I'm an atheist, but most of what I have heard from popes in recent years seems like sound and possibly needed advice.
Also, even though I feel AI and robotics are very important for progressing humanity, I think that much of the world has long since lost a proper sense of intrinsic human value. It's really gone from overt exploitation to slightly more mild exploitation where we pretend the system is really merit based.
And as AI and robotics remove the need for human labor, I hope that someone like the pope can convince people that we should value human beings inherently and more fairly. Inexpensive labor and intelligence should make this feasible.
I hope the speech isn't something dumb like "remember only humans have souls" because I think that's really premature and pretty obvious that AIs are not people at this point.
The really convincing and somewhat deeper simulations of humans are probably only a few years down the line though.
Which comes back to the Rovelli dualism article that was on the front page before. I think we should not be in a hurry to try to duplicate humans in depth (such as imitating emotions, pain, stream of consciousness, self-preservation, etc).
It's just completely unnecessary to go that far to get useful AI, and obviously unethical to subject a real human emulation to slavery.
This is a great point, further to your point on AI. Another perhaps worse offender is our focus on "the economy", at times the focus is always on "what about the economy?!" Forgetting "the economy" is merely a tool intended to improve the human condition. Sometimes I feel people lose sight of this original intention, be it unintentional or otherwise.
When Media Talking Heads say “the economy,” what they are really talking about is just rich people’s investments and old people’s retirement. Basically, for reporters, the economy = only stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
I think you’re being unfairly down-voted. While a lot of people here seek out more news, what I see normal people exposed to on TV is basically that – stocks, and if gas prices are high, that and quarterly jobs reports discussed in relation to stocks. To a first approximation, “did your retirement find gain or lose?” really sums it up for all but my father-in-law and the two of us. This is why it’s such a common trope not to think politicians talk about the real economy because your lived experience really varies based on how much stocks affect your life.
Unfortunately some approximation of a human emulation (a slice of it) comes out of emulating Common Crawl. They do have neurons for emotions because those are necessary to predict next token.
Whether that implies anything about subjective experience... I think that question is unknowable by definition. Either substrate matters (in which case things have to be made of carbon for some reason?), or it doesn't (in which case... God only knows what that implies. Windows XP might have subjective experience).
Is that really the position of the Catholic Church or what is a caricature of what people think it believes? The nice thing about the Catholic Church is that required beliefs have a formal spec. For something has important as this, there would be a clear and unambiguous references. Catholic Catechism / church council / papal encyclical. Do you have a quotable reference?
What I can find is only Aquinas that all living things have souls (anima).
Humans have rational human souls. Animals have animal souls...
Descartes believed that only humans have souls. But that definitely represents a clear alternative to traditional Catholic beliefs. Many modern philosophers might argue that only humans have "consciousness" in a way that implies animals do not have souls.
I've recently started listening to a podcast from a retired Anglican Bishop, "Ask N.T. Wright Anything".
IIUC, he claims that the concept of "soul" is something that the wasn't really present in the Jewish worldview of Jesus' time. Rather, it's something that later theologians (Aquinas?) picked up from Greek philosophy (Platonism?).
I wonder if that means Wright would have a different take on the whole "only humans have souls" idea. (Beyond just differing on the choice of terminology, I mean.)
> I feel AI and robotics are very important for progressing humanity
Why? And what does “progressing” mean, exactly? I’m not trying to be combative or flippant, I’m genuinely asking because the rest of your comment is a great argument for the opposite view.
I’d argue humanity will “progress” when we collectively learn to treat each other and our environment with respect and care. When we have a sense of community with our fellow people instead of placing undue value on individuals and personal gain.
Technological advance could be a boon for humanity if those were our shared values, but as it stands it seems pretty obvious that what it does instead is consolidate power in the hands of those who should never have it.
We already have the technology and resources to improve the lives of everyone, they’re just not fairly distributed.
Martin Heidegger discussed it already. Technology isn't just a tool, but the way we shape the World. The question with technology and AI should not be only "what should we do with it", but beside it, "what does technology do with us"
> I hope the speech isn't something dumb like "remember only humans have souls" because I think that's really premature and pretty obvious that AIs are not people at this point.
It really is en vogue to have this attitude that everyone in church is stupid for believing but it's a huge disservice to yourself to not understand the Vatican is full of the equivalent of the best PhDs sourced from all over the world centered around their specific topic of interest, theology.
> the Vatican is full of the equivalent of the best PhDs sourced from all over the world centered around their specific topic of interest, theology.
I’m sure there are Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings superfans who have put in a PhD level of time and research into their favorite “topic of interest” as well.
I have not! Don’t get me wrong, I have great respect for people who have spent extreme time and energy into researching anything, including works of fiction. I’m sure they are not dumb and are immensely more well read and focused on their area than I am!
The joke was meant to poke a little fun at superfans and not to belittle.
Yeah and if there was a global organization of Harry Potter PhDs that selected the best from all over the world for hundreds of years I'd probably think those guys were smart too and probably wouldn't have surface level takes about adjacent topics.
Given what we know about the origins of Harry Potter, you basically proved ryandrake’s point. Just because you put time into something does not make it worthy of attention.
Religions’ primary purpose is to facilitate tribal bonds, not experimentally seek truths and evaluate data for consistency. That is why almost all start with a set of tenets or immutable “facts”, such as the existence of an immortal component of a person (usually called a soul).
“I hope X isn’t Y” is far from the same thing as “X is Y”. Seems like you’ve put words in their mouth so you can argue against some anti-religious straw man.
If I meet someone and I tell them "I hope you're not dumb", would they assume I think they are dumb or should they take it as purely whimsical? It's also funny you got stuck on that vs on the document I shared, while dissing me for pointing it out.
Intelligence is orthogonal to the tendency to blind obedience to some dogma, or its practical indistinguishable behavioral equivalence no matter what one actually think inwardly.
It doesn’t take a high academia credential to develop a critical mindset about established institutions, and quite the opposite seems more likely.
> I don't think religions should appeal to outsiders
You'd have made strange bedfellows with cranky Catholics who thought so too, 60 years ago after Vatican II's modernization reforms.
> You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing).
Hold on a sec, you ought to clarify what you mean by "gain more members" - the Amish have a very high birthrate, averaging 6.1 kids per woman. While Unitarians are below the replacement rate.
> Games which chase inclusivity often fail, because the very people they appeal to don't actually want to play video games.
How is this old culture-wars canard still being rolled out? A glance at the character rosters on the Game of the Year winners for the past 10 years proves you wrong.
For better or worse, the Catholic church has shaped most of western philosophy for at least 1500 years, including topics not necessarily related to existence of a deity or belief in that existence. It's not surprising that some of their thoughts seem sound and consistent with your ethics.
> I'm an atheist too, but I don't think religions should appeal to outsiders.
Why not? When i was an agnostic I liked the Catholic church as an institution (and many other religious organisations too).
> The idea is that by relaxing norms, he wants to gain more members.
That is a ridiculously cynical take. People join the church, and even more the priesthood because they believe. Why would they corrupt the message to get the numbers up?
I do not know what norms have been relaxed by the church anyway? Changing the mass used by the majority of Catholics? Its happened many times historically.
> But it doesn't actually go that way. It alienates the core, and the people for whom compromises are made don't want to join anyway.
I see no sign of alienation except in small fringe groups (so not the "core").
> You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing).
You seem to be responding to OP line by line instead of understanding their overall point.
OP doesn't appear to be saying Catholicism ought not to grow - rather that they believe trying to appeal to a wider audience than already is interested in religion is likely to fail, or worse, backfire.
The Sims chased inclusivity and was a huge success: the top selling PC game of all time for many years, making billions of dollars, with more than 50% female players, in spite of the fact that you claim the people it appeals to don't actually want to play video games.
Your defense of Gamergate and attack on inclusive games is ignorant and absurd, because the millions of girls and women who play The Sims and other inclusive games simply don't want to play the terribly designed un-original non-inclusive video games designed for teenaged boy incels that Gamergate assholes and their apologists like you thought should be the only kind of video games.
Edit:
joe_mamba: Your revisionist attempt at Gamergate apologetics didn’t address my point. The Sims proves a huge, profitable audience exists outside your 'core gamer' model. Claiming inclusivity kills games doesn't survive even basic counterexamples.
The claim "people those games appeal to don’t play games" is factually wrong. The Sims proves the audience is broader than they claim, that shows inclusivity is not a liability, it can be a strength.
Gamergate-style thinking is tied to a narrow, exclusionary view of gaming. The "activists" trying to inject their ideology were misogynistic incels. And GamerGate was not "co-opted by parasites" after two years, it was started by sociopathic parasites from the very beginning, and any revisionist claim that it had two years of legitimacy is a pathetic attempt at reputation washing.
I worked at Maxis/EA on The Sims. Inclusivity -- including same-sex relationships -- wasn’t "activists injecting narratives", it was part of the core design process. And EA absolutely did not see its audience as "not women" -- women were a major part of the target market.
The Sims didn’t succeed in spite of that -- it succeeded because it understood a broader audience than the narrow "core gamer" model you’re describing. The billions of dollars EA made because they successfully and intentionally expanded their customer base to include women proves you're wrong.
How EA’s $5 billion Sims empire has become a magnet for female talent in a male-dominated field:
EA's intentional inclusivity began long before Sweet Baby, by at least 16 years before Gamergate in 2014, and made them billions of dollars, and I kept the receipts:
>This is a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 3, 8/7/98.
>On page 5, he wrote the following comments about same sex relationships in the game:
>The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitly going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to 100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world’s population). It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other people.
>This is a PDF file with a scan of the handwritten notes, and a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 5, 8/31/98.
>On page 4, there is a section about Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships, which reflects Don's suggestion to change the design to support same sex relationships.
>Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships
>To be outlined in 9/30 Live Mode deliverable.
>Currently the game only allows heterosexual romance. This will not be the only type available – it just reflects the early stages of implementation. Will is reviewing the code and will make recommendations for how to implement homosexual romance as well.
Gamergate was not about SIMS or games popular to women, it was about activists and fake journalists co-opting narrative over entire gaming industry including those whose customer base were not women, so they can inject their activism and identity politics in them. The proof is in the puddin with many of those games touched by sweet baby inc and such activists whose sole focus was being DEI, failing massively and losing the studios hundreds of millions. See the recent Mixtape game.
MOST games lose huge amounts of money, and the "many" games you -- without a shred of evidence -- claim DEI caused to lose hundreds of millions are overwhelmingly offset by one single game, The Sims, earning the studio many billions of dollars, continuing to this day.
And which itself inspired and gave permission and financial justification for many other inclusive games, indie to AAA, by proving there was a huge female audience for games, 14 years before Gamergate got it all wrong by attacking women while pretending it was about journalism.
So of course Gamergate didn't mean to be about The Sims, because The Sims totally undermines its claims. That's why they avoided mentioning or attacking The Sims, pretending it didn't exist and have millions of female players, and why you bristle and bluster and bullshit without evidence when I bring it up.
What receipts do you have to prove the brash claims of your Gamergate apologetics, to counter the design document receipts and first hand experience in the industry developing successful inclusive games popular with gays and girls and even boys, that I just shared?
This video essay by Alexander Avila is right on, and the comments are wonderful:
>It's no doubt The Sims is an influential video game. In this video essay, we're going to talk about its GAY influence, particularly the role it plays in queer people's identity development. Enjoy the presentation as we go over how the Sims influenced a generation in letting them live out their Tumblr dreams...
Thanks for posting those PDFs! It is a rare insight into the often secret world of AAA game development. I can’t believe people are still hung up on and defending Gamergate after all these years. Absolutely unhinged.
Especially pathetic and revealing when they still try to argue it was "Ackchyually" about "unethical journalism". Yet look where we are today, and the streaming influencer "journalists" they follow.
The Sims wasn't just inclusive -- it was chock full of social commentary, from its simulation mechanics to its object descriptions to its storytelling support. What Ian Bogost calls "Procedural Rhetoric": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric
>Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.
>Bogost argues that games make strong claims about how the world works by the processes they embody. Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word. Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a game to convey a particular ideology. [...]
>Frasca mentions the simulation games SimCity and The Sims as examples of procedural rhetoric and uses the handling of same-sex relationships as an example: "[T]he way that The Sims's designers dealt with gay couples was not just through representation (for example, by allowing players to put gay banners on their yards), they also decided to build a rule about it. In this game, same-gender relationships are possible. ... By incorporating this rule, the designers are showing tolerance towards this sexual option."
If Gamergate were really about "ideology in games", The Sims should have been its ground zero central target, and they would have been attacking journalists who wrote about it positively. It wasn’t, and they weren't. That tells you their stated concern wasn't the real one. It was all about attacking and excluding women from day one.
Gamergate was a dry run for MAGA. It pioneered the same online tactics later used by the Trumpist right: coordinated harassment, grievance politics, memes, conspiracy theories, anti-"SJW" culture war framing, and the mobilization of angry online communities into a political movement.
Steve Bannon and Breitbart recognized its potential early, refined and amplified it, and used it to recruit and radicalize a generation of online activists who later flowed into MAGA politics.
Many researchers, journalists, and historians now describe Gamergate as a precursor or template for the alt-right, QAnon, and Trump-era online organizing.
Encyclopædia Britannica -- Gamergate entry: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gamergate-campaign ("Bannon and Yiannopoulos would use that platform to draw Gamergate supporters into the larger alt-right movement.")
A cursory look at the fall of extreme poverty across the world, over the last few decades, is enough to refute the idea that the world is largely based on exploitation.
I agree that things are getting better, but your sentiment feels a bit premature; exploitation is still alive and well in many supply chains. The people who manufacture the products you buy often live much harder lives than you.
You assume that exploitation and material improvement can not coexist. You can be exploited just as well, by that I mean you're not getting a fair share for what you contribute to the system.
A big chunk of it was the improvement in China, which started with a recovery from a previous disastrous decline.
The last 100+ years have also been atypical. Two world wars which disrupted economies in ways that lead to redistribution, huge changes from the end of European empires, the fall of the Soviet Union and communism, and technological advances that automated work but created may new jobs.
I would be very reluctant to assume a continuing trend from that.
Has wealth been distributed from exploiter to exploited? Doesn't seem like it. It just seems like the 99% are being exploited a little more evenhandedly.
That’s really depending on which scale one use. Those who define the terms like "rich" and "poor" are already setting the frame to let the narrative almost only able to go into their specific envisioned perspectives.
I suggest a look at the recent economic development of Bangladesh, if you want something less abstract to illustrate the point that the reduction in poverty is very noticeable.
You would think that a great reduction in extreme poverty would give people pause, but it is almost always barely acknowledged. The strange conclusion is that people who tell you they care the most about poverty do not actually care about it in the slightest. It is just a vehicle for their resentment.
My last impression of Bangladesh was the fire accord stuff, i.e. build emergency exits and get garment factory owners to stop locking their workers inside since they keep going up in flames.
Maybe they've grown. Is Bangladesh at the stage where they outsource labour to other countries yet?
Bangladesh's Human Development Index (HDI) has shown a consistent upward trend, reaching 0.685 in the 2023/2024 report, ranking 130th out of 193 countries. It remains in the "Medium Human Development" category, marking a 72.5% increase in HDI value since 1990 due to significant improvements in life expectancy, education, and GNI per capita.
Human value has rarely existed. Pre-industrial world didn't have much human value. Your were a lord or a serf. There was not much in between. A lord's life had value, a serf's value was nothing.
Post-industrial world needed human capital. Hence, the need for human value. If you notice most of this "need" has arisen out of then need for industrial expansion.
Post-AI will be interesting. Will we go back to pre-industrial or get something better.
I don't think this is factually accurate. What it really boils down is a question of scale of societies.
Most of us humans inherently value each other. There are exceptions, and small communities can get nasty. But for the most part, small human communities tend to be supportive and valuing each other.
This really only stops being the case when you get large-scale societies that allow humans to view others through an overly abstract lens. Combine that with an unchecked accumulation of power, and you have the potential for those in power to view the rest as without value.
I agree with you. I recently watched a bunch of videos from a YouTuber 'Mike Okay' and he visits some random, obscure and non-standard countries to travel.
Most of the people he encounters are super friendly, welcoming and willing to bend over backwards to help him out. It's genuine human connection and willingness. He will speak to people from every possible background, including people in the Taliban and honestly at the end of the day, we're all humans and most people respect that.
Things have become blurred with social media, digital life, closed and private nature of the modern world but if you take a step back, you can realize humans are typically, very helpful, friendly and unique characters.
> Pre-industrial world didn't have much human value. Your were a lord or a serf. There was not much in between. A lord's life had value, a serf's value was nothing.
Not true. Serfs had rights that varied a lot between societies and over time. Religions mostly teach a value of human life, and Christianity teaches equal value: "when Adam devlved and Eve span who was then the gentleman", or "the first shall be last and the last shall be first" or "it is easier for a rich map to pass through the eye of the needle".
There were all sorts of people in between. Free people who were not serfs. Skilled people who were members of guilds.
It's telling how blithely you're missing the point of what the pope(s) mean by human value. Their intended meaning is that far gone from modern consciousness, even among people who meant to champion some kind of human value themselves.
They're not talking about the economic value of humans or even the psychological value of humans as subjects with experiences and a right to liberty or care or something. The idea they're trying to recall and reinvigorate is a sense of human value that transcends that temporal, material noise altogether and that is truly universal. It's the human value that welcomed slaves, prostitutes, wretches, merchants and kings as peers in something grander than economy or state or lineage or tribe or creed.
Now, you can make a well-developed case that that's hogwash and that the human value that matters is the one that alleviates suffering or grants liberty or even the one that grants material reward for some virtue or bloodline or whatever, but that's not what these guys are talking about. They mean a human nature that is always there and always worthy, just as much when it's experiencing temporal poverty/suffering/abuse as when it's basking in temporal wealth/success/freedom.
The idea is that Christian or not, Catholic or not, it does good for everyone to think of human value that way and the critique -- for a long time now -- is that for all the flash and glimmer of technology and its material benefits, it sometimes makes it very very easy to forget.
>>> It's the human value that welcomed slaves, prostitutes, wretches, merchants and kings as peers in something grander than economy or state or lineage or tribe or creed.
This sounds a lot like an appeal to democracy, yet it often seems that religion is at odds with democracy in our world. And given the choice between living in a religious society or a democratic one, I'd choose the democracy any day of the week. Not just for my own prosperity, but for the overall welfare of everybody.
The one thing that has heartened me about the new Pope is that he has spoken favorably about democracy.
What rot. Tell that to native Americans who were forcibly converted and enslaved. Tell that to people in the inquisition. Tell that to peoples in India and the east that were forcibly converted so that the pope could fill his coffers. Tell that to all the children murdered in Christian and catholic schools.
Christianity and Catholicism doesn’t fool me. If you’ve ever wanted to see the mythical devil - look to those preaching and they legacy of hate that they carry.
There's really no argument against the institutional and historical hypocisy. There's no shortage of people and groups that have done or currently do horrible violence against others, sometimes even in the name of these ideas.
But I don't know if that takes away from the idea itself and what fruitful counterpoint it might play in modern discourse.
So your argument is that if some people who claim allegiance to an idea do evil things, that renders all who claim such allegiance, and even the idea itself, evil? That is a pretty poor argument. It's also one that I don't think you would actually accept in another context. I bet you anything that I can find some ideal you uphold which was espoused by some vile people at some point, and I also bet that you wouldn't go "ok, I guess I have to give that ideal up now".
>Christianity and Catholicism doesn’t fool me. If you’ve ever wanted to see the mythical devil - look to those preaching and they legacy of hate that they carry.
Impressive, very nice, now say the same thing about Islam and Judaism.
Islam is worse than Christianity. They preach hate to begin with. At least Christianity started peacefully before being consumed by the conversion mafia.
Judaism I have nothing against as a religion. They don’t proselytize.
The concept of fundamental human rights is certainly new, but our notion of intrinsic human value (and intrinsic value of other life and things) arises from our empathy, which at least in its degree is perhaps our most important defining trait as a species. (Our empathy may have been a prerequisite for the emergence of our intelligence.)
Conflating the two is why some people have trouble understanding why religions like Buddhism and Christianity seemed to tolerate so much inequality and violence; or more generally just assumed people writ large were historically more callous and uncaring than today.
Arguably one of the downsides, though, to a focus on rights vs intrinsic value is that rights are typically couched in materialist terms. Most of the time that's probably for the better, but sometimes maybe not.
If my definition of 'value' was something that was totally contingent on both post-industrial society and an ultracapitalist approach to production, and it made me deduce that human being's lives over thousands of years or in other societies were worth "nothing", I think I would interpret this as a 'reductio-ad-absurdum'.
That is, by deducing an absurd conclusion from the premise, that makes a strong argument that my definition of 'value' must be so narrow as to be effectively broken. I would respond by looking for a different, more wide definition of value, among the various ones that have been proposed.
Arguably from very early on the Church has been at the forefront of "Serfs are of value to the Lord" if you will (St Lawrence, et al).
So far none of the AI stuff I've seen has really been about "the computer has no soul" and more around the danger that dehumanization can bring (which has been a refrain since the previous Leo, mind you).
People really should stop making up history from childrens books. People were valuing people to various degrees and tool seriously the human value question in every single period we have records from.
And varrying degrees apply to post-industrial too - your human value did not meant much in very much industrial third reich fans hands.
>And varrying degrees apply to post-industrial too - your human value did not meant much in very much industrial third reich fans hands.
Ho, certainly they did.
The scope of the ethics is then windowed on who’s deemed human, and who can be slaughtered like an animal for the glory of the great civilization one is part of.
Nothing specific to nazis, look at Rwandan genocide. Hutu extremists systematically referred to Tutsis as "cockroaches" and "snakes" in propaganda. Or even closer on a timeline perspective, Israeli leaders and media have used terms like "human animals" and described Gaza as a "city of evil" or a "nation of barbarians," while some Palestinian factions have used similar language against Israelis.
Dehumanizing "others" is the classic first step to get rid of any morale/ethical concern when interacting with them.
Nazi seen cruelty, violence and lack of empathy as manliness and virtue. Openly and specifically. You as a young man wanting to prove yourself would be beating and killing people, knowing they are humans and that violence toward humans is what made you manly in your peer group. They were not saying "it does not count". They were saying "I am great for doing it".
> The scope of the ethics is then windowed on who’s deemed human, and who can be slaughtered like an animal for the glory of the great civilization one is part of.
It was not a disagreement about who is human. Nazi did not killed just Jews and foreigners. They killed and tortured plenty of fellow Aryans, because those were their political opponents or to create fear in others. When a nazi tortured Aryan German to get names out of him, he knew full well he is torturing a human. It was not about whether they are human or not, it was simply that human life had less value.
Using animals and insects as insults does not mean there was any confusion about whether those being mistreated are humans.
> Dehumanizing "others" is the classic first step to get rid of any morale/ethical concern when interacting with them.
Actually believing they are not human is super rare and found only in some cults. Insults and degradations are how you work others to a rage, but they are not meant to be factual statements. And they are not interpreted as factual statements.
Happily, nazi left enough writing behind them, we know what they thought about human value.
I also wonder if it’s just harder to rule a much larger population in the modern world than in those times. Any jackass can show up and say that he was chosen to lead by some higher power. But you must still convince enough people that that is the case or at least have a military large enough that you can control.
I'm not religious and haven't been since 2008. However, the world today is very different from then. It's fragmented, far more authoritarian, much more dangerous, with "us vs them" mentalities just gaining more and more traction in general in so many countries. There are almost no political leaders left in the world offering a vision that is distinct from mere survival instinct or domination or some mixture of the two. In the last decade we've seen the rise of multiple world-historical tyrants. Meanwhile, many major religions have lost all moral credibility due to continued decades of horrible violence. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it'd be nice to see some real, genuine world leadership from the Pope right now.
I have long come to the conclusion, backed by data, that presidential and semi-presidential systems are deeply flawed.
There's a reason why not a single country turning authoritarian in the last 50 years has been a representative parliamentary democracy. The last one has been Sri Lanka in the 70s. Not a single one since then.
Electing single individuals to power instead of parties and coalitions is a terrible idea.
They are all, and I want to emphasize all, presidential or semi presidential. From Belarus to the Philippines, from Russia to Nicaragua, from Turkey to Tunisia the list is entirely composed by presidential or semi presidential republics.
There are several reasons why this happens, and why it tends to kill pluralism and proper democracy with winner-takes-all mechanics (which also tends to aggregate people across very few/two parties).
We didn't have nearly the prosperity gospel and doomsday cult of christians we have today in 2008 (or at least they were kept much more at bay instead of running the country)
The title seems to be editorialized. To me, it makes it sound like Christopher Olah (the mentioned Anthropic co-founder) is a co-author. Instead he is going to be one of several speakers present when the encyclical is released.
> Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, on preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, will be released on May 25. A presentation event with the Pope and various speakers is scheduled for the same day at the Vatican.
Among the "various speakers" is Christopher Olah. But hard to express under 80 characters I bet.
“Claude, today you will be speaking ex cathedra …”
Actually I may try that as a prompt. Last week I was having git commit messages all be in iambic tetrameter to see if anyone noticed but it annoyed me to death after the first two.
Now to look up “load-bearing” in Latin, just in case.
It's a tall order to live up to the impact of Rerum novarum, the encyclical by the former Pope Leo that greatly guided thinking out of the industrial revolution. Personally, I'm excited to read this. If we take the claims of most AI labs at face value, they believe their work will fundamentally change the relationship between humans and the economy. More involvement from faith leaders is a good thing.
- Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum; current Pope Leo XIV chose his name as an explicit gesture to his nominative predecessor
- This encyclical is a return to the earlier tradition of latin names (Magnifica Humanitas) for encyclicals, as opposed to many of Pope Francis' which used Italian (Laudato si')
- The official date it was signed was 135 years to the day since Rerum Novarum
- The Pope is personally appearing and speaking at the presentation; usually these encyclicals are just released at a small press conference without the Pope himself being there
Rerum Novarum intentionally tracked a third path, rejecting both socialism and laissez faire capitalism at the end of the 19th century. Gesturing so overtly towards it suggests that this new encyclical will also try to establish a "third way," grounded (as the title suggests) in human dignity.
Leo XIV has not published any encyclicals yet; this will be his first, and an extremely ambitious one at that. I also am very eager to read it.
Whatever he had in mind there is surely a warning in how rapidly his efforts were reversed once he passed from the scene.
This is not merely a matter of "favorites" or "imitation" but one of legitimacy. Rome was not built in a day and so forth. Often the most successful paradigm-shifting leaders are ones who can deftly command the legitimacy of the past while adapting their society to a new future. But attempting the latter while disposing of the former usually fails, as in the case of Akhenaten.
If you're in a country where war is occurring, it doesn't matter if it's a world war or not. There are conflicts in pretty much every continent. North America is waging war in the Middle East. Europe has a multiyear conflict threatening to spill across more borders. Several countries in Africa are in conflict even if they are civil wars. North America, while not waging outright war, is in conflict with a South American country. The Asian continent is nearly routinely going through border skirmishes. Antarctica doesn't count. The Australian continent seems the only one without active conflicts. So 5/6 continents capable of being part of world war is in warlike conditions.
Chris Olah, one of Anthropic’s co-founders, got in touch. What followed was, by McGuire’s own description, mind-blowing. “They basically were asking for direct help from the Vatican to convene and help the industry, because the industry was going so fast down this road,” he recalled.
It's an open letter from the pope. An encyclical will often clarify Church doctrine on a topic, or set of topics. See e.g. Humanae Vitae[1] for an example of one that has resulted in, essentially, a lay rebellion — at the time it was issued many clergy, including Bishops opposed it, but the Church itself has gradually become far more conservative (perhaps as a reaction to Vatican II) in the intervening years.
Just a letter from the pope, often about how Catholic teaching relates or applies to some modern issue. They present nothing new in terms of Catholic teaching itself, but, through the pope's authority, serve as important guidance for the faithful.
And honestly, even people outside the Catholic Church sometimes look to the pope for guidance on topics like this - see this very thread. The influence of the pope in the world isn't as strong as it once was, but he still has enough influence that he can do some good with it at times such as these. I think many are hoping for something on the level of Rerum Novarum - I know I am, though of course that's a very tough act to follow.
I wonder if the encyclical will incorporate material or take guidance from “Antiqua et nova”[1], the 2025 doctrinal note of the Catholic Church co-issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture. The Note addresses “the anthropological and ethical challenges raised by AI—issues that are particularly significant, as one of the goals of this technology is to imitate the human intelligence that designed it.” I sincerely hope it builds on it.
Hmm, there’s probably a good reason for this, but it feels weird to involve people who are openly atheist and, moreover, against religion in an event like this.
I hope it's some sort of covert invitation to convert/repent. The doors are always open for those who want to cross it :).
I <3 the sci-fi gods like Herbert, Heinlein and Asimov, and they all had great sci-fi takes on religion ... but Hyperion has THE best take on sci-fi religions IMHO.
This article needs to be retitled, as it stands it's misleading.
Papal Encyclicals[0] are solely authored by the Pope, even if there has been secular scholarship involved in the writing. It is never "presented" by anyone else, and to frame it as presented primarily by Christopher Olah "alongside" the pope is to betray an ignorance of what's officially going on.
Not sure how we arrived at the present title, "Anthropic co-founder to present AI encyclical alongside Pope Leo XIV", but it makes as much sense as "Iceberg nearly completes mainden voyage across Atlantic, with famous ship as passenger."
On top of that, submissions are not supposed to modify titles. Original is "Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25".
It was me. Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that Chris Olah co-authored the encyclical with the Pope. I just found it noteworthy that there was someone from the “industry” at the encyclical presentation on May 25, which I think is a first. Usually, they are all clergy or academics.
Who is this for? Is this to promote AI to the general Catholic public, or is it some kind of cultural signal to potential conservative institutional customers that Anthropic isn’t just a stereotypical bunch of godless California hippies?
Normally when I see these sorts of things it’s obvious what it is for and why, but this one confuses me.
I hope you saw others' correction to the title here that indicate Olah is just a speaker at an event on the same day, not an author (although he almost certainly was consulted for his opinions while the Pope and his assistants were working on the Encyclical). So what matters here is what the Pope is trying to do, not Olah's intentions in his minor role.
The Pope has already spoken quite a bit about ai, and exhorted priests to keep ai out of their homilies, which should be a sacred fruit of prayer and study.
Just from what I have seen he said and my Catholic Theological background, I would say he will definitely be talking about at least a couple things: 1) the relationship between ai and our intellectual labor, and how to use it fruitfully to grow without losing ourselves in it (a very similar concern to many on hn as far as I understand); and more importantly for him and again for many 2) how to use ai in society in a way that everybody can enjoy the fruits of it, instead of just the elite few (similar to the priority of Rerum novarum). This Pope chose his name because of this theme, and has consistently demonstrated that social justice is amongst his highest priority concerns - to the point that he has asked the Church to stop focusing so heavily on sexual ethics because there are such weighty injustices in the world that require our focused effort and attention.
The encyclical is for the Pope to express the church's view on AI and its impact to society to other Catholics. My guess for why Christopher Olah is there is to signal that Anthropic is the ethical AI company.
There was an article in the FT a while ago about how confused and frustrated Trump was about the strait of Hormuz. The conclusion was that not everyone has a price but that concept was outside of the scope of his narrow mind.
It’s for me. It’s strange so I’m probably going to watch it. It helps that I generally like the modern Catholic church’s direction on things (besides abortion but I’m willing to overlook that).
This is very much trying to create a consensus around what being human means and why it’s valuable in an age where it will be easy to dismiss the intrinsic value of a human. Probably a bit more important than a marketing stunt.
While the Vatican does have walls, anyone can pretty much just walk on through them with perhaps a trip through a metal detector, so not sure what you mean.
The Catholic Church also does not teach that there cannot be restrictions on immigration, it simply says that we should treat people with dignity while enforcing such restrictions.
That is just what the (edited) title makes it sound like. The article states that Christopher Olah will be a speaker present at the encyclical release. It does not imply that he had any hand or influence in the content.
Well yeah, private companies influencing doctrine would be far more scandalous for believers I guess. The point is the church making connections with companies straight away, sidestepping heads of state.
I think in the case of Anthropic, it shows they’re at the very least willing to engage with the most important people in the philosophical and theological realm they’re in the midst of disrupting.
When the question asked is roughly of “can an AI ever be considered a human soul?”, there isn’t a philosopher alive whose individual opinion would be considered more meaningful than Pope Leo’s.
It’s unlikely that the church’s opinion would influence the future business choices of Anthropic. I think it still remains a positive business move to publicly engage with the church.
I don't think you got my point. I'm not criticizing anthropic for deciding to engage with the pope, I'm pointing at the state we're at where a for profit company is doing individually the work of understanding how their disruptive tech should fit in the wider world.
Saving distances, it's like Glock engaging with spiritual leaders to figure out when it's ethical to kill. This should not be their area of decision, and if it starts being so there is clearly a giant gap for the entities that should be leading this instead.
I don't know enough to disagree with this specifically, but reductionism and generalizing is its own problem. A PR stunt is far cry from a power grab. Reductionism favors addressing large trends, and large boogeymen, classes, groups, etc.. instead of doing the diligent work of finding root causes, nuanced as they might be, and addressing those.
If what you say is right, I would challenge that by still insisting the corporations can only do what governments let them. You might say they run governments behind the scenes, to which I would say, who let them? They keep influencing elections? Then elections don't seem to be working, that's the root cause perhaps? In all the major political issues, that's the trend I'm seeing, democracy failing, but then I'll challenge myself and ask why is it failing?
The old sentiment of "if it can't be fixed, it isn't a problem" seems rampant. Modern democracy itself is a fix for some other sets of problems. In the US at least, it is in theory designed to be mended and fixed. Perhaps the real cause is lack of political will power by everyone pursuing politics, to even talk about changing the way the government is architectured, altering constitutions, talking about parting ways with land and population (secession), or incorporation of some. Perhaps the population just isn't that interested in educating themselves on matters of civics, therefore how democracy works needs a rewrite at its core?
Either way, I rambled on, i know, but it's with a point i hope is obvious: the common political sentiment around billionaires, corporations, oligarchs (or similar "woke" or "DEI" dogwhistles on the right) simply don't address root causes. They're reductive by design, not accident.
I don't think it's reductive, the root cause you ask for is relatively obvious: no system can indefinitely tame a set of forced that are at near peer powers.
If private entities have as much power as the sum of common citizens to influence public opinion, policy, or the action of elected officials, then they overtake the system, whatever it is, however it's been designed.
An upper bound on individual power is then the only thing that maintains the system working.
I agree, and most people agree too. Upper bound on power though, not wealth. This has been an issue for a long time. In the 30's business men tried to overthrow FDR and got a slap on the wrist for example. Something about the structure of government doesn't account for them, and expects politicians and voters alike to be noble and honorable on default.
Also, even though I feel AI and robotics are very important for progressing humanity, I think that much of the world has long since lost a proper sense of intrinsic human value. It's really gone from overt exploitation to slightly more mild exploitation where we pretend the system is really merit based.
And as AI and robotics remove the need for human labor, I hope that someone like the pope can convince people that we should value human beings inherently and more fairly. Inexpensive labor and intelligence should make this feasible.
I hope the speech isn't something dumb like "remember only humans have souls" because I think that's really premature and pretty obvious that AIs are not people at this point.
The really convincing and somewhat deeper simulations of humans are probably only a few years down the line though.
Which comes back to the Rovelli dualism article that was on the front page before. I think we should not be in a hurry to try to duplicate humans in depth (such as imitating emotions, pain, stream of consciousness, self-preservation, etc). It's just completely unnecessary to go that far to get useful AI, and obviously unethical to subject a real human emulation to slavery.
Whether that implies anything about subjective experience... I think that question is unknowable by definition. Either substrate matters (in which case things have to be made of carbon for some reason?), or it doesn't (in which case... God only knows what that implies. Windows XP might have subjective experience).
This is the position of the Catholic Church, so don't expect anything different.
My hope is that, within those boundaries, he may find something interesting and meaningful to say.
What I can find is only Aquinas that all living things have souls (anima). Humans have rational human souls. Animals have animal souls...
Descartes believed that only humans have souls. But that definitely represents a clear alternative to traditional Catholic beliefs. Many modern philosophers might argue that only humans have "consciousness" in a way that implies animals do not have souls.
IIUC, he claims that the concept of "soul" is something that the wasn't really present in the Jewish worldview of Jesus' time. Rather, it's something that later theologians (Aquinas?) picked up from Greek philosophy (Platonism?).
I wonder if that means Wright would have a different take on the whole "only humans have souls" idea. (Beyond just differing on the choice of terminology, I mean.)
Why? And what does “progressing” mean, exactly? I’m not trying to be combative or flippant, I’m genuinely asking because the rest of your comment is a great argument for the opposite view.
I’d argue humanity will “progress” when we collectively learn to treat each other and our environment with respect and care. When we have a sense of community with our fellow people instead of placing undue value on individuals and personal gain.
Technological advance could be a boon for humanity if those were our shared values, but as it stands it seems pretty obvious that what it does instead is consolidate power in the hands of those who should never have it.
We already have the technology and resources to improve the lives of everyone, they’re just not fairly distributed.
It really is en vogue to have this attitude that everyone in church is stupid for believing but it's a huge disservice to yourself to not understand the Vatican is full of the equivalent of the best PhDs sourced from all over the world centered around their specific topic of interest, theology.
Also for the time being you can see that the Vatican understands AI much better than you already, just have a read here: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu... [0]
> ANTIQUA ET NOVA > Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence
I’m sure there are Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings superfans who have put in a PhD level of time and research into their favorite “topic of interest” as well.
The joke was meant to poke a little fun at superfans and not to belittle.
Religions’ primary purpose is to facilitate tribal bonds, not experimentally seek truths and evaluate data for consistency. That is why almost all start with a set of tenets or immutable “facts”, such as the existence of an immortal component of a person (usually called a soul).
It doesn’t take a high academia credential to develop a critical mindset about established institutions, and quite the opposite seems more likely.
That catholic church has a long and sordid history of protecting its own.
You'd have made strange bedfellows with cranky Catholics who thought so too, 60 years ago after Vatican II's modernization reforms.
> You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing).
Hold on a sec, you ought to clarify what you mean by "gain more members" - the Amish have a very high birthrate, averaging 6.1 kids per woman. While Unitarians are below the replacement rate.
> Games which chase inclusivity often fail, because the very people they appeal to don't actually want to play video games.
How is this old culture-wars canard still being rolled out? A glance at the character rosters on the Game of the Year winners for the past 10 years proves you wrong.
I think it was dusted off when the game Mixtape received glowing reviews despite there being hardly any actual gameplay in it.
Ask anita sarkeesian and the publications still giving here airtime.
Let it go. It's not healthy. Witch hunts like this are not helping anyone with anything, other than influencer grifters.
Why not? When i was an agnostic I liked the Catholic church as an institution (and many other religious organisations too).
> The idea is that by relaxing norms, he wants to gain more members.
That is a ridiculously cynical take. People join the church, and even more the priesthood because they believe. Why would they corrupt the message to get the numbers up?
I do not know what norms have been relaxed by the church anyway? Changing the mass used by the majority of Catholics? Its happened many times historically.
> But it doesn't actually go that way. It alienates the core, and the people for whom compromises are made don't want to join anyway.
I see no sign of alienation except in small fringe groups (so not the "core").
> You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing).
The Catholic church is growing globally.
OP doesn't appear to be saying Catholicism ought not to grow - rather that they believe trying to appeal to a wider audience than already is interested in religion is likely to fail, or worse, backfire.
Your defense of Gamergate and attack on inclusive games is ignorant and absurd, because the millions of girls and women who play The Sims and other inclusive games simply don't want to play the terribly designed un-original non-inclusive video games designed for teenaged boy incels that Gamergate assholes and their apologists like you thought should be the only kind of video games.
Edit:
joe_mamba: Your revisionist attempt at Gamergate apologetics didn’t address my point. The Sims proves a huge, profitable audience exists outside your 'core gamer' model. Claiming inclusivity kills games doesn't survive even basic counterexamples.
The claim "people those games appeal to don’t play games" is factually wrong. The Sims proves the audience is broader than they claim, that shows inclusivity is not a liability, it can be a strength.
Gamergate-style thinking is tied to a narrow, exclusionary view of gaming. The "activists" trying to inject their ideology were misogynistic incels. And GamerGate was not "co-opted by parasites" after two years, it was started by sociopathic parasites from the very beginning, and any revisionist claim that it had two years of legitimacy is a pathetic attempt at reputation washing.
I worked at Maxis/EA on The Sims. Inclusivity -- including same-sex relationships -- wasn’t "activists injecting narratives", it was part of the core design process. And EA absolutely did not see its audience as "not women" -- women were a major part of the target market.
The Sims didn’t succeed in spite of that -- it succeeded because it understood a broader audience than the narrow "core gamer" model you’re describing. The billions of dollars EA made because they successfully and intentionally expanded their customer base to include women proves you're wrong.
How EA’s $5 billion Sims empire has become a magnet for female talent in a male-dominated field:
https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/the-sims-25-anniversary/
EA's intentional inclusivity began long before Sweet Baby, by at least 16 years before Gamergate in 2014, and made them billions of dollars, and I kept the receipts:
The Sims Design Documents:
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...
>This is a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 3, 8/7/98.
>On page 5, he wrote the following comments about same sex relationships in the game:
>The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitly going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to 100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world’s population). It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other people.
https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...
>This is a PDF file with a scan of the handwritten notes, and a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 5, 8/31/98.
>On page 4, there is a section about Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships, which reflects Don's suggestion to change the design to support same sex relationships.
>Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships
>To be outlined in 9/30 Live Mode deliverable.
>Currently the game only allows heterosexual romance. This will not be the only type available – it just reflects the early stages of implementation. Will is reviewing the code and will make recommendations for how to implement homosexual romance as well.
And which itself inspired and gave permission and financial justification for many other inclusive games, indie to AAA, by proving there was a huge female audience for games, 14 years before Gamergate got it all wrong by attacking women while pretending it was about journalism.
So of course Gamergate didn't mean to be about The Sims, because The Sims totally undermines its claims. That's why they avoided mentioning or attacking The Sims, pretending it didn't exist and have millions of female players, and why you bristle and bluster and bullshit without evidence when I bring it up.
What receipts do you have to prove the brash claims of your Gamergate apologetics, to counter the design document receipts and first hand experience in the industry developing successful inclusive games popular with gays and girls and even boys, that I just shared?
This video essay by Alexander Avila is right on, and the comments are wonderful:
Did The Sims make you gay? - a video essay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi-HWyh0Ybk
>It's no doubt The Sims is an influential video game. In this video essay, we're going to talk about its GAY influence, particularly the role it plays in queer people's identity development. Enjoy the presentation as we go over how the Sims influenced a generation in letting them live out their Tumblr dreams...
>Absolutely unhinged.
Especially pathetic and revealing when they still try to argue it was "Ackchyually" about "unethical journalism". Yet look where we are today, and the streaming influencer "journalists" they follow.
The Sims wasn't just inclusive -- it was chock full of social commentary, from its simulation mechanics to its object descriptions to its storytelling support. What Ian Bogost calls "Procedural Rhetoric": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric
>Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.
>Bogost argues that games make strong claims about how the world works by the processes they embody. Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word. Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a game to convey a particular ideology. [...]
>Frasca mentions the simulation games SimCity and The Sims as examples of procedural rhetoric and uses the handling of same-sex relationships as an example: "[T]he way that The Sims's designers dealt with gay couples was not just through representation (for example, by allowing players to put gay banners on their yards), they also decided to build a rule about it. In this game, same-gender relationships are possible. ... By incorporating this rule, the designers are showing tolerance towards this sexual option."
If Gamergate were really about "ideology in games", The Sims should have been its ground zero central target, and they would have been attacking journalists who wrote about it positively. It wasn’t, and they weren't. That tells you their stated concern wasn't the real one. It was all about attacking and excluding women from day one.
Gamergate was a dry run for MAGA. It pioneered the same online tactics later used by the Trumpist right: coordinated harassment, grievance politics, memes, conspiracy theories, anti-"SJW" culture war framing, and the mobilization of angry online communities into a political movement.
Steve Bannon and Breitbart recognized its potential early, refined and amplified it, and used it to recruit and radicalize a generation of online activists who later flowed into MAGA politics.
Many researchers, journalists, and historians now describe Gamergate as a precursor or template for the alt-right, QAnon, and Trump-era online organizing.
Axios -- "How the far right borrowed its online moves from gamers": https://www.axios.com/2022/10/20/gamergate-right-online-hara...
Encyclopædia Britannica -- Gamergate entry: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gamergate-campaign ("Bannon and Yiannopoulos would use that platform to draw Gamergate supporters into the larger alt-right movement.")
WIRED -- "Gamergate's Aggrieved Men Still Haunt the Internet": https://www.wired.com/story/gamergates-aggrieved-men-still-h...
Poynter -- "Gamergate was a warning that the media failed to heed": https://www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2025/what-was-gamergate...
University of Melbourne -- "How the far right weaponised gamers and geek masculinity": https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-the-far-right-we...
ABC Australia — “Alt-right groups are targeting young video gamers”: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-15/alt-right-groups-vide...
Wikipedia summary with citations to books and reporting on Bannon, Breitbart, the alt-right, and MAGA connections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-o...
The last 100+ years have also been atypical. Two world wars which disrupted economies in ways that lead to redistribution, huge changes from the end of European empires, the fall of the Soviet Union and communism, and technological advances that automated work but created may new jobs.
I would be very reluctant to assume a continuing trend from that.
You would think that a great reduction in extreme poverty would give people pause, but it is almost always barely acknowledged. The strange conclusion is that people who tell you they care the most about poverty do not actually care about it in the slightest. It is just a vehicle for their resentment.
Maybe they've grown. Is Bangladesh at the stage where they outsource labour to other countries yet?
https://data.undp.org/countries-and-territories/BGD
Again, what does that have to do with exploitation?
Post-industrial world needed human capital. Hence, the need for human value. If you notice most of this "need" has arisen out of then need for industrial expansion.
Post-AI will be interesting. Will we go back to pre-industrial or get something better.
Most of us humans inherently value each other. There are exceptions, and small communities can get nasty. But for the most part, small human communities tend to be supportive and valuing each other.
This really only stops being the case when you get large-scale societies that allow humans to view others through an overly abstract lens. Combine that with an unchecked accumulation of power, and you have the potential for those in power to view the rest as without value.
Most of the people he encounters are super friendly, welcoming and willing to bend over backwards to help him out. It's genuine human connection and willingness. He will speak to people from every possible background, including people in the Taliban and honestly at the end of the day, we're all humans and most people respect that.
Things have become blurred with social media, digital life, closed and private nature of the modern world but if you take a step back, you can realize humans are typically, very helpful, friendly and unique characters.
Not true. Serfs had rights that varied a lot between societies and over time. Religions mostly teach a value of human life, and Christianity teaches equal value: "when Adam devlved and Eve span who was then the gentleman", or "the first shall be last and the last shall be first" or "it is easier for a rich map to pass through the eye of the needle".
There were all sorts of people in between. Free people who were not serfs. Skilled people who were members of guilds.
They're not talking about the economic value of humans or even the psychological value of humans as subjects with experiences and a right to liberty or care or something. The idea they're trying to recall and reinvigorate is a sense of human value that transcends that temporal, material noise altogether and that is truly universal. It's the human value that welcomed slaves, prostitutes, wretches, merchants and kings as peers in something grander than economy or state or lineage or tribe or creed.
Now, you can make a well-developed case that that's hogwash and that the human value that matters is the one that alleviates suffering or grants liberty or even the one that grants material reward for some virtue or bloodline or whatever, but that's not what these guys are talking about. They mean a human nature that is always there and always worthy, just as much when it's experiencing temporal poverty/suffering/abuse as when it's basking in temporal wealth/success/freedom.
The idea is that Christian or not, Catholic or not, it does good for everyone to think of human value that way and the critique -- for a long time now -- is that for all the flash and glimmer of technology and its material benefits, it sometimes makes it very very easy to forget.
This sounds a lot like an appeal to democracy, yet it often seems that religion is at odds with democracy in our world. And given the choice between living in a religious society or a democratic one, I'd choose the democracy any day of the week. Not just for my own prosperity, but for the overall welfare of everybody.
The one thing that has heartened me about the new Pope is that he has spoken favorably about democracy.
Christianity and Catholicism doesn’t fool me. If you’ve ever wanted to see the mythical devil - look to those preaching and they legacy of hate that they carry.
But I don't know if that takes away from the idea itself and what fruitful counterpoint it might play in modern discourse.
Tell that to those were were protects by the influence of the Church. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protector_of_the_Indians
> Tell that to people in the inquisition.
Which inquisition? Do you by any chance mean the Spanish Inquisition? An agency of the Spanish government.
> Tell that to peoples in India and the east that were forcibly converted so that the pope could fill his coffers
Which people. There were Christians in India for 2,000 years. Some of my ancestors probably converted before the English did.
> Tell that to all the children murdered in Christian and catholic schools.
AFAIK these are mostly allegations that have never ben substantiated.
Impressive, very nice, now say the same thing about Islam and Judaism.
Judaism I have nothing against as a religion. They don’t proselytize.
Conflating the two is why some people have trouble understanding why religions like Buddhism and Christianity seemed to tolerate so much inequality and violence; or more generally just assumed people writ large were historically more callous and uncaring than today.
Arguably one of the downsides, though, to a focus on rights vs intrinsic value is that rights are typically couched in materialist terms. Most of the time that's probably for the better, but sometimes maybe not.
So far none of the AI stuff I've seen has really been about "the computer has no soul" and more around the danger that dehumanization can bring (which has been a refrain since the previous Leo, mind you).
And varrying degrees apply to post-industrial too - your human value did not meant much in very much industrial third reich fans hands.
Ho, certainly they did.
The scope of the ethics is then windowed on who’s deemed human, and who can be slaughtered like an animal for the glory of the great civilization one is part of.
Nothing specific to nazis, look at Rwandan genocide. Hutu extremists systematically referred to Tutsis as "cockroaches" and "snakes" in propaganda. Or even closer on a timeline perspective, Israeli leaders and media have used terms like "human animals" and described Gaza as a "city of evil" or a "nation of barbarians," while some Palestinian factions have used similar language against Israelis.
Dehumanizing "others" is the classic first step to get rid of any morale/ethical concern when interacting with them.
> The scope of the ethics is then windowed on who’s deemed human, and who can be slaughtered like an animal for the glory of the great civilization one is part of.
It was not a disagreement about who is human. Nazi did not killed just Jews and foreigners. They killed and tortured plenty of fellow Aryans, because those were their political opponents or to create fear in others. When a nazi tortured Aryan German to get names out of him, he knew full well he is torturing a human. It was not about whether they are human or not, it was simply that human life had less value.
Using animals and insects as insults does not mean there was any confusion about whether those being mistreated are humans.
> Dehumanizing "others" is the classic first step to get rid of any morale/ethical concern when interacting with them.
Actually believing they are not human is super rare and found only in some cults. Insults and degradations are how you work others to a rage, but they are not meant to be factual statements. And they are not interpreted as factual statements.
Happily, nazi left enough writing behind them, we know what they thought about human value.
There's a reason why not a single country turning authoritarian in the last 50 years has been a representative parliamentary democracy. The last one has been Sri Lanka in the 70s. Not a single one since then.
Electing single individuals to power instead of parties and coalitions is a terrible idea.
They are all, and I want to emphasize all, presidential or semi presidential. From Belarus to the Philippines, from Russia to Nicaragua, from Turkey to Tunisia the list is entirely composed by presidential or semi presidential republics.
There are several reasons why this happens, and why it tends to kill pluralism and proper democracy with winner-takes-all mechanics (which also tends to aggregate people across very few/two parties).
From my outside perspective, Israel's leadership appears to have spent years deliberately conflating Judaism and Zionism.
> Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, on preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, will be released on May 25. A presentation event with the Pope and various speakers is scheduled for the same day at the Vatican.
Among the "various speakers" is Christopher Olah. But hard to express under 80 characters I bet.
Actually I may try that as a prompt. Last week I was having git commit messages all be in iambic tetrameter to see if anyone noticed but it annoyed me to death after the first two.
Now to look up “load-bearing” in Latin, just in case.
- Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum; current Pope Leo XIV chose his name as an explicit gesture to his nominative predecessor
- This encyclical is a return to the earlier tradition of latin names (Magnifica Humanitas) for encyclicals, as opposed to many of Pope Francis' which used Italian (Laudato si')
- The official date it was signed was 135 years to the day since Rerum Novarum
- The Pope is personally appearing and speaking at the presentation; usually these encyclicals are just released at a small press conference without the Pope himself being there
Rerum Novarum intentionally tracked a third path, rejecting both socialism and laissez faire capitalism at the end of the 19th century. Gesturing so overtly towards it suggests that this new encyclical will also try to establish a "third way," grounded (as the title suggests) in human dignity.
Leo XIV has not published any encyclicals yet; this will be his first, and an extremely ambitious one at that. I also am very eager to read it.
Presidents have their favorite past counterparts, so did emperors, and clearly the Pope does as well.
Does this kind of imitation prevent truly creative action taking? Did Akhenaten have someone in mind when he declared his own religion?
This is not merely a matter of "favorites" or "imitation" but one of legitimacy. Rome was not built in a day and so forth. Often the most successful paradigm-shifting leaders are ones who can deftly command the legitimacy of the past while adapting their society to a new future. But attempting the latter while disposing of the former usually fails, as in the case of Akhenaten.
At least they didn't pick Dario lest he burst in flames
Yeah, but they did loose the great emu war.
Chris Olah, one of Anthropic’s co-founders, got in touch. What followed was, by McGuire’s own description, mind-blowing. “They basically were asking for direct help from the Vatican to convene and help the industry, because the industry was going so fast down this road,” he recalled.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanae_vitae
What we do need is a lot more ordinary people to do something about it.
[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
I hope it's some sort of covert invitation to convert/repent. The doors are always open for those who want to cross it :).
Papal Encyclicals[0] are solely authored by the Pope, even if there has been secular scholarship involved in the writing. It is never "presented" by anyone else, and to frame it as presented primarily by Christopher Olah "alongside" the pope is to betray an ignorance of what's officially going on.
Not sure how we arrived at the present title, "Anthropic co-founder to present AI encyclical alongside Pope Leo XIV", but it makes as much sense as "Iceberg nearly completes mainden voyage across Atlantic, with famous ship as passenger."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclical#Catholic_usage
It was me. Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that Chris Olah co-authored the encyclical with the Pope. I just found it noteworthy that there was someone from the “industry” at the encyclical presentation on May 25, which I think is a first. Usually, they are all clergy or academics.
To claim that you didn’t intend to do what you did is either lying or dangerously ignorant.
https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/Techisturningincreasinglytore...
Why are the AI companies meeting with them at all? Just seems uncomfortable and suspicious.
Normally when I see these sorts of things it’s obvious what it is for and why, but this one confuses me.
If you've read any Vatican publications, the theme is being the authority on the ontology of reality.
EDIT: A decree for bioethics https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu... I'd expect a similar deal for AI.
-- Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
(Yeah, it’s a problem, but they can’t see it)
“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”
The Pope has already spoken quite a bit about ai, and exhorted priests to keep ai out of their homilies, which should be a sacred fruit of prayer and study.
Just from what I have seen he said and my Catholic Theological background, I would say he will definitely be talking about at least a couple things: 1) the relationship between ai and our intellectual labor, and how to use it fruitfully to grow without losing ourselves in it (a very similar concern to many on hn as far as I understand); and more importantly for him and again for many 2) how to use ai in society in a way that everybody can enjoy the fruits of it, instead of just the elite few (similar to the priority of Rerum novarum). This Pope chose his name because of this theme, and has consistently demonstrated that social justice is amongst his highest priority concerns - to the point that he has asked the Church to stop focusing so heavily on sexual ethics because there are such weighty injustices in the world that require our focused effort and attention.
For the shrinking Catholic church it's trying to regain relevance. For Anthropic it's PR.
The Catholic Church also does not teach that there cannot be restrictions on immigration, it simply says that we should treat people with dignity while enforcing such restrictions.
Regardless of content, it seems an extra step in solidifying where power lies.
When the question asked is roughly of “can an AI ever be considered a human soul?”, there isn’t a philosopher alive whose individual opinion would be considered more meaningful than Pope Leo’s.
It’s unlikely that the church’s opinion would influence the future business choices of Anthropic. I think it still remains a positive business move to publicly engage with the church.
Saving distances, it's like Glock engaging with spiritual leaders to figure out when it's ethical to kill. This should not be their area of decision, and if it starts being so there is clearly a giant gap for the entities that should be leading this instead.
If what you say is right, I would challenge that by still insisting the corporations can only do what governments let them. You might say they run governments behind the scenes, to which I would say, who let them? They keep influencing elections? Then elections don't seem to be working, that's the root cause perhaps? In all the major political issues, that's the trend I'm seeing, democracy failing, but then I'll challenge myself and ask why is it failing?
The old sentiment of "if it can't be fixed, it isn't a problem" seems rampant. Modern democracy itself is a fix for some other sets of problems. In the US at least, it is in theory designed to be mended and fixed. Perhaps the real cause is lack of political will power by everyone pursuing politics, to even talk about changing the way the government is architectured, altering constitutions, talking about parting ways with land and population (secession), or incorporation of some. Perhaps the population just isn't that interested in educating themselves on matters of civics, therefore how democracy works needs a rewrite at its core?
Either way, I rambled on, i know, but it's with a point i hope is obvious: the common political sentiment around billionaires, corporations, oligarchs (or similar "woke" or "DEI" dogwhistles on the right) simply don't address root causes. They're reductive by design, not accident.
If private entities have as much power as the sum of common citizens to influence public opinion, policy, or the action of elected officials, then they overtake the system, whatever it is, however it's been designed.
An upper bound on individual power is then the only thing that maintains the system working.
I tend to agree -- Even if I'm not sure what that quite looks like, and even if I'm not sure if that's better than what we already have.