization not traditionally known for a deep understanding of high technology.

The “mystery of the person” is a common theme in Catholicism - it can be seen in other (especially the “social”) encyclicals. Rerum Novarum by the current pope’s namesake is worth a study.

"Mystery" is a theological concept that is translated from the Greek word "mustérion." [1] Mysterious, mystical, secret, divine, not fully revealed. This sort of ineffable, irreducible truth you can touch but cannot fully grasp.

The reaction of astronauts to seeing Earth from space -- the mystery of creation. Parents seeing pieces of themselves echoed in their children who are nonetheless distinct and surprising -- the mystery of the person.

Much of the meditations in the encyclical are related to human dignity and fraternity. An example:

> Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits — vulnerability, suffering and failure — we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.

[1] https://biblehub.com/greek/3466.htm

I fear I have committed the sin (I mean that word, here) of commenting before reading the entire article. Often it is the comments that set the tone of interpretation and communication more than the article itself, because people read the comments, not the article.

To somewhat mitigate that, here are items that are striking me as I read more. (I hope you'll forgive that this still directs the comment in the direction of my own lense.) I'll keep updating the comment.

> Looking at our own time, we cannot ignore the fact that the protection of human rights [as declared by the United Nations in 1948] has been exposed to two particularly serious dangers. The first is that these rights are declared in a purely formal sense, while technological progress continues alongside covert or overt violations of human dignity.

I read this as a warning of how rights are words, but actions are performed regardless of them. It aligns with something I've been trying to word, which is that as I've seen more and more abuses of power, I've come to believe that ethics requires external accountability, which can often require its own power - a conclusion I don't want to come to; I would prefer social agreement and communal spirit rather than external power. But either way, I do feel it's very clear there are a lot of people, very much in tech too, who simply do what they want regardless of its harm. They justify it to themselves; they don't stop themselves; no one externally stops them.

> Along with a greater awareness of the value of every human person and their rights, recognition of minority rights has also grown. Yet, there is still a long way to go to ensure that the rights of a great many, namely women [are guaranteed.] It is, therefore, not enough to state simply that men and women have equal dignity and rights; it is necessary that this be reflected in concrete decisions, such as in laws, access to employment, education, social and political responsibilities, and the way society listens to and values women’s contributions.

In 2026 American politics terms, this reads as pro-DEI to me.

> the first major principle of Social Doctrine that I wish to highlight: the common good. We can describe it as the social expression of the dignity recognized in every person. ... For a Christian, going beyond the narrow confines of one’s own interests and committing oneself, within the limits of one’s ability, to the common good is a non-negotiable value, as is the promotion of life.

'Non-negotiable.' Very clear words.

> When politics abandons a long-term perspective and reduces itself to short-term calculations or sterile polarizations, then the language of the common good loses credibility, and, at the same time, social inequalities and divisions grow.

> 64. This also applies to international politics.

and,

> I invite everyone to conceive of ways of cooperating and of more effective international institutions, capable of safeguarding the global common good without compromising the legitimate diversity of peoples and nations. Indeed, the promotion of the common good can never be separated from respect for the right of peoples to exist, to preserve their own identity and to contribute their unique qualities to the family of nations.

I love the support for international cooperation and peace and organisations that support it. It reminds me of the post-WW2 sense, the era that gave rise to the United Nations, Unicef, etc - organisations almost forgotten in the news we see on HN today, with the possible exception of the WHO.

> [84] Moreover, any attempt or plan to eliminate or subjugate a nation is gravely immoral and therefore unacceptable.

The beauty of this - or its tragedy - is that it is so easy to apply to many situations today, actions undertaken by many nations.

We should just stop using the term DEI. It has been demonized in the common parlance so successfully that to a ton of people it no longer means 'people who are different are made valuable by that difference'- it's been demonized into essentially meaning 'give black people and women jobs they don't deserve'. It's a prime example of propaganda through language pollution.

For whatever reason HN has been slowly goose stepping towards the future lately so I expect this to go over like a lead balloon but I don't much care.

> > a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion

> Unrelated to AI, but a wonderful support of the breadth of humanity in this anti-DEI time.

I mean.. DEI was in reality homogenization and eliminated diversity. Just because you agreed with the small amount of allowed opinions/people doesn't make it more diverse.

Opposition to DEI is not opposition to diversity so much as it is opposition to discrimination. More than just discrimination, DEI often came in the form of a particularly dishonest and two faced approach to it. Unlike affirmative action - which in my experience tends to acknowledge that sometimes justice requires a measured and deliberate exception to equality - DEI often tried to simultaneously condemn the idea that we were discriminating in favor of certain groups, while also effecting policies that were overtly discriminatory.

If I told my executives I would dock their pay if they exceeded a cap of X% men in their org, would that be discrimination? I doubt many would contest that issuing explicit penalties for breaking a cap on a particular gender. Ah, but what if I gave executives a bonus for reaching an "inclusion milestone" of (100-X)% women? That's not discrimination - that's DEI. Microsoft [1] and Intel [2] both instituted this policy.

My own past employers extended this logic to headcount. In 2019 we instituted a policy of reserving EDP (engineering, product, & design) headcount for "diverse" candidates. What does does "diverse" mean? It means women of any race, as well as Black and Latino men - though in practice >95% of "diverse" candidates were white and Asian women. Each quarter, 20 heads were reserved for hiring "diverse" candidates, and when managers hired from this reserved pool it did not count towards their allocated headcount. You see, if I have a headcount of 100 and I exclude men from applying to 20 of those, then that's discrimination. But if I have a headcount of 80 and we allocate 20 additional headcount that's exclusively available to women, that's not discrimination that's DEI.

This is why, as contradictory as it may sound, I do consider myself supportive of affirmative action, but opposed to DEI. Certainly there are some groups that implement DEI in a transparent and honest manner, but my read is that DEI tends to be done in a two-faced manner while "affirmative action" carries the connotation of being upfront that sometimes equality needs to be honored in the breach to ameliorate the unequal circumstances of reality.

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft...

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-...

I don't believe there was an era in history more DEI accepting than nowadays.

'you shall have no other gods before me'. operationally, a warning. false worship is dangerous. we get what we worship (value above all, orient towards, optimize for). heaven or hell, read it immanently or transcendentally, personally or collectively. either way, choosing the right worship is paramount.

the conundrum: what is the right objective? puerile attempts, eg "maximize flourishing" or perhaps "minimize suffering" are trivially countered by paperclip machines fulfilling the letter while laying utter waste

'mystery of the person'

given the context, some keywords for orientation: free will, rejection of temptation, the cross

You are joking with your anti-DEI comment right? You do know that you do talk about the christian church?

They do nothing to include everyone. They are not standing up when it counts or excumante churches and believes who do not follow proper humanitarity.

They are not even in the forefront of fighting climate change which hurts billions.

I'm down to start a butleirian jihad

This. AI can, should, and will erode all legacy companies into intelligent utilities - with an end state of nearly-free open source utilities.

Anyone concerned with concentrations of power and abuse of AI should be focusing on getting open source work to keep pace with decentralizing that power into accessible free tools for the masses.

I'm not even sure where to start, but I have to ask- are there any groups / projects that are trying to make and train an OSS model federated across members' machines?

Which open source companies would you recommend supporting?

> There's a lot to do.

How can I contribute?

As someone who created and exited a successful AI startup in the past, I'll say it's actually quite different today. Even I don't have the funds to start a foundational model company, and I absolutely wouldn't before my exit either.

While I do believe there may be valid path forward with smaller models, there are still significant financial barriers to entry that didn't exist to the same extent in the past.

Modern encyclicals aren't written in Latin anymore. They're drafted in Italian and the title is the Latin translation of the incipit.

Indeed, the beginning of the Italian text is: "La magnifica umanità creata da Dio si trova oggi..." from which, Magnifica Humanitas.

For those who don't know why that's interesting: The tradional practice for creating these kinds of texts is to first write an editio typica in Latin. This Latin text is then the basis for translations into vernacular languages.

Yeah, I don't know how they expect the people of Latin America to read this.

> But in this document everything seems to be based in the concept of "human dignity", which, however useful or beautiful, has no roots in Catholic tradition: it's a purely secular idea.

I'm not a philosopher or theologian, but this just seems wrong to me, at least when taken in the context of the entire encyclical and the history of Catholicism. That "God created humanity in his own image" has always been a central tenant (if not the central tenant) of Christianity and Abrahamic religions generally. So it would seem like anything that makes us "less human", or denies us the full power of our "uniquely human gifts", would by definition be making us "less Christ-like", and my read of the rest of the encyclical seems like this is (generally) Leo's point.

Again, I'm not a theologian, but Pope Leo obviously is, and "tying these ideas back to core Catholic principles" didn't strike me as a problem in this encyclical.

> [The Amish] carefully evaluate the potential impact of every new technology on the community. The decision is a purposeful one, governed by the criterion of the common good of the community.

Counterpoint: buttons. Without proclaiming expertise on the subject, I think this is an overly romantic view of the Amish, and most of their decisions (like any religious/religiously-adjacent demographic) are based on vibes and contemporary politics.

A good link on this are what technology different sects allow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Amish_technology_comp...

Nearly everyone allows the washing machine, which having wrung out laundry by hand when ours broke gave me a whole new respect for folks who do without the tool.

I think while it's a very lucid comment, it's still too much reconciliatory for the position that the pope occupies. He should be advocating from a sustainable transition from the current capitalist/consumerist economic doctrine to one more centered on welfare and the care for the other, following his religious doctrine's moral values.

I believe that Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was there, and available for consultation.

The truly interesting question, and the crux of the matter, also hasn't changed much since 1903:

How?

Yep but the anti-socialism/communism world did wonders to make that feel like kryptonite whenever those words get brought up, even though anyone who is doesn't see themselves as "rich" in that sentence who fully agree. That's why even factory workers are anti-communism or anti-union which are literally the best way to fight back the imbalance of power.

Hasn't AI been made available to millions of people?

Or is this the old hacker news trope again that nothing except full on communism will ever be acceptable?

I love how excited you are about this and it's rubbing off on me.

> will the Vatican research if God can express himself in LLM?

Such would be dangerously close to divination, in the style of reading tea leaves or Ouija boards.

I'm a non-practicing catholic, and an agnostic (or an atheist, depending on the mood). And yet I acknowledge that the Catholic church is a force to be reckoned with in the spiritual matters, and one of the few institutions to have had continuous influence on the material (or temporal) matters for centuries. Whether their brand of faith is rooted in your culture or not, these are words that deserve attention, I think.

What caused you to fall away? Bad priest / diocese?

Who cares? It isn't like bad people can't have good ideas and vice versa. From where I'm sitting Luciferians, Theosophists, etc are just as suspect as Catholics because they believe in imaginary stuff.

Why should you posses a homestead? What value do you produce that droid can't that would make you deserving of anything at all? Why should corporations that design, manufacture and program the droid not own the land instead?

We need to very rapidly decouple human worth from the economic lens otherwise the economic argument is against humans.

> Remember that there are 3 main powers in the world

Michael Scott: There are four kinds of business: tourism, food service, railroads, and sales.

[pause]

Michael Scott: And hospitals/manufacturing. And air travel.

Interesting how politicians, preachers and consumers are the powers in the world but rich people are missing from the equation.

> I can't wait to have one droiding(manning) my homestead.

How's your transducer lobe developing?

I stand with the Pope, also.

Sadly, the politicians are all bought off by the powerful and rich elite. And the ones who aren't are soon hounded out.

What does the "The West" stand for? They (the Elites and the politicians) said human rights etc. But Gaza proved that a lie. Gaza happened in "broad daylight" and the Western leaders did nothing at best, and at worst demonized those who spoke out, as supporters of terrorists.

Really rather unfortunate. I wished religious people took their stuff seriously and not so often end up concluding that the bible wants them to harm people or something.

I guess it must be the same that make people think they must deliver freedom in form of bombs all the time.

I just messaged a few of my friends who I know are devoutly Catholic (and also happen to work in AI): 3 out of 4 are currently reading it this morning for their Memorial Day.

Almost nobody.

As an atheist and even anti-theist I see no such obligation. What a strange thing to say

From where does that obligation originate?

Priests will read it and then talk to their congregations about it on Sundays throughout the year, if not explicitly, then in how it shapes their homilies.

You mean Catholic believers, not Christian

You can't have money without it being power. So no, you can't have a firewall between them.

A 2 term limit would be a good start

you know.. a lot of changes came from just words. literally our modern society tend to sway the public opinion through just words from news and influencers..

"people should aim to reengineer humanity and eliminate illness, old age, suffering and vulnerability"

sure, that's exactly where AI is headed.

also: just imagine a world where people don't age. just imagine it for a second.

I mean yeah, initially, to get a picture of the full thing, but this is also not a document you just read once, kind of have to read the most interesting parts multiple times and ponder about them, refresh the context, in order to really get the best out of it, consider it theological science :)

It’s a Master’s not a PhD, but in math, yes.

For a moment I pictured the Jesuits training their own LLM. If Arthur C. Clarke was still alive, we'd read a story like The Star, but with AI as the main plot device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_%28Clarke_short_story...

This Dust short, "The Greatest Lie" seems timely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gulzQIkwbJg

(at least the intro.. all in all I think it's a bit too long and some part of it kinda "cringe", but hey)

> who better to lead the cause of humanity than the Catholic Church?

Oh no, is my sarcasm meter broken?

why do you like Francis better?

> as a self described good person i believe theres a lot more good people than bad people in the world (most are neutral) so if access to tech is equal the good side always wins. the problem here is again that access is not equal under capitalism. but thats a political thign not a tech one.

I believe there are mostly people who think they are good. And as the proverb goes the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

And for claiming to have some authority on social justice when women are shunned from priesthood and leadership roles. At least they're coming around a little bit with the first woman appointee of a head of a dept of the roman curia in 2025.

Between the Canadian residential schools and sexual abuse scandals alone, it's shocking that people actually look to the holy see as any kind of moral authority. Nevermind the connections to slavery, fascism, and even the cosa nostra.

Thanks for highlighting this. I've seen a lot of popular press about Magnifica Humanitas that notes the slavery apology. It does make some sense with this (recent, as you note) humanist push, but shoe-horning a centuries-overdue apology about actual terrible slavery into a consideration of how AI might metaphorically enslave us feels a little weird.

What point are you trying to make here, because your post is all over the place and never really goes anywhere.

The pope is not claiming utopia is possible. He is reminding the world of its moral duties within this scope. "Capitalism" is not a system that we helpless atoms merely get pushed around in. How good the world is depends on each one of us choosing to do our moral duty toward the common good. There is no "system" that will, without effort on the part of its citizens, straighten the crooked timber of humanity and relieve human beings of their moral responsibilities.

Capitalism tends to benefit most people, like capitalist enterprise makes food, clothing, cars and the like and most get some benefit. I'm not convinced by the on our expense bit on the whole. It can have glitches sometimes of course.

Any good tickers?

I see you're not much of a fan of nuance

Readers apparently think this comment is a joke. Not entirely:

https://religionnews.com/2026/05/22/why-anthropic-is-helping...

The vigilance the Pope calls for is appreciated, but never underestimate lobbying. If he had called for an outright AI moratorium or ban, that would be clear. But this encyclical leaves room for "adjustments", i.e., boiling the frog slowly.

..just like any other government?

Votes (particularly on submissions over comments) do not directly translate to karma. I'm not sure if it's documented anywhere what the algorithm is, but it's something proportionate to the logarithm of post votes becomes profile karma. It's similar with comments, but I believe (anecdata and observation) the positive effect of votes on karma is also logarithmic, but the negative effects of downvotes is linear; so if you have a highly controversial comment that sits at 1-2 points, you can net lose account karma.

If the technology is used to serve humanity by providing food or housing, it seems like his stance would be approving. But if it was used to increase profits and people still starved that would be bad, right?

"AI must be used for the good of humanity" isn't even an anti ai position really.

The Catholic Church has at present no answer to that question. The contemporary political-economic stance of the Catholic Church is based on economic liberalism and capitalism and maintaining a just balance between capital and labour, as indeed mentioned in the encyclical itself.

I don't think anyone has an answer to that question at present, honestly.

Actually, he did, extensively.

From what you read, what do you think? All your questions are mentioned in the encíclica.

what do you think?

I did but I will read it in full later. Summarizing the encyclical was a waste of time. Summarization is good for quickly probing the topic, tone and quality of a work. Here the topic is obvious, the Vatican tone is extremely consistent and encyclicals so far were all well written and thoughtful so there was nothing new to learn.

If you asked all the LLM to find flaws in the arguments presented, and to come up with counter-arguments, I doubt many current models would be so bad as to come up with that, and even the ones that did would fold when asked "how is that even an argument?".

ugh, read the room

Pure speculation, but simply the presence of em-dashes may be a statement in itself.

One of the big problems I see currently is all the wild accusations being thrown around by seemingly half the internet that every little thing has been AI manipulated upon the tiniest suspicion. We will go mad tearing each other apart if we keep escalating this behavior.

Yes, some of it is blatantly obvious, but not to everyone-- so I think those casting aspersions need to really back up their claims with more than one or two bits of 'evidence'. I have been accused of using AI to write comments (which I have thus far never done), and I know I'm not the only one by a long shot. Such a waste of time and energy. Ignore it and move on if something smells off to you.

Also I am just so, so tired of the em-dash argument. Humans have been using it for a looong time. Let it go.

The Italian version of this https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/it/encyclicals/docume... uses en dashes instead. Could the em- or en- dashes be a side-effect of the translation?

Someone did an analysis and concluded that it appear to be at least partly (~10-15%) LLM-generated, or at least LLM-translated (see comments): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s58hDHX2GkFDbpGKD/linch-s-sh...

I'd say that the onus falls on the engineer insofar as they need to ask the questions of "why are we making the new better tool", "according to what criteria is it better", and "do we need the better tool". And at least for me, that onus falls on the engineer instead of falling on the user because it's the engineer who is creating the tool, not the user, and if the engineer chose differently, the tool wouldn't be out there to be used for evil.

Sometimes it might just be better to not do the thing, especially if it conflicts with one's morals. And well, the idea that "if I don't do this, someone else will" seems to not work out well in practice.

Attacking the cult of progress is a major through-line:

> 12: Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations. All too often, we place our hope in unlimited 'upgrades,' in forms of progress that exacerbate inequalities, and in immediate solutions incapable of healing people's wounds.

> 94: The danger of humanity becoming a victim of its own achievements was already clearly recognized by Saint Paul VI, who warned that 'the most extraordinary scientific progress, the most astounding technical feats and the most amazing economic growth, unless accompanied by authentic moral and social progress, will in the long run go against man.' For this reason, technological progress — valuable in itself — requires careful discernment of the anthropological vision that guides it and the ends it pursues. If technological development advances without a corresponding ethical and social progress, the result may be an increase in means without a growth in humanity: 'having more' without 'being more.' In such a scenario, there is a risk that individuals will be evaluated principally according to the outcomes they produce.

> 112: More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.

There's much more along these and related lines.

Although your comment is acid, I think this bears truth

> Maybe Leo should focus on finding a way to disconnect western society from their current cult-of-progress delusions?

It's too weak of a rhetoric from the highest representative of the Catholic church to call for regulations, but the alternative is to call for a transition from capitalism itself. Nothing that grows inside economic doctrines that only value constant growth at all costs can be safely regulated, regulation being only a makeshift solution.

I'm (genuinely) curious as to what your idea of a less dangerous theology would be. I'm an atheist, but I find the inherent dignity of humans as beings made in the image of God to be one of the more appealing aspects of the Abrahamic faiths.

Some of the greatest horrors of the 19th and 20th centuries were committed by people who refuted that theology and replaced it with Social Darwinism and Scientific Racism.

> But it also makes things more dangerous when we start building systems smarter than we are.

> What happens when the tool outgrows the toolmaker?

We've already built systems smarter than we are without much issue.Libraries and search engines for example. LLMs are just the next level of this.

hyuk hyuk kyuk, man you are hilarious!!! Take my updoot good sir

Are people seriously turning towards their religions for a take on intellectual property rights?

>Moreover, ownership of data cannot be left solely in private hands but must be appropriately regulated. Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few. It is necessary to think creatively in order to manage data as a common or shared good, in a spirit of participation, as Saint John Paul II already suggested regarding collective goods. [128]

It does mention IP concerns, but that's not the greatest existential threat posed by AI.