Magnifica Humanitas

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

by theletterf • 2 months ago

1650 877 2 months ago

As Pope Francis warned, we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it: “It must also be recognized that nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our own DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired… have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world.” [7] In the past, it was largely up to the State to guide and direct innovation. Today, however, the main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments. Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good.

I look forward to reading this in detail. As I get older (and perhaps as AI has allowed me to spend more time thinking and less time doing) I've found myself thinking more and more about 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) but I do find it very interesting to read and learn from and about those whose job it is to think about the answer to those questions.

theletterf5• 2 months ago

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."

redfloatplane4• 2 months ago

That is a really beautiful passage, thank you for sharing - I hadn't made it to that section yet and still haven't. I'm still reflecting on the stuff in the opening!

If we focus only on contingencies, we risk letting the succession of emergencies dictate the direction of our path. We are living through a rapid phase of transition, a “change of era,” in which — while some are vying for the future of new technologies and others dedicate themselves to reflecting on the matter — most people are watching and waiting, observing from afar and merely hoping for the best. For this very reason, crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?

bradrn• 2 months ago

I am immediately reminded of my favourite quote from the Jewish book Pirkei Avot (‘Ethics of the Fathers’):

It is not your duty to finish the work [of perfecting the world], but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.

[https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.2.16?ven=english|Mishnah...]

oulipo2• 2 months ago

Sure. And this is what everyday people do. And this is why CEOs and billionaires refuse to do (doing their fair share), and freeride on the people's work and dedication

zimpenfish3• 2 months ago

When he quoted Tolkien, my heart stopped.

I wonder if meeting Colbert played any part in that.

lordgrenville• 2 months ago

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

simonw3• 2 months ago

I wondered if that was the Pope's way of throwing shade at Palantir and Peter Thiel.

ycitm• 2 months ago

The next sentence in the quote hasn't aged so well - "What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."

LastTrain• 2 months ago

(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.

jmyeet• 2 months ago

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.

arcanemachiner• 2 months ago

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.

Elon Musk is currently worth ~800 billion dollars. This could happen in a much shorter timeframe.

amelius2• 2 months ago

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.

cgio2• 2 months ago

This has weird “look what you made me do” undernotes. A Christian can live by their values without forcing them on others. As anyone can from any religion or not religious at all.

bigstrat20035• 2 months ago

No man can control the behavior of others, in the end. All any of us can do is conduct himself properly, and encourage others to do the same. It's worth acting right even if nobody else does.

solid_fuel• 2 months ago

"I have to sin because those non-Christians might sin" is an interesting chain of thought.

Religion is about many things, and a major theme is depriving yourself to demonstrate your faith. Refrain from sin, pray for forgiveness and repent your mistakes. Live as a good example, give aid and charity to others. These are all commands in the Bible.

Concern yourself with your own sins, not those of others. Do all this and you will be rewarded in heaven.

Wonder what Jesus would have to say about your thoughts here - that you have to break the commandments of your God because if you don't, someone following a different god might break them first. It doesn't sound very Christ-like to me.

taurath• 2 months ago

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?

ZacnyLos2• 2 months ago

Divided into five chapters, Magnifica humanitas has an underlying premise: technology is not “a force antagonistic to humanity” (4), nor is it “inherently evil” (9). However, “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.

Therefore, Pope Leo XIV appeals for people to build “for the common good” and to “remain human,” following a courageous mentality of shared responsibility and communion, so that the world “will come to recognize the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell” (16).

linsomniac• 2 months ago

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.

grim_io• 2 months ago

How much does it cost to introduce cognitive dissonance into the models? :)

dogcomplex5• 2 months ago

That is the hope and faith. MechaHitler definitely tested the waters. Lets hope full alignment is impossible, because otherwise perfect billionaire thought slaves are still happening.

ZacnyLos2• 2 months ago

AI must be “disarmed” in order to free it from the mentality of military, economic, and cognitive competition. “To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern,” he says. “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity” (110). He devotes ample space to a critique of transhumanism and posthumanism, which interpret progress as the overcoming of human limits. Instead, limitations are not defects to be eliminated, but a constitutive dimension of the human person, because it is in fragility and finitude that relationship and openness to God and to others mature. He says we must remember that “humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them” (118).

Pursuing technological innovation at the expense of eliminating human limitations, he says, would cause an anthropological regression. “Humanity—in all its grandeur and woundedness—must never be replaced or surpassed,” he says. Technology can alleviate humanity’s sufferings and open new possibilities, but it must not deny the essence of humanity, which is our “capacity for relationship and love” (126). In the face of AI, says the Pope, “the true alternative is not between enthusiasm and fear, but between two paths of development: a progress that serves individuals and peoples, or a progress that subjects them to the mentality of power” (129).

ares6233• 2 months ago

That's a long read. I grew up Catholic, went through a pretty devout few years in my early adulthood, but ultimately I have decided that it is not for me. I send my kids to a Catholic school though (it is deeply tied to our culture), so I guess in that sense it is still worth my time reading it in full.

EDIT: Few paragraphs in, it is beautifully written.

theletterf5• 2 months ago

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.

TeMPOraL• 2 months ago

(I'm not a Catholic though most people around me are.)

I have a similar perspective. Plus, I'll be frank: in the last few years, these occasional keynote publications from Vaticans are pretty much the most sane, deep, balanced and humane perspectives on AI anyone is writing. Reading this is a better use of one's time than reading the current batch of "tech thought leaders" articles or HBRs or Gartner magic square updates.

turing_complete3• 2 months ago

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

ares6233• 2 months ago

No, nothing like that. It wasn't a single thing. Just drifted away I guess, and disillusioned. I have no strong ill feelings towards it.

ZetaRicky• 2 months ago

Interestingly, the Latin version of the encyclica is yet to be released at the moment

stavros8• 2 months ago

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

loloquwowndueo• 2 months ago

Well because it’s Latin America, not the US, the vast majority of people are at least bilingual anyway :)

brunoarueira2• 2 months ago

Although, it's called Latin America many countries speak variations of spanish and Brazil speak portuguese, just because those languages derived from latin and not because there the people speak it

qsort4• 2 months ago

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.

wl• 2 months ago

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.

vintagedave6• 2 months ago

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.

We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.

There is a lot to read here. I am curious where the meditations on the 'mystery of the person' will go: a brief search doesn't show further mention. The encyclical appears to focus on exhortations for us, humans, than on the nature of AI. Probably wise at this stage. I feel it is not AI that is either positive or negative, but its use of it, and the call-out to the growth of private industry as more powerful among nation-states is a strong statement for a institute like the Vatican to make:

Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good.

vintagedave6• 2 months ago

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.

vintagedave6• 2 months ago

the earth’s goods — soil, water, air and natural resources — are given by God to the entire human family to sustain the lives of all, and that every person has an inherent right to the use of such goods, both now and in the future. ... Today, we are called to recognize that this universal destination applies not only to material goods, but also to immaterial and cultural goods.

Immaterial and cultural goods. This is a fascinating view on non-tangibles and one I feel inspired by. Reading this I asked myself (wait for the larger quote in a minute) how this affects views of IP, learning when texts are not available, cultural impact of characters and stories, the output from universities, publication of papers, ownership of research done by public or even private (!) funds, and more. Particularly I wonder about open weights vs open source for AI, and open source as a concept: where the old-school 'free software' GPLed version seems -- perhaps I am showing my bias -- most aligned with the ethical stance here?

66. Certainly there is a right to private property, which has its own specific meaning and purpose, yet it is always subordinate to the universal destination of goods.

'Always subordinate'.

among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data. In a context where the wealth of nations depends increasingly on knowledge and technology, when these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods. In turn, it widens the gap between the included and the excluded, between those who can participate in the digital revolution and those who remain on the margins.

Wow!

I cannot interpret this; it's not my right. But moving from the questions I asked above, to this paragraph, is powerful.

lukan10• 2 months ago

"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. As long as this gap persists, we cannot say that society truly and fully recognizes that women have the same dignity as men."

So ... women should have the same dignity as men and should get the same access to "employment, education, social and political responsibilities". But of course they cannot be trusted with spiritual matters, so they cannot become priests. In other words, to me this is still the same old hypocrisy that made me leave that institution and also today make me deeply distrust any words of wisdom coming from there.

chrisweekly• 2 months ago

On what basis does the pope speak about gender equality and women's rights? As the representative of the catholic church, the cognitive dissonance is profound.

tw04• 2 months ago

which can often require its own power - a conclusion I don't want to come to

Unfortunately we’re quick to forget that all of those words were put on paper after a time of violence, and ultimately they are a social contract between the many masses and the few “in power” that we agree to adhere to rules instead of committing violence to force behavior.

But ultimately there is only one logical conclusion to the game when parties stop playing by the rules and that’s violence, whether we want it or not. What i think you’ll find most often is the men who commit the most “crimes” against the social contract are the biggest cowards who have never faced violence or consequences and think they never will.

boxed5• 2 months ago

> 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.

vermilingua4• 2 months ago

Perhaps, perhaps not; but you can't possibly argue that the current anti-DEI climate better fosters diversity than a pro-DEI or a-DEI environment.

Forgeties792• 2 months ago

The anti-DEI “movement,” especially what we see in the US, is mostly thinly veiled racism by another name.

All one has to see is how frequently people call any non-white/non-male hire or appointment a “DEI-hire” because they can’t possibly conceive that marginalized groups would see any success based on merit. They start from a position where they are all incompetent and being given an unfair advantage until proven otherwise. It’s also on you to guess whatever their arbitrary bar is.

daveguy4• 2 months ago

DEI was only ever meant to reflect the diversity of society in our institutions (which historically have been and continue to be homogeneous compared to society). Of course there are better and worse ways to create the outcome of increased diversity. But thr recent backlash is the antithesis of diversity, wrapped up in the propaganda of "reverse racism."

bombcar6• 2 months ago

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.

vintagedave6• 2 months ago

Thankyou. I am not Catholic so was unfamiliar with the term. I'll read about it.

irdc5• 2 months ago

Not a Roman Catholic but I am occasionally interested in what the Church has to say on ethical matters. What does the Church understand by "mystery of the person", and how does it relate to the assertion by the Church that, for example, gender (one aspect of the human subjective experience) can be understood purely in terms of biology?[0]

0. https://www.catholic.com/qa/the-churchs-position-on-transgen...

fatherzine• 2 months ago

'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

Curosinono2• 2 months ago

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.

po1nt3• 2 months ago

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

zaneyard2• 2 months ago

What is the point of this comment? Do you mean to say we should cease the pursuit of DEI because we've "come so far"? Of course that's engaging with you with the assumption that you're not intentionally ignoring the weaponization of the movement in the US to further the goals of the current administration.

idiotsecant• 2 months ago

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.

urbnspacecowboy• 2 months ago

We should just stop using the term DEI. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

We should just stop using the term woke. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

We should just stop using the term social justice. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

We should just stop using the term critical race theory. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

We should just stop using the term diversity. It has been demonized in the common parlance...

And on and on and on. Why should we stop using terms because bigots demonize them "in the common parlance"? Bigots demonize every term.

mullingitover9• 2 months ago

We should just stop using the term DEI. It has been demonized in the common parlance so successfully

Whatever term you pick to describe a concerted effort to overcome the tendency to bigotry, they'll just hijack that, too.

There's a whole industry built around this, and the media is so receptive to the right-wing that they'll openly describe how they'll do it[1], will execute the plans in public, and the mainstream media will act as their stenographers.

[1] https://xcancel.com/sykescharlie/status/1396844806547050499

api• 2 months ago

It also refers to a wide range of different policies that need to be evaluated on their merits. These policies are not all the same.

It’s become a thought stopping cliche. Modern discourse is absolutely loaded with thought stopping cliches so it’s not the only one by any stretch.

Manuel_D19• 2 months ago

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-...

kendallpark2• 2 months ago

"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

qsort4• 2 months ago

I have only skimmed it, will definitely read carefully as soon as I have time. I will say, as an atheist, that regarding technology the Vatican has some of the best takes of any institution/government I have ever seen.

jfengel4• 2 months ago

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.)

qsort4• 2 months ago

Much of Western thought traces back to serious work by Church theologians.

The problem I have with this is that it's structurally a motte-and-bailey claim. If I have to take it literally, then it's obviously true and it's simply unserious to deny it: the Church does have a pervasive influence on Western civilization. The way it's often rhetorically used, however, is in opposition and to the exclusion of other strands of thought that are equally foundational: the renaissance, the enlightenment, the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, the scientific enterprise, in a smaller but still real way classical antiquity. To the extent it can be said to exist, Western civilization is a patchwork. It is beautiful and I very much like it, but I don't think any one patch gets to have all the credit.

In fact I think atheists should make more effort to learn about the vast diversity of other faiths

A better version of myself for sure would make that effort. The problem, of course, is that other faiths are just as deep and complicated as "our own", and it would take a lot of time and effort to do so with any level of seriousness.

renox• 2 months ago

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.

Your sentence doesn't really make sense, and there is a lot of deities..

You end up incorporating a lot of Christian thought without realizing because it's so deeply ingrained that it seems like the only option.

Depends on the country, some Northen european countries have a very high proportion of atheists, so it happens probably less there.

dgellow7• 2 months ago

I don’t think you understand atheism? As an atheist I do not believe in any form of deity or divine authority. I do not reject a specific religion, I do not actually believe there is any form of divine order to our world. I can look at faiths as the social constructs they are, and find interest in concepts humans have been developing and created cults around but there won’t ever be a religion/deity I will look at and somehow start to believe. And religious doctrines do not come for free, they are fundamentally built on top of a belief in a divine truth. My moral values may overlap with some religious people at a given time but we are using incompatible models to analyze our world

hackingonempty• 2 months ago

Much of Western thought traces back to serious work by Church theologians

Western thought traces back to the Greeks. Aquinas refers to Aristotle as "The Philosopher." Aristotle died over 300 years before Jesus was born.

The Catholic Church, for all its many faults, retains a serious intellectual tradition.

On Aquinas, the Church Doctor, Bertrand Russell had the following to say:

"Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times."

andrepd6• 2 months ago

Much of Western thought traces back to serious work by Church theologians

Ehh. The vast majority of "Western" thought of the past >2000 years, including that of the Church itself, come from Greek philosophy and thought.

doginasuit• 2 months ago

Church theology does not happen in a bubble, elements can also be traced back to contemporary and secular thinking. To its great credit, the Catholic Church has not taken the path of other parts of Christianity but have listened and learned from the public conversation.

The ideas in this work are not entirely unique or original, they fit with what many people have been saying since language models came on the scene. But it is the most articulate, earnest, and balanced that I have seen from prominent figures and institutions. It has helped me discover and question my biases. Humanity desperately needed a better champion in the conversation, and it is moving to see the Church step into that role so effectively.

deaton2• 2 months ago

Generally speaking, a lot of western values are built on top of Christian ethics. Particularly, most of what we value regarding freedom and individual choice and whatnot comes from the englightenment, which is a direct result of the protestant reformation.

vouwfietsman• 2 months ago

This is like saying most western thought traces back to people 165cm in height or lower. If everyone is forced to be catholic, all human output, including positive output, is done by catholics.

Guess what, all Chinese EVs are made by communists, maybe there's something to it after all!

huhkerrf• 2 months ago

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

turing_complete3• 2 months ago

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

andrepd6• 2 months ago

Antiqua et Nova was partially written by one of the priests that tempt me to be a catholic.

cbm-vic-20• 2 months ago

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.

andrepd6• 2 months ago

the exercise of moral and spiritual discernment

The likes of Sam Altman and Peter Thiel have openly stated they view humans as largely disposable. I don't think we can expect much humanism from them.

derangedHorse• 2 months ago

such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems

We know the representation (weights) and the computational processes, but we don't know the "why" behind the convergence of the model to a particular structure within that framework

tete4• 2 months ago

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.

dyauspitr• 2 months ago

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.

hootz5• 2 months ago

How many Catholics will put the encyclical to be summarized through an LLM?

ares6233• 2 months ago

ugh, read the room

customguy4• 2 months ago

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?".

hootz5• 2 months ago

This was not an attempt at an argument, it was a sarcastic joke on how a lot of people are already dependent on AI, even on things that you weren't supposed to use LLMs for, but I guess I failed at it.

lobocinza5• 2 months ago

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.

sethbannon• 2 months ago

The overarching message is that builders should deeply consider the impact of what they're building on civilization.

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

Therefore builders "bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility" because "every design choice reflects a vision of humanity."

The questions shouldn't just be 'can we build it?' or 'will people want this?'

We need to also ask 'should we build it?' and 'will this make humanity better?'

The encyclical calls on us to “join forces in building up the common good.”

This is a message we need right now.

Xenoamorphous• 2 months ago

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.

throw48472852• 2 months ago

I would replace the word scientists with engineers in that quote. People often conflate the two, but in my experience, scientists tend to be more cautious and there are built in checks and balances in the process (however flawed).

Engineers/technologists tend to have no such guardrails, and are also usually embedded into entirely profit motivated environments, whatever their own values might be.

tom2026hn• 2 months ago

I worry that companies like Anthropic, which are moving toward RSI, may prioritize speed over the timely identification of irreversible risks.

cma2• 2 months ago

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.

runlaszlorun• 2 months ago

Awesome, thx for posting. I now have my new next book to read. Been wanting to read more of the original cybernetics stuff.

Would you also recommend "The Human Use of Human Beings"?

davidivadavid• 2 months ago

That book cover goes so hard.

bem94• 2 months ago

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_.

bluesign5• 2 months ago

The thing is why that this feels so good future is; it is a system with no constraints. A bit like Star Trek universe in Roddenberry's imagination. This kind of utopia can only be achieved with all honest actors, but in reality systems are usually designed around bad actors.

Even with all morally good actors locally, there is no guarantees for external forces. Thinking it hypothetically, even with global coordination ( all good actors ) there is not a proven path that would lead us to better place from any starting point from past.

exceptione2• 2 months ago

  > much more compelling than those found in the various "manifestos" which come out of Silicon Valley.

Whenever I hear these "tech overlords", I am always baffled at the total lack of culture, the absence of taste, the empty visions and the implied complete subjugation of humans to ideals of "efficiency" or "quick and easy". Maybe they would have been more interesting people if they had been brought up in beautiful towns and cities, if they had lived in a rich cultural environment instead of being raised as consumer of cheap and flashy pop culture. Maybe we should tax bad architecture, it gives me headaches but others might incur heavier damage.

As an aside, at least Trump is drawn to the grandeur of high culture from historical times, but he also doesn't understand a jota about aesthetics, and so the White House gets turned into a tacky gypsy-style abomination with one dollar ornaments.

snikeris2• 2 months ago

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)

I believe the Amish figured this out over a century ago.

zplo68• 2 months ago

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.

slfnflctd2• 2 months ago

Far too many of us (particularly younger people, but not only them) undervalue or are dismissive of philosophy. I once was like this, partly because at the time I'd been brought up - like most humans - to believe my parents' religion held all the answers philosophy might address.

I quickly learned as an adult that whether you're a person of faith or not, it's not pointless at all. It's the foundation of everything. Philosophy is how you explain the deeper reasons behind why you follow whatever religion you do, or adhere more meaningfully to whatever kind of agnosticism, atheism and/or 'spirituality' (with or without woo) you espouse.

moron4hire3• 2 months ago

This can only be true if you believe in a certain mad-scientist version of these things. We as a society have systems (however flawed) to hold scientists and engineers to ethical standards: e.g. peer review and in many cases--e.g. civil engineering, architecture, medicine--even legal frameworks to enforce ethical standards. Science and engineering are human endeavors, they are not divorced from the human condition, they cannot be separated from humanity and human rights.

Maybe you mean mathematics is amoral and are committing the common conflation of "engineering is just applied science and science is just applied mathematics," which is a really bad case of missing the forest for the trees.

tensor2• 2 months ago

This is a ridiculous comment. Science papers always have sections on impact. It's the running with scissors industry types simply chasing the bigger paycheck that don't stop to think.

Xmd5a• 2 months ago

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".

vermilingua4• 2 months ago

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.

ako• 2 months ago

Agreed, I think the builders are the wrong people to ask for this self reflection. Anything can be used for good and bad. A knife can be used to prepare food, or to stab someone. A drone can be used to attack a country, or to defend a country. A wooden beam can be used to build a house, or to build a cross to crucify someone. Same way AI can be used for good and bad. And it’s up to the person using the tool to act moral. Unfortunately this world is full of people that consider power and money more important than morals. For me, religion falls in this bucket, lots of “do as I say, not do as I do”. And on top of this, there’s very little agreement on what is good, and what is bad. Morals are quite fuzzy, and flexible.

hammock5• 2 months ago

Yes. I like WEF and Klaus Schwab’s stakeholder capitalism model here. We need governments to force companies to answer not just to shareholders but to employees and communities, and we need one world government to force individual governments to do that.

GoToRO2• 2 months ago

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.

xandrius3• 2 months ago

I get where you are coming from but this is the common "reduction to politics" that anyone who doesn't want to address a problem uses: think of any societal or human problem and you can have your comment with different nouns.

Sure, IF we could just go and fix our governments in some magical way then the problem would disappear. That goes from hunger, climate change, videogame addiction and AI. The problem is that what you value in life in different than what others do, so we now have a system in which sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you don't.

But back to the topic, I do think that how OpenAI and Anthropic handled the government and them asking to drop guardrails is something a company can actually and actively do without having to reinvent the universe.

jamesinmn• 2 months ago

I don’t like putting blame on the builders

Why does it have to be either/or?

From a high-level view, there are powerful cultural/political forces that nudge us towards building harmful, wasteful things without us being aware of said forces. The government, corporate greed, and billion-dollar marketing budgets are to blame.

But on the ground, from an in-the-trenches perspective, I think an engineer at Meta, for example, shares in some level of blame, too. Mainly because there is plenty of evidence showing how much harm Meta products have brought upon society. Yet Meta couldn’t be built without engineers opting in to work there in exchange for $300k salaries.

We desperately need moral clarity and courage at both the policy-level and the individual level.

moron4hire3• 2 months ago

When he speaks of the builders needing to take responsibility, I think he is directing his comments at tech company leadership. The Sam Altmans of the world, not the poor slobs like us who need a job for health insurance because apparently unemployed people don't deserve to live.

bluefirebrand4• 2 months ago

I don't like putting the blame on the builders

Like it or not if you knowingly build stuff that is used for evil purposes you are complicit

You can't build an orphan mulching machine and get away with just a shrug. "I don't really agree with mulching orphans but someone else paid me to build that. If I didn't build it someone else would have" just does not absolve you of your involvement in mulching orphans

pheaded_while9• 2 months ago

Consciousness is the causal factor, not government. You are putting the cart before the horse to insist on any political solution.

jjk166• 2 months ago

We need to fix our government and then you can build anything you want.

Are we all going to stop building things until the government is fixed and all political problems are resolved? No? Then we must think about how we should build in a world with imperfect government.

Npovview• 2 months ago

"That which can be destroyed by the truth should be." - P.C. Hodgell, from her novel Seeker's Mask (1994)

"That which can be automated by the AI should be."

jobu1342• 2 months ago

Hard disagree to your disagree. Every organization is made up of people and reflects the character of its members. So with the nation itself. If people won't take responsibility for their own actions, neither will the government. I.e. self-government isn't the answer to fixing a broken people. Transformation begins within one's self, not in imposing one's will on another. First everyone much look to themselves, then the government, organizations, and projects will fix itself.

Everyone likes to talk about "fixing the government". It feels nice to understand the problem with something else that is broken. The problem is that replacing the people in charge is a no-op if you don't have a pool of good people to choose from and the will to choose them.

peanut-walrus• 2 months ago

It's a feedback loop between governance, social structures and individuals. But out of those, only individuals are the ones with free will who are able to "break" the loop and direct society along a different path. It's not just building "big things" that changes us, it's every small individual decision about what you choose to spend your labor on. No revolution would succeed without people willing to rebel and no dictator could dictate without people willing to follow them.

jimbokun20• 2 months ago

Oh, just “fix government”?

Glad there’s a simple, easy to implement solution to solve this problem! One that hasn’t been considered or tried before!

dogcomplex5• 2 months ago

True. World governments committing genocide and building concentration camps yet it's the computer scientist who's supposed to worry about ethics here because they're the ones who are merely the first to inevitably mix two paper's methodologies together?

All of this is empty puffery til the US and Israel are condemned. Go after the Big Tech billionaires backing those monsters, sure, but no builder needs to be more concerned about ethics than the very institutions designed to concentrate human decision making. Fix your own house first, folks. Techies - keep building, and do better than these people.

ThrowawayR23• 2 months ago

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; ..."

hnthrow0287345• 2 months ago

This would be more meaningful if, perhaps, we had to swear an oath to it before being able to practice. And practitioners would be treated more seriously if everyone knew we swore that oath. And the legal utility as accountability and defense would also be useful.

Of course people are going to ignore it if there's no force behind it.

MichaelZuo• 2 months ago

Noble ideals can be upheld, relatively consistently… only if violators are visibly punished. And to a degree roughly commensurate with the violation.

The critical point is that the violators have to be punished more consistently then the demanded consistency of the ideals.

mentalgear3• 2 months ago

I think not just (computer) scientists but the general population thinks to serve the common good makes sense, not last because we understand it's eventually for our own good.

It is however just that very small minority of the population with highly psychopathic/narcissistic traits - those that, in pre-historic times, would have been kicked out swiftly of hunter & gatherer / small village communities because of their parasitic nature - that in bigger civilisations seem to thrive due to abstraction (distance/time of the effect of their actions) and obfuscation (PR) and instead unfortunately seem to rise to the top (CEOs, presidents, 'thought leaders' ...) to steer the world's overall economy and mindset - and steer it in the abyss.

Sometimes I think humanity was just not made to scale, and this aspect is one very large aspect of it.

jimbokun20• 2 months ago

We need to find an organization to which software engineers can report corporations abusing these principles, that can then take legal action or at least disclose those practices to the general public.

doug_durham• 2 months ago

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.

lelandfe• 2 months ago

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approve...

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes

Sure hope your rosy inflection point happens real soon.

Otherwise, the direction this is taking us is pretty obvious.

moron4hire3• 2 months ago

As I keep telling my project owner at work, "the AI will get better" is not a plan.

ncr100• 2 months ago

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?"

pj_mukh7• 2 months ago

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?

PantaloonFlames• 2 months ago

It's too simplistic to imagine the tension is between robot patrol dogs vs automating drudgery. If automating drudgery suddenly puts 30% of people out of work, it has huge broad negative impact on people who are currently alive and working in the current system. Innovate, but do it with awareness.

ctoth• 2 months ago

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!

erikerikson• 2 months ago

I agree that holding only the concrete implementers responsible would be inappropriate. However, I don't believe that distinction is made. One says "I am building a house" even if they are completely contracting the job out. I'd suggest the greatest responsibility lays with the funders and that the Pope would agree.

ThrowawayR23• 2 months ago

No, we don't have to take the funders' money; that's what having professional standards means. Nobody would excuse a doctor performing unsafe procedures because they "needed the money". Engineers were jailed for the Volkswagen emissions tampering scandal and nobody would excuse them for needing to take funders' money.

jeremyjh• 2 months ago

The funders are among the principal builders in this context. This is addressing the people who have a say in what is built, and how it is built. Much of that belongs to the executive and ownership class, but not all of it.

hodgesrm• 2 months ago

Mark Zuckerberg is a builder in the context of the encyclical.

arter452• 2 months ago

It lands on both. "It was just a job" or "I was just following orders" doesn't excuse you from doing unethical stuff.

jimbokun20• 2 months ago

I’m only through the introduction but this encyclical makes clear everyone bears some responsibility to act, including but not limited to the builders.

lishzen• 2 months ago

Users are responsible, too

alok-g2• 2 months ago

Who do you consider to be by-and-large, overall, more intelligent? Who then is more capable of exercising intelligence towards figuring out what's actually good?

aerodexis5• 2 months ago

Just following orders huh...

hackboyfly• 2 months ago

Thanks for this!

devilbunny• 2 months ago

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.

ycombinete• 2 months ago

Indeed. And because of it’s age and outlook its view is very far back and very far forward.

The casual reference to a 135 year old encyclical that dealt with the seismic shift of industrialisation took me quite aback for a number of reasons.

michaelsbradley5• 2 months ago

There are so many encyclicals, apostolic letters, etc. One could spend years reading just a fraction of them, depending on reading and comprehension speed, of course, which varies by person.

Two I recommend, from the last 40 years:

Veritatis splendor, John Paul II, 1993

Argues that Christian freedom is fulfilled, not limited, by objective moral truth: some acts are intrinsically evil regardless of intention or circumstance, conscience must be formed by divine law rather than self-authorization, and the Church must faithfully teach this moral truth as the path to authentic human flourishing in Christ.

https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...

Fides et Ratio, John Paul II, 1998

Argues that faith and reason are complementary paths to truth: reason needs faith to avoid skepticism, relativism, and reductionism, while faith needs reason to express, defend, and deepen its understanding of divine revelation and the human search for meaning.

https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...

pickledish• 2 months ago

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 :)

kombine• 2 months ago

"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.

oersted6• 2 months ago

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.

ngcazz2• 2 months ago

Like glibly synthesizing a reimplementation of NextJS

dubcanada3• 2 months ago

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?

alok-g2• 2 months ago

Just like we can incrementally innovate, we should be able to incrementally figure too.

slashdave2• 2 months ago

We cannot condone naïve enthusiasms, nor fuel unfounded fears

phtrivier• 2 months ago

Cue Pieter Thiel explaining how this message of compassion is actually the word of the ant-christ while setting his software (maybe "built in Rust !) to all the earthly empires.

hugodan• 2 months ago

Yes, but can the pipe draw a pelican riding a bike?

theletterf5• 2 months ago

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...

redfloatplane4• 2 months ago

Ah, an opening to recommend The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, about a Jesuit going to space to speak with aliens. It won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 1998. I read it recently and it has stuck with me very strongly!

Forgeties792• 2 months ago

Now I’m thinking of “The Nine Billion Names of God” (which I actually read because someone here linked it!) and I’m a little nervous lol

jimbosis• 2 months ago

Forgive me if this isn't what you meant, but a Jesuit has trained his own LLM:

https://www.magiscenter.com/magisai

From the "Core Features" tab: "Trusted sourcebase: answers are consistent with Catholic Church Teaching and the most contemporary scholarship in science, philosophy, history, scriptural exegesis, social science, and theology."

The Jesuit priest behind this is Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D.

https://www.magiscenter.com/father-spitzer

I haven't used magisAI, but I've read a small to fair amount of Fr. Spitzer's writings, and also seen and heard some of his videos and podcasts (largely from his show Fr. Spitzer's Universe), and probably qualify as a big fan of his.

https://ondemand.ewtn.com/Home/Series/ondemand/video/en/fr-s...

https://www.ewtn.com/tv/shows/father-spitzers-universe

P.S. In case you are wondering about the glasses he wears or his appearance in photographs, he suffers near blindness due to retinitis pigmentosa:

https://www.magiscenter.com/blog/latest-news-on-fr-spitzers-... [2018]

EDIT: Formatting.

tancop• 2 months ago

for me the most important point in this is about how ai and tech in general concentrates power. if we want to build something good (in a moral sense) we need to put in work and make sure as many people as possible can use it with equal access.

this basically implies only open source models can be ethical but open source is not sufficient, you also need to make them give true information and avoid all kinds of harmful behavior. thats kind of a problem because if your weights are public even with a strict license a "bad" user can always fine tune it to remove any guardrails.

i think the solution for this is make sure the default behavior is aligned but let users turn on wild mode with zero censorship/refusals. that way everything is opt in, for example a parent can disable the mode for their children but a hacktivist or diy chemist can unlock everything.

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.

tete4• 2 months ago

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.

brador• 2 months ago

No one who needs to read this will ever read it again.

Reading is a trained skill. Requiring years, even decades, of training. It too shall fall to AI.

customguy4• 2 months ago

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)

turing_complete3• 2 months ago

Excited to read this. I really liked the note "Antiqua et Nova" from last year (still under Pope Francis). The autors showed a deep understanding of AI that many secular commentators lack. They developed the concept of integrated intelligence as opposed to the functional, reductivist view of intelligence that is prevalent in the AI community.

jaybrendansmith2• 2 months ago

Why downvote this? The Holy See has an opinion on Artificial Intelligence? This is a fascinating document, and everybody should read it, and form their own opinions. The world currently seems to lack moral leadership, and who better to lead the cause of humanity than the Catholic Church?

Ardren• 2 months ago

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

Oh no, is my sarcasm meter broken?

jaybrendansmith2• 2 months ago

I am not defending the Catholic Church! I am defending a single publication...if a stopped clock is accurate twice a day, I celebrate that moment.

cracadumi3• 2 months ago

I didn't see an EPUB, so I made one from the Vatican HTML: TOC + footnotes, passes epubcheck.

https://github.com/n2ctech/magnifica-humanitas-epub/releases...

sgarrity• 2 months ago

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)

cracadumi3• 2 months ago

Yes for the plumbing, no for the text.

Codex helped write the converter, but the EPUB text is parsed from the Vatican HTML. The script doesn’t rewrite or summarize anything; it just repackages the source into EPUB with TOC, footnotes, metadata, and cover.

netfortius2• 2 months ago

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?

cracadumi3• 2 months ago

Not intrinsically English-bound; the first version had English metadata/anchor assumptions. I just made it language-configured and added --lang fr. It preserves Unicode/diacritics and builds the French Vatican page too.

v1.1 has both EN/FR EPUBs.

netfortius2• 2 months ago

As an atheist I have an obligation to finish reading it all (still going through, and taking notes, probably having to revisit), but I am not sure how many (christian) believers will feel the same.

Vaslo2• 2 months ago

You mean Catholic believers, not Christian

jact• 2 months ago

Catholics are Christian.

jawns2• 2 months ago

From where does that obligation originate?

dgellow7• 2 months ago

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

raldi• 2 months ago

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.

michaelsbradley5• 2 months ago

Some Catholic priests might do that, it’s up to the individuals.

gooseyman2• 2 months ago

The em-dashes present within the writing made me pause and consider how much of this was written/exited by AI.

Quick browse through pre-AI works from John Paul II show em-dashes present.

slfnflctd2• 2 months ago

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.

gooseyman2• 2 months ago

Now that's some em-dash passion!

My point was less about em-dashes and more stopping to consider how the vatican's workflow and editorial process has changed in wake of AI, and what, if any, impact that could have on the outputs.

AI is a tool, I have no problems with others using it to assist with writing as long as the original intent/argument remains.

morningsam• 2 months ago

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...

estearum2• 2 months ago

People need to stop acting like AI systems can detect AI. They can't. Pangram and similar are simply lying. There's no method to do what they claim and there never will be.

l2dy• 2 months ago

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?

the_real_cher2• 2 months ago

Why does the onus fall on the engineer for creating a better tool and not on the people who use that tool in evil ways?

We've been having the same argument since the dawn of mankind. AI is the new AR.

sham1• 2 months ago

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.

the_real_cher2• 2 months ago

No one can predict the future.

Putting the blame on the engineers is a distraction from the real people at fault...the business people and the politicians.

theletterf5• 2 months ago

@dang Is this item getting a lot of negative votes? I've no way of knowing, other than seeing my kharma increasing only slightly after all the points the story collected.

vermilingua4• 2 months ago

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.

theletterf5• 2 months ago

Thanks! That makes sense. This was just genuine curiosity on how HN works, I couldn't care less about kharma.

jawns2• 2 months ago

In the encyclical, the pope talks about the ethics of responsible AI usage. It's pretty dense material, but if I had to summarize it, I'd boil it down to three general moral laws:

1) AI may not be used to injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2) AI must faithfully follow the directions of human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law.

3) AI's existence and availability should be protected as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws.

MyHonestOpinon2• 2 months ago

Remarkable close to the Assimov's Robotic Laws.

triceratops• 2 months ago

I think that's the joke.

geremiiah3• 2 months ago

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.

ExpertAdvisor01• 2 months ago

They are already used extensively to kill people .

shmval• 2 months ago

The message here obviously comes from a good place. But it can't escape the trap baked into its own theology. Putting humanity one rung below God, with everything else below us is a trick that allowed semitic civilizations to make empires and economies go FOOM faster than the rest of the world. But it also makes things more dangerous when we start building systems smarter than we are.

What happens when the tool outgrows the toolmaker?

xyzsparetimexyz• 2 months ago

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.

shipman05• 2 months ago

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.

fgaanb2• 2 months ago

The Pope is making a fundamental mistake here: His advisors told him that AI works and needs to be managed.

He does not address plagiarism, the fact that AI is mostly a surveillance and IP laundering tool, the fact that AI hasn't achieved much so far. You could say it has achieved nothing if compared to the whole history of human ingenuity, certainly not in CS.

He should have compared AI to the golden calf.

His criticism is lukewarm, does not address the criminal aspects and technological failures and is as such industry compliant. He can now say "I have tried" without harming the industry in the least.

This text is not what our current situation demands, but I hope that priests will augment and amplify it in their sermons and go a bit deeper.

dgellow7• 2 months ago

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

fgaanb2• 2 months ago

Technically it is one of the ten commandments.

arter452• 2 months ago

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.

WhyNotHugo• 2 months ago

This quote is from 1903. Times haven't changed that much:

Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people.

xandrius3• 2 months ago

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.

adamtaylor_135• 2 months ago

You have to somehow separate the horrible evils that have been inflicted on the world by Communism before you can get people to consider words closely associated with it.

Being anti-communism is good not only for the individual's health but for their society as a whole.

whodidntante• 2 months ago

The "imbalance of power" can only be "fought" by eliminating the concentrations of power. This is not a capitalist vs communist thing,it is, at least, a human thing, as humans need hierarchy, and power ends up being held by the few. The Romans, the Ottomans, the Persians, the Qing, and many, many other empires all have had the same "issues". I am sure this "problem" goes back to antiquity.

Findecanor2• 2 months ago

I think we should not use the word "communism". It is imbued with a lot of different values depending on who you ask, and is therefore utterly useless.

Marx and Engels had originally envisioned a liberal democratic society with lots of high ideals but they had allowed the transition to it to be tough. Every self-proclaimed "Communist" state never got through that transition: the people in charge never let it (often never intended to) and instead cemented their authoritarian dictatorships. So let's call those what they were.

kspacewalk22• 2 months ago

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

How?

komali211• 2 months ago

There's been plenty of examples of workers seizing the means of production and establishing sustained non-capitalist organization (State or otherwise). We have any number of strategies to choose from: The PRC, Soviet Union, Syndicalized Spain (my favorite, seems the least likely to lead to police state), Vietnam, Cuba. The question thus isn't "how," but more specifically a couple other questions: "How do we prevent capitalist forces from liberalizing our movement (PRC, Soviet Union)," "How do we prevent fascists from killing us all (Syndicalized Spain)," "How do we prevent becoming a state-capitalist police state that halts the revolution (PRC, Soviet Union)"?

oersted6• 2 months ago

It did absolutely change, a lot, it was one of the main themes of the 20th century: revolution. In the old sense of the word, turning the social order upside down.

It took many forms: capitalist social democracy, communism, fascism, feminism... Left or right, without making a value judgement, they were all revolutions seeking to empower the working masses.

Of course, when you get rid of kings, it's really really hard to make sure the vacuum is not filled by something even worse. Credit where credit's due, as a European, I do believe that the US is one of the few cases that was somewhat successful in not completely bungling this opportunity (although there's the detail of slave labour, and the conquest of natives...).

And after many-many horribly failed attempts, much of the world did end up in a relatively healthy state around the second half of the 20th century. Fukuyama's end of history and all.

Now we seem to be regressing again. Perhaps it's part of the eternal cycle and it was always coming. Perhaps it's not actually regressing all that much, and it just looks like it to our coddled selves, or we have become more ambitious on what we think is right. Perhaps people have found new loopholes (tech) on how to get ahead and dominate the rest of us, and we just need to catch up and get it under control again.

Perhaps that quote from 1903 is relevant now, but it doesn't mean that it was relevant the whole time since. Perhaps it was, I wasn't there.

saghm5• 2 months ago

If you ignore everything that happened in between 1903 and today, it might seem like we've never made any progress on this, but at least in the US wealth inequality was demonstrably not as much as an issue for some of the time in between. For a time in the 20th century, it was possible for someone solidly middle class in the US to be able to save up a bit of money and afford a down payment on a house within a decade of working. That's something we've lost to time now, and it's not because it's impossible to achieve or because of the bogeymen of DEI making the fruits of labor and technology too sparse to share with everyone, but because an increasingly large portion of the pie is going to an increasingly smaller set of people.

The delta between 1903 and today in this regard might be small, but the line between them isn't flat, and that makes it even more tragic and frustrating to have this questioned as if it's an impossible problem.

ngcazz2• 2 months ago

Revolution!

carlosjobim• 2 months ago

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?

twoodfin• 2 months ago

AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data

I’d bet the other way: You could have said exactly the same thing about computing 60 years ago, when IBM systems cost millions of dollars and filled whole rooms. And of course many people did.

Personal, commodity access to compute won, and won so thoroughly that it enabled this wave of scary compute centralization.

Centralized, scaled compute will always fill a purpose. But neither Microsoft, nor Facebook, nor OpenAI started out needing “Cloud Scale”.

The first one man unicorn startup will, I’m fairly certain, not be paying Anthropic per month or per token for the vast bulk of their matmul.

tensor2• 2 months ago

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.

haaz• 2 months ago

Great to see the Pope recognises the gravity of what is to come with AI and is coming out early with this.

polotics5• 2 months ago

What kind of regulation is Leo the alignment expert proposing exactly?

Occam's Razor says this is Anthropic trying to build a regulatory moat by leveraging some halo effect.

Maybe Leo should focus on finding a way to disconnect western society from their current cult-of-progress delusions? Could be a better use of the infallible man's pulpit?

colinhb• 2 months ago

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.

polotics5• 2 months ago

I think you misunderstood the message there. These pompous paragraphs are not attacks on the cult of progress, at all.

I read the extremely unexamined blank: """technological progress — valuable in itself —"""

Read again: they are extremely weak sauce, with the implicit message that all that wanting more is oh yes so morally wrong... Morally. But in Leo's wordage I find zero pragmatism, zero hard facts, zero El Niño, zero it's gonna crash... zero call to action. Just pious de-fanged sidelined position-taking.

But anyway. I found the unlock for Karma drop, went from 2666 to 2659 with this one previous comment, I kid you not! So all the good words, and then "regulation" right, standing next to Anthropic's boss, all good right?

gchamonlive7• 2 months ago

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.

bad_haircut72• 2 months ago

Capitalism is clearning having a moment atm but as far as I know nothing about capitalism demands permanent growth. Capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production (and a complicated system of laws that allow ownership of abstract concepts, like futures contracts). Its the people who always want more - usually the ones who already have the most, and this has been the case since the first kings.

polotics5• 2 months ago

Are you serious? Have you seen how much environmental damage the old Soviet Union has done? Do you think it's that simple: "capitalism bad"...?

Proper systemic improvements are possible, and having markets is a good way to allocate resources and efforts.

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265206

polotics5• 2 months ago

What kind of regulation is Leo the alignment expert proposing exactly? Occam's Razor says this is Anthropic trying to build a regulatory moat by leveraging some halo effect.

Maybe Leo should focus on finding a way to disconnect western society from their current cult-of-progress delusions? Could be a better use of the infallible man's pulpit?

jeanlucas• 2 months ago

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

paologiacometti• 2 months ago

Unfortunately, he did not mention the moral responsabilities of the Silicon Valley technopower in delivering and selling a technology so society-impact only for making themselves and their shareholders richier.

vermilingua4• 2 months ago

Actually, he did, extensively.

layer8• 2 months ago

Overview article: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv...

goldenarm• 2 months ago

The paragraphs about making software transparent and collectively sound really similar to the open source ethos.

amai• 2 months ago

Has someone done an AI generated summary ;-)

Lerc2• 2 months ago

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"

keeganpoppen• 2 months ago

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)

bluefirebrand4• 2 months ago

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

Lerc2• 2 months ago

Not at all the same thing. AI is a subset of what companies can do, and many if the issues people have with AI are not intrinsic to AI but rather their use in the hands of companies utilizing then for their own benefit.

fsflover• 2 months ago

Open source models don't exist. Open-weight ones do, which are more equivalent to freeware than free software.

adolph• 2 months ago

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

netcan2• 2 months ago

...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.

stavros8• 2 months ago

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.

daheza2• 2 months ago

I think if there were any solution to the lack of jobs due to AI implementation then people would be fine. There isn’t any solution from either party in the US so people are naturally attacking the thing that is causing the problem.

titzer• 2 months ago

People were fed up at "Occupy Wallstreet", but the media and craven political situation absorbed those movements back into the fold. Forget "fed up". When do we start seeing actions that don't feed directly back into the oligarchy's capture?

parineum• 2 months ago

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.

komali211• 2 months ago

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.

lukan10• 2 months ago

"it's all just capitalism in its most raw, inevitable, end game form."

Can you explain, what would be early capitalism and what is the difference to "end game capitalism" to you?

6stringmerc• 2 months ago

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.”

dist-epoch2• 2 months ago

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

floriankarsten• 2 months ago

And he meant it as a good thing. Something to be embraced.

gom_jabbar• 2 months ago

Exactly. The source of that quote should be this interview from 2017 [0].

For those interested in exploring Land's main thesis (capitalism is AI), I have a research project on the topic [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGxgGQpyBYM

[1] https://retrochronic.com

comfysocks2• 2 months ago

>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.

satvikpendem• 2 months ago

I wonder how many people read and heed the words of the Pope. I've seen letters like these for years now which sound good but I don't see any change in people after having read them.

chrsw• 2 months ago

Almost nobody.

tete4• 2 months ago

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.

9087653545• 2 months ago

"Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!"

"Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves."

"...And there is also with you Shimei the son of Gera... He came down to meet me at the Jordan, and I swore to him by the Lord, saying, ‘I will not put you to death with the sword.’ Now therefore do not hold him guiltless, for you are a wise man. You will know what you ought to do to him, and you shall bring his gray head down with blood to Sheol."

mbo• 2 months ago

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.

stevenalowe• 2 months ago

I’m sure a similar epistle long ago argued that Swordsmiths must ensure that their products are only used for justifiable self-defense.

I’d be thrilled if religion was only used to uplift people but that’s not going to happen either

werber• 2 months ago

I noticed ads on churches in Mexico City for this earlier this year, https://juanito.ai

stared• 2 months ago

My secular take: "we want Star Trek, not Philip K. Dick, future".

darepublic• 2 months ago

Time to start on the first draft of the orange Catholic bible

malfist• 2 months ago

I'm down to start a butleirian jihad

SV_BubbleTime• 2 months ago

Sure, we’ll get a tyrannical worm phase… but really I think I’d prefer that to the path of tech bros and MBAs controlling my universe. At least it makes the focus clear.

atomic128• 2 months ago

Already in full swing: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/

magic_hamster3• 2 months ago

Good luck with that. Capitalism doesn't work that way. AI will make money for some companies, but as always, it will be on our expense, not for our benefit. We will get some convenient features, we will grow dependent, and eventually subscriptions will be squeezed as far as we are able to pay, advertising will take over, we will have less choice and worse service.

By then we might not even have computers anymore, or we might have "transparent" computers, i.e. have everything on the cloud and just tell our AI agents what to do.

Sorry Pope Leo, things are not going to suddenly turn into a wonderful utopia, but maybe buy some stocks so you can at least make a buck from what's coming.

brcmthrowaway2• 2 months ago

Any good tickers?

lo_zamoyski• 2 months ago

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.

geremiiah3• 2 months ago

Nah, I think that's a bit of a cop-out. Capitalism heavily incentivizes competition at the detriment of everything else. You can talk about moral duties all you want, but in a hyper-competitive environment, if you don't do the thing, the other guy will. Societies don't necessarily have to be structured in such ways.

magic_hamster3• 2 months ago

My point is AI is not going to be built to "benefit humanity" because that's not the incentive in our economy. AI might give us some benefits, but like all tech products currently, it will be designed to benefit corporations and shareholders. It is what it is.

tim3332• 2 months ago

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.

magic_hamster3• 2 months ago

Arguably, all the industries that you mentioned (clothing, food, automotive) have the same symptoms, doing everything possible to increase growth even (and often) at the expense of shipping worse products. At least, this has been my experience with clothing, electronics, appliances, and honestly almost everything. It's very hard today to find good long lasting products. A couple of decades ago you could expect your purchase to last a while, today - hardly.

IAmGraydon• 2 months ago

So the guys at Anthropic convinced the Pope to write a hype piece for them. Next-level grifting right there.

451298• 2 months ago

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.

tete4• 2 months ago

And of course the AI salesforce was there pretending they take stuff seriously, maybe even believing it themselves. At least I don't believe that when the choice is maximizing profit or being a good person it will be the latter. Or at least I don't find a career path like that all too likely.

speak_plainly• 2 months ago

I know lots of people are excited because an ancient institution has something to say about AI.... But what's said is not really novel or even interesting.

The letter aims to maintain the status quo of the project of the Church.

The world is shifting under the Vatican's feet and the crappy system they once lorded over is done.

It's time for change, maybe people don't need to work anymore and maybe people should aim to reengineer humanity and eliminate illness, old age, suffering and vulnerability. We can fundamentally change how society distributes wealth.

Some of the arguments are rich coming from the Church: being scolded about centralization of power, claiming truth and shared information is a common good, and consider the history of the Church in their anti-war declarations.

The most astonishing thing in this letter is the pope declaring that modern technology has rendered Aquinas's just-war theory out of date.

sirnicolaz• 2 months ago

"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.

Curosinono2• 2 months ago

I seen this movie but it was a dystopian movie.

I can imagine an utopia though were this works out well. I can even imagine that after 100 years or 200 a lot more people become more melowed out and our society overall will be more calm.

coffeefirst• 2 months ago

Like this? https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-postmortal-a-novel-drew-mag...

(I highly recommend the book. I do not recommend the world it imagines.)

energy1232• 2 months ago

Which the Pope is against, the encyclical says that eliminating suffering is a bad thing because it's a necessity for good things to happen.

mentalgear3• 2 months ago

The Pope has a better understanding of what's at stake that many of 'our' (lobbied) politicians.

ipython• 2 months ago

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.

ttfkam2• 2 months ago

Not known for deep understanding of high technology? The Catholic Church was behind the scientific discovery of The Big Bang through the Catholic priest (and astrophysicist) Lamaître. Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was an Augustinian friar. Steno, a Catholic bishop, formulated the foundational principles of stratigraphy, establishing geology as a formal science. Secchi, a Jesuit priest, was a pioneer in spectroscopy and the first to establish that the Sun is a star, creating the first stellar classification system.

swat535• 2 months ago

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.

vitally3643• 2 months ago

Pope Leo: Do Not Build The Torment Nexus

Techbros (as usual): how dare you suggest I'm a bad person for wanting to kill everyone in order to build the torment nexus? Don't you know how much money Jeff Bezos has?

mentalgear3• 2 months ago

“Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon”

This is very on-point: capitalism-driven AI development as we have it today will always turn against the common good due to it's singular profit-motive.

What a time: the pope having a much clearer picture of the risks & dangers of 'AI' than most people, many 'tech leaders' and certainly most politicians.

gchamonlive7• 2 months ago

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.

vintagedave6• 2 months ago

Yes. I was slightly disappointed by the commentary on welfare itself:

This principle encourages us to move beyond any form of paternalistic or welfare-based management of societal life, but instead to promote a culture of shared responsibility in a State that values citizens’ initiative, and a civil society capable of forging bonds and mobilizing energies in the service of the common good.

The section above on the universal destination of goods was far more encouraging.

He did also write,

The idea of “social justice” helps us recognize that injustices do not arise solely from the wrong choices of individuals, but also from structures, mechanisms and economic and cultural systems that produce inequality almost automatically.

logicchains• 2 months ago

The pope, as a Christian, is well aware that human nature is fundamentally sinful. If you take away the ability for people to profit themselves from their work, they just stop working and you get mass starvation like China and Russia post communist revolution.

iamacyborg3• 2 months ago

I don’t know that the Papacy has ever been about that though

jdw64• 2 months ago

“technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it,”

If critical decisions affecting human life—such as hiring, lending, crime prediction, and welfare—are processed in an opaque black box, people will lose their fundamental right to explain their context or appeal against the machine's algorithmic verdicts

perfmode• 2 months ago

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

applfanboysbgon• 2 months ago

Is it wrong? Individuals were absolutely getting dehumanized in Kafka's time, but also since then are becoming ever increasingly more so, so it makes sense to speak of it continuing to happen and get worse. It is not binary.

mmplxx• 2 months ago

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

saghm5• 2 months ago

I don't have to agree with everything someone says to agree with one of the points someone is making. This point happens to be a good one, independent on my views of anything else that he (or his organization) might say

jimbokun20• 2 months ago

His words on this topic make a hell of a lot more sense than any of the people running technology companies. And many politicians, too.

dubcanada3• 2 months ago

AI has nothing to do with technology, the questions are 100% psychological not technological. It's fundamental shifts in deep degrees of how humans have worked for centuries. Most of which the church has been the centre of.

BloondAndDoom• 2 months ago

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).

bombcar6• 2 months ago

For many companies, even those breathlessly professing DEI, it boils down to “you can be any color you want as long as you operate exactly as our computers and processes expect you to. Any deviation will be harshly dealt with.”

jedberg3• 2 months ago

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

zdw2• 2 months ago

Having been through an hiring cycle recently and prior to AI, the entire process has been pretty broken for a long time, but AI is definitely breaking it (and a whole lot of other things) in new and novel ways.

The only reliable and high quality signal is a positive referral, but those are gated by your personal network, which may not be well developed.

roopekangas• 2 months ago

Time for hidden prompt injections in cv?

treis3• 2 months ago

Have you ever successfully appealed a failed HR screen?

IME the reality of the modern world that there's little genuine appeal or reconsideration anymore. There is some sort of process but it's Byzantine and if we're talking the government, expensive.

I guess everyone has had different lives but between humans and algorithms I take the algorithm every time.

sleight42• 2 months ago

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

threethirtytwo6• 2 months ago

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.

jimbokun20• 2 months ago

It’s a black box in the sense that we know the process used by LLMs to “reason” is very different than how humans reason and make decisions.

The whole point of “jury of your peers” is that your guilt or innocence is being decided by people with common life experience to you and thus the possibility of empathy and judging you fairly.

riccardomc3• 2 months ago

No, your reasoning is flawed: a judge or a jury is voted, appointed or selected through a process which is the result of centuries civilization, norms and legislation. As corrupt it might be in some cases, it is expression of mankind.

They are not a black box, they passed rigourous examinations and they stick to principles enshrined in constitutions and laws.

Technology, or better, the productization of it, is instead the result of the interest of very few powerful individuals or corporations and aggressive product market fit iterations.

The bullish discourse around the PMF loop says that this is good because it is better at solving people's problems. But after a few decades it is obvious there's a gigantic risk the process actually exploits people's problems instead of actually solving them.

dogcomplex5• 2 months ago

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.

rbanffy• 2 months ago

I liked the previous Pope better, but I can't say this one is wrong about this.

nachox9993• 2 months ago

why do you like Francis better?

bbor3• 2 months ago

I'm glad he published it of course, but I was disappointed on two counts:

1. He's not at all careful with his argumentation. Frequently he'll colocate two points that aren't really connected, not bothering to justify one before moving on. I've been a massive fan of his persona ever since I heard he was planning to be the AI pope, but it's a shame to find the philosophical output of the actual man to be around the level of a decent blogger.

2. He refuses to make the Kantian or Hegelian move of basing the discussion of empirical matters on evidence. I understand that faith (aka 'belief without evidence') is a huge part of their whole deal--and likely an inextricable part of humanity's indomitable spirit--but it's just a waste of time to build arguments about technical and political matters upon such foundations.

In other words: there's no point in really talking about AI with someone willing to justify claims like 'no machine could ever think' with 'god says so'. All you can do is try to manipulate them into a prosocial position (read: your side).

Hopefully it's obvious that the majority of the letter isn't really about AI but rather about lessening the harms of capitalism, nationalism, and climate change, which hopefully we can all agree on! The commentary above is focused on the AI specific (esp. Chapter III and parts of I).

pj_mukh7• 2 months ago

I would love for the Pope to answer this question:

If a technology existed that reduced the cost of producing a critical thing (think food, housing, medical care) down to near zero, however, it made the humans currently building the thing redundant, should we build it? Would it be okay to use the hyper-optimization power of Capitalism to build such a technology faster?

Before someone yells at me about this not being the current situation, I think that is the endgame of most of this AI development and in fact the endgame is even more comforting: If it takes 10 construction workers at $60,000/annum to build one home, I can forsee the descendants of current AI tech enabling 10 construction workers at $150,000/annum building 5 homes in the same time with an even larger profit margin for the corporation involved.

But as a clear moral quandary, I think the Pope should consider the first situation.

nemomarx• 2 months ago

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.

pj_mukh7• 2 months ago

"by providing food or housing" vs "if it was used to increase profits"

Why..not both? I know this question is naive, but there is nothing that "hard-codes" AI to only increase profits at the cost of providing food or housing for much cheaper prices. Yes a Private equity firm could later insert itself and jack up prices and play such games, but that isn't baked into the technology itself.

And as such, the technology seems the wrong thing to be litigating.

gbibas• 2 months ago

This makes me think of enlightened self interest. If the tech elite crush everyone by automating too fast then the economy collapses and people don’t have the money to pay them and their advertisers, so it will wind up hurting them directly too. Enlightened self interest SHOULD keep those same people in check finding a way to use the technology to empower advances in efficiency that empower people not just corporations. But the AI leaders don’t outwardly seem to think about these issues, and when asked just brush past them. We should not stop tech progress even if it were possible in a global competitive environment (which it is not), but there are some moral issues that should guide tech leaders in decision making, not just profit motives.

geremiiah3• 2 months ago

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.

jbrun• 2 months ago

Interestingly, the invention of the printing press, a clear analogous technology to AI, was directly linked to the schism and creation of the protestant and reformation movement and bloody religious wars. So the Catholic church knows what it is talking about here!

GuB-42• 2 months ago

A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few

Particularly ironic considering the history of the Church.

I mean, it is not wrong, but that's essentially the business of essentially every church, religion, cult,... whatever you call your spiritual organization.

goosejuice4• 2 months ago

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.

sunshine-o• 2 months ago

I read as long as my attention span would allow because this is a very long text.

I am curious, what is the view of different religions on conversing with something that is not human like a chatbot?

mercacona• 2 months ago

NUMBERED PARAGRAPHS, YESSSS! Seriously, once page numbers have become optional, electronic editions of books (monographs, essays, and academic texts) need to number the paragraphs so we can keep references working. I’m fed up with referencing the entire text or specific chapters.

skrebbel2• 2 months ago

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

lynndotpy• 2 months ago

I love numbered paragraphs, but this is the standard for religious texts, no? Famously so for centuries?

I love it when old stuffy institutions are on the cutting-edge of clarity of communication as much as anyone else. (The SEC with its "HOW EQUIFAX NEGLECTED CYBERSECURITY AND SUFFERED A DEVASTATING DATA BREACH" report where nearly each section title was a complete sentence, making the Table of Contents also serve as a summary, got me very very excited).

I would welcome, numbered paragraphs _and_, an HTML standard, and full-sentence-section-titles in the world of academia.

cucho• 2 months ago

Here is an easier to read version, in clean markdown: https://github.com/cucho/magnifica-humanitas/blob/master/mar...

fooker2• 2 months ago

This is a surprisingly nuanced and technically literate take on this topic. Kudos.

I wonder if this sort of thing got this dude elected, to navigate the changing times.

consumer4512• 2 months ago

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

fooker2• 2 months ago

This is a surprisingly nuanced and technically literate take on this topic. Kudos.

I wonder if this sort of thing got this dude elected, to navigate the changing times.

(duplicating my comment from the other thread as this seems to have more traction)

dominictorresmo• 2 months ago

maybe we will have a new Rerum Novarum

booleandilemma2• 2 months ago

I like how the pope is emerging as a sort of champion of human rights in the face of AI, when the messaging coming from our politicians and corporate overlords is "you're all going to be replaced, make way for the data centers, peons". I stand with the pope.

tharmas• 2 months ago

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.

booleandilemma2• 2 months ago

I used to believe it was human rights also, and maybe it was, but now the aim seems to be: profit at all and any cost.

netcan2• 2 months ago

It's kind of worth reading. Not to learn about AI. But... it is an interesting/historic intersection of religion and technology.

Side note: (a) This new pope is very good at "political rhetoric" and (dare I say) polemic. He's a lot more relevant than recent popes. (b) There seems to have been a vibe shift, re: secular sentiments towards religion.

There is potentially a lot happening at this intersection... say catholicism and AI.

For example... LLMs make scripture a lot more accessible. That tends to be impactful, historically. It's Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza and Schmidt. This kind of thing is a niche interest... even among the faithful, but an important niche. And... it just answers your questions, patiently.

It's also a therapist, confidant and advice giver... potentially a confessor or priest. Talk of "making an AI god" got a little stale, but... there are many ways that LLMs might take god-like roles in people's lives.

Predictions are futile, but I suspect we are going to see AI encroachment into religious/spiritual domains. I further suspect that good, natural, conversational audio is the bottleneck.

Personally... I'm curious about this Pope/AI thing. I find it interesting.

danilocesar• 2 months ago

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

jimmy766153• 2 months ago

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.

sometimelurker• 2 months ago

the guys name is Leo because the pope who was around for the industrial revolution was named Leo. I think he also has a math PhD but I could be wrong. he's 100% paying attention

michaelsbradley5• 2 months ago

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

michaelsbradley5• 2 months ago

For the record, he earned a Bachelor’s degree in math, not a Master’s or a PhD. I had looked that up previously, so knew it wasn’t a PhD, but recalled incorrectly when making my comment earlier today.

jeffrallen• 2 months ago

It would be better on the original latin.

jkwn• 2 months ago

I find it difficult to see how even the measured words from the pope can actually enact this changed needed to 'disarm' AI. The forces behind the armament/war of AI development are innate to the qualities of our governance systems, capitalism, and human behavior, and AI itself.

None of these will go away until something breaks catastrophically, when it will be too late. And even then it will be short repose from another iteration for as long as we are in the digital information age.

There are only two steady end states that I see... either a global surveillance totalitarian system under the industrial complex, or, a radical change of the environment in which the aforementioned can be sustained.

110. Finally, I would like to employ the expression “to disarm,” which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.

Modos• 2 months ago

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..

missedthecue• 2 months ago

LLMs are some of the most fairly distributed technology in history. It's actual insane how equitable global access is, especially compared to the previous evolutions of the computer industry (mainframes, then desktop, and eventually mobile phones). People are just saying stuff to say stuff at this point.

MagicMoonlight• 2 months ago

Why would we listen to him? Even he doesn’t believe in God.

Jesus let the Romans take him. The pope drives around in an armoured car with hundreds of soldiers. Why? After all, he’s the official spokesperson of God. He’s either untouchable, or would be endlessly rewarded with sainthood for being a martyr.

But he obviously doesn’t believe that.

wald3n• 2 months ago

Love this: building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected. 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. As a result, while some pursue the illusion of unlimited self-assertion, many are deprived of basic necessities.

ProofHouse• 2 months ago

More thoughtful analysis of AI and society than anything this far

bix6• 2 months ago

This is a magnificent work. The thoughts and words are so precise and beautiful.

alecco4• 2 months ago

Yes it's a very dangerous concentration of power. But I don't believe strong words or proposing regulation by just another elite would change much.

Please join/help open source groups doing small + local or distributed models. There's a lot to do. Support truly open source companies.

Let's walk the walk.

nickvec• 2 months ago

Which open source companies would you recommend supporting?

hideout_berlin2• 2 months ago

debian

jauntywundrkind• 2 months ago

Allen AI (ai2) is doing ridiculously good work, with such a clear focus on enabling others. https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social

Their work on SERA (open training, open weights) is fantastic. 40 GPU days of time, training a competitive model, but also, a model built for further close fine-tuning. That refining and distilling models down, especially for complex code-bases, to make the model want to do the right thing, to know the process you use, has such promise. And it's done so in the open, with so much work to help you train or refine yourself, at such low costs! https://allenai.org/blog/open-coding-agents

I'm so so so happy AI2 is helping bring up NSF OMAI compute center, some modern equipment they'll have access to. https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social/post/3mlbihzxsei2a https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social/post/3mlbii3d37t2u

Incredible company. And such versatility! Earth sensing/geospatial models MolmoEarth, their own benchmarks for example for Instruction Following IFBench, MolmoAct robotics / VLA, and radical new MoE models EMO, https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social/post/3mm7udixycs2h https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social/post/3mm7udixycs2h https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social/post/3ml4pooclic23 https://bsky.app/profile/ai2.bsky.social/post/3mle56nehfz2w

alecco4• 2 months ago

From top of my head:

https://nousresearch.com/ They do much more than Hermes

https://pluralis.ai/ has distributed models the network owns

And many others filling very different niches.

I would also count DeepSeek because they publish and share so much. Their new caching prices are very good for not that bad models. Last week I needed to generate content via API and I spent literally $3.40 where before I would've paid easily $200. But you have to connect directly as it seems OpenRouter messes up caching somehow.

ai_slop_hater2• 2 months ago

There's a lot to do.

How can I contribute?

alecco4• 2 months ago

Join some Discord servers of open source projects/startups. Hang out and make friends. Figure out where and how you can fit best.

dogcomplex5• 2 months ago

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.

jpfed• 2 months ago

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?

alecco4• 2 months ago

Several. https://pluralis.ai/ https://nousresearch.com/ https://allenai.org/ and a few more I can't remember right now.

I'm personally on the other end: local small models working well for specific tasks (i.e. "agentic")

tinfoilhatter2• 2 months ago

In this regard, Saint John Paul II stated that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations on 10 December 1948, remains one of the highest expressions of the human conscience of our time.

Interesting, considering that the U.N. has its roots established in the ideology of Luciferians. [1][2][3]

Surely the Pope and the Vatican are both aware of this fact.

[1] https://archive.is/D27Jr [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucis_Trust [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophical_mysticism

nathan_compton• 2 months ago

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.

tinfoilhatter2• 2 months ago

Yeah, who cares that there's a group with the goal of establishing a new world order featuring a totalitarian one-world government and a one-world religion that enforces Noahide law. Sounds lovely! /s

This logic is absolutely ridiculous in my opinion. Should we have cared about Hitler? Maybe he was just a bad guy with good ideas - after all, he helped to create the Autobahn.

If you haven't read about what Alice Bailey believed in or other theosophists and you're just saying who cares because you hold the impression that the United Nations is some benefactor to humanity, okay. I don't hold that viewpoint regarding the UN and I find the fact that it is actively advised by a group of Luciferians that espouse the kind of crap Alice Bailey did, quite troubling. Nor do I consider the Vatican a benefactor to humanity, just to set the record straight.

serf• 2 months ago

it's a shame that the vatican didn't bother asking whether or not the crusades would make humanity better before causing the death of 9 million plus people.

..or whether or not hiding all those pedophiles was the right.

and to be clear ; i'm not equating AI to those things -- i'm saying that I don't care about the opinion of a group with such a sordid history regardless of how shined up the PR is now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPmyry0yaQE

bzmrgonz• 2 months ago

I am confused with the church's stand on this. If it is a genuine moment in time that the created begin to create on their own accord, then why not promote the distribution of these ai creations to us, so we can boost our productivity and carry on for another millenia or two. Or is it that this creation truly gives us independence from church, state, and consumerism? and that frightens them? Remember that there are 3 main powers in the world, political, religious and consumerism. CHina is aggressively pursuing humanoid droids. I can't wait to have one droiding(manning) my homestead. The task of animal husbandry, aquaponics, etc, will be childsplay then.

shepherdjerred• 2 months ago

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.

exe34• 2 months ago

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

How's your transducer lobe developing?

theflyinghorse• 2 months ago

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.

regularization• 2 months ago

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

_doctor_love• 2 months ago

We are also witnessing a disconcerting loss of historical memory, as first-hand accounts of the Holocaust and the two World Wars are disappearing. This leads to a selective or distorted rewriting of the past, in a context where fake news and the manipulation of narratives obscure the lessons that have been learned. Without a living memory of the horrors of war, political decisions risk being made on the basis of power alone, without any consideration for the long-term consequences.

Very true. Observed in Hiroshima as well.

Education in the United States especially is highly sanitized when it comes to the dropping of the atomic bombs and the horrors of the Holocaust.

gymbeaux3• 2 months ago

Great message from the Pope (I never thought I'd write those words). I'm glad he recognizes what's going on with AI (LLMs, really) as one of the highest areas of concern for humanity and the Earth and is using his influence to encourage things like renewable energy investment. It's a shame he isn't in a position of "real" power and we're still at the mercy of the worst U.S. president in history.

One thing that isn't talked about enough is how so much is going into AI but not much is coming out of it. The rhetoric from tech bros is still that AI is "going to" change the world. Hasn't really changed the world yet, except driven up everyone's utility bills and put hundreds of thousands of people out of work.

I encourage people, especially software engineers here, to remember the previous "new hotness" tech advancements - blockchain and NoSQL DBs being two recent examples. In both instances there was a flood of VC money into startups that have mostly failed because each was supposed to change the world (or at least change software). I spent a lot of my free time in those days trying to "find a problem" for blockchain and NoSQL to solve. I remember thinking I must be a lousy software engineer because I just wasn't getting the hype. Now I know it's because whenever something new comes out, people talk about how it can do X Y and Z, and there's a disconnect between what a technology CAN do, and what it SHOULD do. I can use blockchain for all sorts of things, but in most cases it wouldn't be the best option. Same for NoSQL DBs. Same for LLMs. The more you understand blockchain, the more you realize it's only good as a globally-distributed, immutable ledger - and currency is the only practical application of that in our society today (e.g., Bitcoin). NoSQL is the same way - yeah you can use MongoDB for whatever app, but it's going to be a bad time maintaining and scaling when you're storing relatively simple and consistent records. A CRUD app usually doesn't warrant a NoSQL DB.

LLMs are the same. I'm finding they are good at search-type tasks, where frankly not much "thinking" is involved. Therefore, with respect to writing software, they are best suited for simple, internal tools. Even then, I have to baby it, especially with today's LLMs. Claude Opus has been nerfed (most-likely quantized) to make space in the datacenters for Mythos, and eventually Mythos will be bad too for the same reasons. The question becomes, as it always has, "will LLMs rise up to the challenge" and history tells us "no." These things never live up to the hype. When you understand how LLMs work, you understand why ChatGPT 3.5 isn't that much worse than GPT 5.5, artificial benchmarks be damned.

wilg• 2 months ago

I'm as happy we have a non-crazy pope as the next liberal, but as someone who isn't religious I think it's very important to be skeptical of any opinion given by a religious leader. As such, they've declared they are rejecting the best tools for understanding humanity, culture, and the physical world, and have deeply compromised judgement.

throwaway5752• 2 months ago

This is history in the making. We're living in an evil time - bad people are stealing from humanity, using conflict to distract, and acquiring personal power out of greed. This will be one of the greatest moments in the papacy, and I expect if there are people around to read it, it will be talked about in a thousand years.

plotti3• 2 months ago

The answer is sortition a.k.a. democracy by lot. From my subjective understanding it is The only institutional democracy variant that puts a firewall between money and power.

ugh123• 2 months ago

A 2 term limit would be a good start

plotti3• 2 months ago

You can’t fix the broken system with such a minor patch

lstodd3• 2 months ago

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

plotti3• 2 months ago

Well then you need to read the wiki article how sortition works. Greeks did it because they fubared their whole society before.

motohagiography• 2 months ago

we should import it as a POPE.md skill and see if it meaningfully alters reasoning and results.

block_dagger• 2 months ago

I wonder if they used AI to write or edit any of this.

nachox9993• 2 months ago

what do you think?

dsign• 2 months ago

Yaii! Nice. I liked this one, and I hope the popes keep at it. I'm not in bed with Faith, but there is a point in life when one must accept certain things. Mine, now, are that we are in a time of cultural decline. Not because lack of access to culture, but simply because culture is last in line after all the many forms of culture-free entertainment, and oh god we have so many of those. With the advent of AI, people will simply outsource more of their thinking and do less of their own. Which means there's a serious risk that we Homo sapiens will cede our relevance, or at the very least, that humanism's marriage with progress will come to an end. That saying that of all things the measure is Man ought to become the domain of Faith in a future where we build souls more lofty than our own.

russellbeattie• 2 months ago

It makes me angry that people are taking this seriously. Reading this screed would require having to continually parse out the generally loathsome Catholic ideology and dogma from whatever insight it might contain. I have no desire to even try.

The Catholic Church is not anywhere close to being a neutral institution who will be writing something like this in good faith (no pun intended). This is an organization based on prejudice, subjugation and outright delusion built on literally millennia of persecution. All of their observations will be made from the standpoint that their worldview is the only correct one, which is unacceptable in every way.

For example, ChatGPT will quickly and efficiently answer all your questions about how and where to get a safe abortion, including pros and cons, history and other specifics. This is something the Church is vehemently opposed to on principle. Anything else they have to say on the topic is therefore irrelevant.

I guarantee that whatever AI doom they're warning about will never be anywhere close to the damage the continued existence of the Catholic Church causes and will continue to cause in the future.

Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't know history nor read the headlines of the past several decades.

Hey, I love it when Bob from Chicago tells Trump to go to hell, but beyond that I couldn't care less what he or the truly horrific religion he leads thinks about anything, let alone new technology.

elzbardico4• 2 months ago

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

MASNeo• 2 months ago

The church has arguably used technology progress to its advantage, repeatedly. I cannot wait what the Magnifica Humanitas will start. Will Musk respond by making Grok more faithful, what will be the Leonardo DaVinci of our times for future generations to admire, will the Vatican research if God can express himself in LLM?

Paracompact5• 2 months ago

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.

popcorncowboy• 2 months ago

"To the manifest glory of Rome, greatest of all cities, forever shall it stand" - circa the collapse of Roman empire. Or something like it.

NGL it sounds like so much bleating of the sheep standing outside the abattoir.

abrenuntio• 2 months ago

For a good Catholic (Dominican) summary of the encyclical:

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

singiamtel• 2 months ago

Looking forward to the VaticanGPT that speaks in holy canon

michahell• 2 months ago

Talk about making things hard to read. Also, Holy See? Whoever thought that was aptly named? The Holy StumbleUpon would be better as they always stumble things after everyone realized before them 5-100 years ago. Nonetheless good that religion also offers some of their infinite wisdom regarding AI to steer those who take any value in most of their gibberish

jkman• 2 months ago

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

dang• 2 months ago

Related ongoing thread:

Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48270497 - May 2026 (50 comments)

Also:

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187201 - May 2026 (235 comments)

Others? (I seem to recall others.)

beders• 2 months ago

Nobody should take the Pope seriously or the Vatican.

An organization that - for centuries - has actively protected child molesters, has sat on billions of dollars, has sided with Nazis, has been involved in multiple fraud and money laundering cases has absolutely zero standing to advice anybody on anything.

phorkyas82• 2 months ago

..just like any other government?

hn_throwaway_9912• 2 months ago

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.

For example, if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century, this appears to me largely a consequence of the fact that industrial technology at the time was both incredibly productive compared to what came before but it also required legions of humans to operate it. Ford didn't pay his workers more out of the goodness of his heart, 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. 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.

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. But this is not a rhetorical question - I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong.

Animats5• 2 months ago

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

itchingsphynx• 2 months ago

Indeed, the Industrial Revolution was the topic of a previous encyclical, which inspired this one.

RERUM NOVARUM ENCYCLICAL OF POPE LEO XIII ON CAPITAL AND LABOR

http://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docume...

hn_throwaway_9912• 2 months ago

Thanks! This answer was actually the one that I found most helpful. I feel like some of the other responses to my comment were talking about how we regulate lots of other tech, but that wasn't really my point - I understand that we regulate tech, but only when it becomes "economically convenient".

But your last sentence "Electric utilities did not end up ruling the world" really struck me. It's a great point, and TBH I don't really actually know why electric utilities didn't end up becoming more powerful. Time for me to go research the early history of electrification.

Edit: This reddit thread on AskHistorians has good info and links: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8373wv/how_f... . Again, thank you very much for your mention of electricity, because it looks like it actually was a pretty severe power struggle between electric companies and governments at large trying to regulate them, and if anything it has given me some hope that maybe "the people" will eventually win out.

insane_dreamer• 2 months ago

Right. And the only way to stop AI from ruling the world is to regulate it like a utility.

jonahx• 2 months ago

Nice example.

I wonder though... it seems the tech behind electricity has no moat, broadly speaking, and so was commoditized. Whereas if one of the AI companies finds a proprietary breakthrough algorithm that won't be the case... at least until others catch up.

owenmakes• 2 months ago

Yes, but because electricity is mostly produced by gas turbines, and you could say oil & gas companies do rule the world. Utilities mostly take care of the distribution, and are naturally monopolic/oligopolic businesses which is why in most countries, they are regulated (or owned) by the state.

ndrh4• 2 months ago

Although there is not necessarily a cognate from the past to accurately describe what AI becomes in the future, I wonder if electric companies were once thought to have "better" electricity than others, like how AI companies have proprietary algorithms which are all basically very similar.

We may arrive at a point where standardized AI is a commodity, and since it was developed using reams of public data, proprietary rights become severely limited. (Personally, this is beyond my current level of optimism in law, ethics and humanity.)

Schlagbohrer• 2 months ago

Fossil Fuel companies did end up ruling the world for a century (ongoing).

jackbravo• 2 months ago

Nice answer! And thinking about it, isn't the telephone and maybe also the internet in the same category. In México the telephone company was first a public company and then a private one that made our biggest billionare (Carlos Slim), so maybe not so much here :-p, but you can argue that both have been a net benefit for the whole world.

pizzaman1• 2 months ago

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.

dogcomplex5• 2 months ago

Correct. Policy can do a whole lot for building (or suppressing) early development of a technology.

Once it has already spread far and wide with clear economic pathways though? Perhaps less so.

nashashmi2• 2 months ago

At the same time, it was a cartel of industries that felt threatened by the emerging green technology and became one of its greatest opponents. Government policy only meant the official loss of one side to the other.

We will never reverse CO2 emissions until humanity entertains itself less, spends less time in tourism, and does fewer unproductive recreational activities like drinking and drugs. Only then will waste go down significantly and utility go up. And only then will we reverse co2 emissions.

ndrh4• 2 months ago

Kind of terrifying that "we may" turn the tide on CO2 is an acceptable level of optimism.

If we don't, we all die. it isn't something to leave up to mindless market mechanics.

beloch• 2 months ago

Check out Charles C. Man's "The Wizard and the Prophet". In this book, a wizard is someone who approaches a problem with technological innovation. A prophet is someone who approaches it with societal transformation, usually involving sacrifice by the masses.

e.g. Malthus (and others) observed that human populations were growing exponentially, but crop-land is a finite resource. Humanity seemed doomed to starvation in just a few short generations. As a prophet, Malthus tried to get people to stop having so many children. Other prophets repeated this effort multiple times, always warning of an apocalypse that was just a few decades away. Meanwhile, wizards tried spreading bat guano on fields and started breeding new varieties of wheat, rice, etc.. The result has been a continual stream of innovation that has led to the world's food supply growing faster than its population. Yet, the warning of the prophets remains sound. There's an ultimate limit.

Humans seem hardwired to both be and love prophets while totally failing to follow their advice. Prophets have been warning us to reduce our energy use, eat local, bicycle everywhere, etc.. Some of us do some of these things some of the time, but not nearly enough to make a real difference. Wizards have gotten solar and wind to the point where they're economically viable enough to supplant coal and internal combustion engines, and that is making a huge difference.

Prophets are valuable for identifying problems, such as AI, but their demands for abstinence and self-sacrifice usually don't gain much traction. It's when the wizards show up that things usually start cooking.

Prophets have identified AI as a problem and are calling for limits, but history has shown that not nearly enough people are likely to listen. How might a wizard approach the problem in a way that lets people keep doing their thing without the world ending? The pace of AI development is so quick that we also have to ask, is there enough time for the wizards to do their thing?

---------------

EDIT: On the bright side, while the rapidity of the AI revolution seems utterly unprecedented, so too is the concentration of power in those who control it. The prophets really only need to convince or coerce a handful of billionaires in order to buy the world's wizards years or decades.

asdfologist• 2 months ago

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

luc_• 2 months ago

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.

zb• 2 months ago

CFC refrigerants are the canonical example.

hn_throwaway_9912• 2 months ago

But I think the action regulating CFCs is kinda what I'm talking about. As a consumer in the US, I don't ever remember having to sacrifice on my refrigerator or A/C - heck, I generally remember those appliances going down a lot in price from the 80s to the early 00s.

So my argument is not that we can't regulate technologies, but that we only do so when it becomes "technologically convenient". I think the comparison of CFCs to fossil fuels also highlights this point. CFCs were used in a relatively small area of the economy, and replacing them was pretty easy, so not a lot of regulatory will was required. Contrarily, the entire world economy runs on fossil fuels, so replacing them is an enormous task, and as one example you get tons of powerful invested interests pushing back. I honestly don't remember any crazy people shouting "the ozone hole is just an elite conspiracy", but you hear that all the time with respect to global warming.

My fear with AI is that it is such a powerful tech (or is at least viewed as such) that the powers that be are scared of being surpassed by another country/company if they slow down.

slashdave2• 2 months ago

Genetic manipulation of humans, both indirect and direct

Ferret7446• 2 months ago

"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.

hn_throwaway_9912• 2 months ago

"Nuclear weapons don't kill people. People kill people". So obviously we should let everyone order their own personal nuke from Amazon and let the market sort it out, or something.

Technology concentrates power. Yes, people may be the problem, but "taming technology" is obviously not a "flawed premise". There is a big difference between people having the power to bludgeon their neighbors with sticks and stones compared to blowing up entire continents with nukes.

vrganj• 2 months ago

People kill people using guns.

firearms accounted for 78% of all mechanisms used in homicides between 2018 and 2025.

https://ammo.com/research/murders-by-weapon-type

FigurativeVoid• 2 months ago

Technology shapes behavior. To ignore that is to ignore history.

Paracompact5• 2 months ago

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...

rluna828• 2 months ago

Many regulatory regimes ebb and flow as societies rediscover from first principles why something was banned (or not banned) by the people before them.

sdellis2• 2 months ago

The USA is currently undoing their previous PFAS regulations and declaring "game on" for poisoning the populace. And who doesn't want Glysophate on their cereal?!? The "free market" has done such a great job protecting us from corporate poisoning. /s

flir• 2 months ago

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.

jedimastert• 2 months ago

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.

underlipton• 2 months ago

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.

ajmurmann• 2 months ago

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.

BigTTYGothGF• 2 months ago

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?

Aeolun3• 2 months ago

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.

VanTheBrand• 2 months ago

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

CHB0403085482• 2 months ago

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.

mistrial93• 2 months ago

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

overfeed2• 2 months ago

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.

sdellis2• 2 months ago

I think the 22 million people who died in World War I, for reasons there is no consensus on, would contest your claim. And that is just a fraction of a fraction of all humans, with their own stories and dreams and loved ones, who have died (and continue to die) in vain to firearms and explosives.

jjfoooo4• 2 months ago

But there's not an everyday use case for firearms and explosives for the average person. There's civilian, everyday task that would be easier were better firearms and explosives available

cjalmeida• 2 months ago

One could argue the death toll of WW I and WW II would not be possible without large scale manufacturing of firearms and explosives.

jjmarr• 2 months ago

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.

applicative2• 2 months ago

This took quite a while. The idea had kicked around before, but basically, when Israel was thought to have one, the Soviets invented 'nonproliferation'. This was the theme of the hysteria that led to their triggering the 1967 war. God forbid the Jews have the capacity to protect themselves.

scrivna• 2 months ago

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.

garte• 2 months ago

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.

jcattle3• 2 months ago

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.

ruicraveiro2• 2 months ago

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.

iNic• 2 months ago

- 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

joshdick• 2 months ago

I think new forms of media, like radio and television, are worthwhile comparisons to AI. They were hugely influential technologies in the 20th century, making a small number of media companies hugely powerful. That sounds a lot like AI.

The difference to AI is that we regulated the heck out of radio and television companies. I think this is evidence in favor of heavily regulating AI.

ruicraveiro2• 2 months ago

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.

simonebrunozzi• 2 months ago

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.

bandrami• 2 months ago

Also the "five dollar day" was kind of a marketing gimmick too. Your daily pay was still $2.50, but if you stayed two years, went to church on Sundays, tithed, didn't go to bars, didn't go to union meetings, kept your house clean, and didn't send remittances overseas (and he had people checking on all of these things), you got the rest as a bonus in the form of savings bonds.

applicative2• 2 months ago

He even advised V I Lenin to emulate the same structure.

keybored3• 2 months ago

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.

epsteingpt• 2 months ago

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.

jgreid• 2 months ago

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.

wang_li• 2 months ago

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.

aaarrm• 2 months ago

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

bm371613• 2 months ago

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...

unitof• 2 months ago

Printing press, depending on your view of taming.

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

owenversteeg• 2 months ago

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.

bedrio• 2 months ago

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 :/

pyuser583• 2 months ago

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.

autaut• 2 months ago

Human cloning, bio weapons are two fast examples

riccardomc3• 2 months ago

I wonder how many HN users asked their AI of choice for a quick summary...

embedding-shape• 2 months ago

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 :)

jdelfuego3• 2 months ago

I find the Amish approach to technology a very interesting one. As I understand it, they're not in principle "against" modern technology, but they 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, which in my opinion is much healthy than our free-for-all.

In this respect I find this encyclical quite lacking. It makes interesting points, and will give food for thought for people working in/with AI who might not otherwise have been exposed to these kinds of concepts. But one would expect, from a Catholic encyclical, an exposition of the principles of common good from a Catholic perspective. 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. Nothing in the document couldn't have been written by a secular philosopher. It gives the uncomfortable impression of someone arriving late to the party, so to speak, trying hard to fit in.

The answer to the question "is this technology good or not?" can ultimately only be answered in reference to ends: it's good insofar as it helps achieve the end which is sought. The common good of the community, which AI might either help or hinder, depends ultimately on what is the the end, or purpose, of man. And it is about _this_ that the Catholic church claims to have a definite answer, a true set of propositions regarding the origin and destiny of man, not achieved by human ingenuity but directly revealed by God. Whatever can be labelled Catholic will reference that supernatural claim to divine authority; yet none of that is present in this text. It remains an interesting exercise in thought on AI and other topics, but nothing here indicates that those reflections are Catholic.

Paracompact5• 2 months ago

[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.

jdelfuego3• 2 months ago

Fair. Also far from an expert on the Amish. Your comment made me think in two things. One, as another [1] comment on this thread mentions, some technologies end up in some sort of 'background', used by everyone and not receiving any thought from anyone. Maybe that's some sort of practical proof of their "neutrality", in the sense of being something that satisfies a simple human need with demanding the sacrifice of part of our humanity? I don't know. The other: maybe their self-imposed isolation (physical, cultural, linguistic, etc ) affords them a greater independence with respect to contemporary politics and vibes?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48271324

hn_throwaway_9912• 2 months ago

Could you explain by what you mean regarding "Counterpoint: buttons"? I wasn't previously aware of how buttons were viewed among the Amish, and all the results I found were varying degrees of "it's complicated", e.g.: https://www.amish365.com/buttons-amish/

And while I would agree that stating "The decision is a purposeful one, governed by the criterion of the common good of the community" may be over-romanticizing it, it does seem to me that the Amish are evaluating the use of buttons according to their core principles. I.e. the whole reason it's a bit complicated is that the Amish universally avoid flashy displays of vanity, and many uses of buttons, especially in the Victorian era, highlighted that, but that plain/simple/hidden buttons aren't that different from hook-and-eye fasteners, which are universally accepted.

hn_throwaway_9912• 2 months ago

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.

kendallpark2• 2 months ago

> 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

Agreed, it's an ahistorical take. The Western secular concept of "human dignity" has roots in the Abrahamic religions. Not the other way around.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-1590-9_...

jdelfuego3• 2 months ago

I think I get your point. The issue with which I disagree is that it remains a principle of Catholic thought that it avails nothing to man being created in the image of God without conversion and grace. A piece of moral guidance coming from the Pope which remains at a natural level (i.e. the danger of becoming "less human" which you identify as Leo's point) runs dangerously close to ignoring that the Catholic faith insists that the end of man is supernatural, not natural only. It'd be a good thing if the human dignity of some is preserved thanks to the discussions this encyclical might raise; but that's not enough, for "what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world and lose himself and cast away himself?” (Luke 9:25).

My issue with this encyclical is that, interesting discussion on ethical and philosophical aspects of AI notwithstanding, I still would like to hear the Catholic voice on AI: a voice that actually believes that man is not for this world, and that only grace through faith in Christ can save him. And this is not it, I think.

zdw2• 2 months ago

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.

andrepd6• 2 months ago

Not about AI, here is an interesting point

176. In the development of her doctrine, the Church has gradually come to a deeper awareness of the gravity of these issues. It is true that past events cannot be judged anachronistically, as though the moral criteria that matured over time had always been available. Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery. In antiquity and the Middle Ages many individuals and even ecclesiastical institutions had slaves. Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to requests from Sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, the enslavement of “infidels.” [174] It was only in the nineteenth century that a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated, notably under Pope Leo XIII. [175] This development offers a clear example of the Church’s growth in understanding the perennial truths of Revelation that she safeguards. Although there was not always consistency in practice — given that slavery was long tolerated before being unequivocally condemned — there has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized. This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached. [176] It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.

As he surely understands but does not quite bear to be completely honest about it, the Church has only been a humanist institution for the past ~150ish years. The history before is bloody, and brutal, from genocide and slavery to wholesale cultural destruction, from its very beginnings.

Followed by a very keen remark:

178. Even today, colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information. Entire regions, especially those marked by structural fragility and limited geopolitical relevance, are currently subjected to a new mindset of extraction: that of health data, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps and demographic information. These have become the new “rare earths” of power: vital data which, once aggregated and analyzed, can be used to train predictive models, guide investment strategies, anticipate crises and, above all, determine who and what is deemed to matter. Those who control the health data of entire peoples — often collected under the pretext of aid, research or innovation — possess a structural leverage over the future, for they can shape needs and markets. They can also decide, before others, to whom medicines, investments and protections will be allocated. Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: to ensure that shared knowledge becomes a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance. This requires restoring to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom and for whose benefit. Otherwise, the digital age will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form.

glkindlmann• 2 months ago

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.

TacticalCoder2• 2 months ago

1. Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur ...

1200+ upvotes as I enter this comment.

nickagliano• 2 months ago

I can’t believe there’s a Pope from Chicago quoting Gandalf in an encyclical about AI.

jimmy766153• 2 months ago

There are a lot of great aspects of the pope's writing. The most important one probably being that a spiritual leader understands that there is a large technological and societal change on the horizon. I still quite often experience the well described phenomenon of talking to "normal people" (my family in Europe for example) that seem to think that AI is gonna be roughly as important as the electric car and is not gonna change much about our world.

The major thing that Magnifica Humanitas is lacking in imo, is a vision for the machines themselves. The pope treats them exclusively as lifeless tools, and while I think that this is most likely true for current LLMs, we should think more about the limit of what is going to happen in the next 20 years than being overly focused on the current capability level. To me it seems rather likely that we will soon have machines that plausibly experience consciousness. I think there will be a long period in which we still have no better definition of consciousness than we currently have, and so the question of whether they are actually conscious will be a heavily debated one. 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? Was Jesus really just the savior of humans, or is there something that unites all intelligent, experiencing beings?

Probably these questions sound ridiculous to some, it is very against the intuitions that we have had so far, but I think these are the most important questions right now. Job loss is a practical problem, not a spiritual one.

jvanderbot5• 2 months ago

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.

ShinyLeftPad4• 2 months ago

You are the reason your children are alive, do they fall under husbandry?

An animal that defies a human and becomes an unwilling tool is food or eliminated

Some animals are protected legally. Animal welfare in general is an important topic. (But it's irrelevant because LLMs do not provide food that's key to human survival.)

Your logic sounds like the logic of slaveowners back then. Remember how it turned out?

panza• 2 months ago

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).

laichzeit0• 2 months ago

Interesting. Did Neanderthals have souls? We know we interbred with them. The question is then whether earlier hominids also had souls. Was "ensoulment" a gradual phenomenon or did it arise spontaneously? If it was gradual does it mean at some point there was a "cross-over" period where we interbred with soulless hominids? Interbreeding becomes philosophically awkward if ensouled and non-ensouled beings could mate and produce offspring. I don't think it's clear at all even what has a soul and what does not.

nathanh49032• 2 months ago

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.

severine• 2 months ago

Appreciate the answer, but then I have some questions:

So, according to that theory, god could substantiate again, this time into an "imago dei computer", giving the computer "machinity"?

A computer that is god, makes divine stuff and is, for example, at one point unplugged, but comes online miraculously three days after, etc?

That would be Jesus-like, but we could posit an Eve/Adam-like computer, would that be imago dei too?

Has god become only human, or has it become other animals, plants, or things?

Not trying to be facetious, just unable to follow some thinking when it would involve observable miracles on earth.

fumeux_fume• 2 months ago

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.

ziotom78• 2 months ago

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

OrangeMusic• 2 months ago

Not sure if it's really "highly debatable" that an entity that appears conscious is therefore conscious.

The Chinese room thought experiment is obviously flawed to me. It's not the "computer" that is conscious, it's the running software.

basisword2• 2 months ago

> 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'.

deaton2• 2 months ago

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.

lumost• 2 months ago

The great fear of our current incarnation in AI is that it will create a permanent class divide between those who own the AI and those the AI commands. There may not be a "go to college and get a better job" option in the future if AI eats the majority of knowledge work. The traditional "invisible hand" only matters if we still live in a capitalist society.

akomtu• 2 months ago

111. I wish to address a special appeal to those who develop artificial intelligence. <...>

He addresses the Catholics, appeals to their faith, but how many of those behind AI have any faith? Many, maybe most of them, are proudly atheists and even nihilists, and they can't be reasoned with on the grounds of faith. The Pope says that God created man in his image, and warns that the technocratic paradigm sees humans as machines to be optimized, but isn't it what the crowd behind AI truly believes in?

plnii2• 2 months ago

Well i don't plan to read the long and rambling text, but i will use this to promote an idea on how to start regulating AI.

Start with video. No one needs AI creating videos with humans in it. But it will eventually get so good that we won’t be able to trust any video. And people will create videos of others to destroy them, which is already happening.

I’d further suggest that it be illegal to create any fake image of a person without their consent. That consent must literally be for every picture and every frame in which their likeness appears. Not one frame can be altered without their consent.

sambuccid• 2 months ago

Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data. In a context where the wealth of nations depends increasingly on knowledge and technology, when these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods

Wow, this feels very Hacker ethic-ky

theologan• 2 months ago

Pope Leo, the most bodacious philosophizer of the Holy See, is totally right.

nachox9993• 2 months ago

aguante el Papa

sawirricardo• 2 months ago

If anyone interested in the "slop" version of this discussion https://magnificahumanitas.sawirstudio.com

Magnifica Humanitas

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