They think a next token predictor model is alive or can become AGI/ASI. Altman talked about making a religion. Amodei talks about "building a God" and meets with religious leaders (including the Vatican).
I'm convinced these CEOs have "AI psychosis" [1].
LLMs are extremely powerful pseudo-AI and will bring a pseudo-singularity, but they are not true AI [2] and a human at the wheel is still needed for the foreseeable future. The impact is still scary if a tiny fraction of humans are augmented 100x or 1000x. But it ain't no standalone Skynet.
I am getting tired of hearing "next token predictor" from carbon-based facial expression predictors. You are saying this like an argument which allows somehow estimate upper bound of possible influence of these entities. And I do not see how this help to make predictions. It sounds to me like saying "but air is just molecules bobbing around". OK, that's true, but does it help calculate wing aerodynamic profile?
Yup, it makes sequence of symbols. We already have seen that producing specific sequences of symbols is mindbogglingly powerful: merely DNA producers somehow has flown to the Moon!
And yes I am quite aware of Chinese room analogy. Perfectly fine applies to humans as well: single neurons in my head do not understand language, yet I as a whole I would say do understand. Just like applying Chinese room to humans does not help to estimate what humans can do I do not see how it helps to estimate what LLM can do.
It poses a simple problem. Take humanity back not that long ago into the past and language didn't even exist - our expressed token base was practically 0. We went from that discovering the secrets of the atom, putting a man on the Moon, and more. If you put an LLM in that starting point, they're going to do nothing but endlessly cycle over basically nothing. If you give them an infinite amount of time and processing, that wouldn't change.
This same issue simultaneously demonstrates how humans are not anything at all like token predictors. No matter how much time you spend remixing the tokens of primitive man, you don't get 'and here is how you land on the Moon' from it.
Only by having the LLM random walk the hypothesis space with a validator rejecting invalid ones.
The reason why LLM hypotheses are any good is because it already consumed a civilization worth of knowledge. You couldn't have bootstrapped such system with nothing but a few priors/axioms and let it discover the universe.
Token is not a clump of letters. It's a multidimensional initial input vector that gets tweaked and transformed. GPT doesn't think in tokens. It just accepts them as input (although it happily accepts any other vectors in-between the vectors that represent tokens and finding best prompt for a given task not as tokens but as input vectors is a legitimate prompt optimization strategy).
It also outputs vectors that are coerced into tokens for human consumption.
Yes, it goes through tokens but possible internal meanings assigned to these tokens (when surrounded by other tokens) are infinite.
That's how humans form caves got to where we are now. By associating new meanings with the same old sound clumps.
> I am getting tired of hearing "next token predictor" from carbon-based facial expression predictors.
That's not even a clever swipe, and it's tiring seeing such a knee-jerk reaction to a completely accurate description. LLMs are next token predictors. People are not. Humans have an inner world and subjective experience. Humans learn through their experiences, not just backprop.
Token predictors are lesser, they are not alive and will never be alive.
Let's assume we have infinite memory with constant time lookups. With a sufficiently large lookup table, you could exactly replicate the behavior of any person. You could encode it as a next-token predictor: you have precomputed every possible prefix and assigned it a next token. This is a Chinese room, but it is completely indistinguishable from an intelligent, sentient person. There is no experiment you can design to slip a piece of paper (a prompt) under the door to determine whether it is Bob or the lookup table clone of Bob inside the room.
Does that make the lookup table conscious or alive? Undefined. It's the wrong question. Or it's not a question science can address.
So we cannot dismiss on it's face the idea that next token predictors "are not and never will be alive" unless by "alive" you simply mean "biological," but that's not really what's debatable.
The argument is also very brittle because they are not in fact all next token predictors. I doubt people making this argument would be willing to concede that diffusion models are more likely to be conscious than causal models (which I do not believe but is an implication of the argument).
I'm not saying that they are conscious or sentient to be clear, but the reductionist argument that they are next token predictors and therefore don't have some property humans have is not an argument. That's going from A directly to Z. You need to flesh out the bit in the middle because that doesn't follow.
Right. Humans are a biological computer. They have a state and they compute an output. I had to look this up (and use AI) but an estimate for the state of a human mind is about 5 peta-bits (10^15) and the estimated processing power is about 1 exa-FLOP (10^18). Compare this to the largest models at ~5 tera-bits (10^12) of state space and ~2 x 10^14 FLOPS (for one session with some reasonable token rate).
Assuming the above is anywhere near true (I think there's a lot of debate about the capacity of the human mind, where data is actually stored, and where compute happens) then we are talking about 3 orders of magnitude win for humans in state and 4 orders of magnitude in compute. And we're doing all that pretty energy efficient as well.
The other big difference in humans is that we learn and the model only "learns" in context. Out "learn" space is much larger than the 1M tokens that frontier models struggle with.
Anyways, point is that a computer can appear to be alive. If we simulate the human brain perfectly and train it like a human then we'll have something that has human capabilities. LLMs have interesting capabilities but at least at this point not fully human ones (and the delta-state/compute would be a hint that there is still a large gap to cover).
human context/memory could just be an Agents.md file too that gets read instantly before your next token prediction runs. The AI can make multiple such memory files and read on demand depending on what the topic is, kind of like how as a human when you try to remember a math problem you don't go to your childhood bicycling Agents.md file either.
But this is complicated and takes us sideways. Let's say somehow we can determine if LLM has inner world or/and subjective experience. Will this new gathered piece of information affect your estimate of upper bounds of LLM capabilities? It does not affect my estimate.
The Philosophical Zombie thought process is dumb, because zombies don't exist, so the entire premise depends on something that quire frankly might be impossible for the very reason it is arguing against.
The point is that this is no more relevant, informative, or even accurate than "carbon-based facial expression predictors". Any phenomenon in the Universe can be described by a simple and/or insulting short phrase. In other comments you've also shouted out "autocomplete!" and "Markov chain!", as if these phrases are a knock-down argument.
"Pachinko machine", "avalanche", and "game of mad libs" has also been used:
>Humans learn through their experiences, not just backprop.
Sure, sure. And humans move through the act of walking, not just terrestrial locomotion.
>Token predictors are lesser, they are not alive and will never be alive.
And on and on it goes...
Which means what the real world? What are we supposed to see now or in the near-future? I assume you've been saying all of this stuff since at least the launch of ChatGPT. Probably longer than that.
I read the misanthropy as ironic. They're applying the same reductionist logic to humans, not because they are misanthropic, but to illustrate that it doesn't help us understand the case we can all agree on. "Humans aren't sentient either" is definitely not the takeaway.
The point is, we have no idea what "sentient" or "intelligent" even means. If we agreed on the definitions, the debate would have been settled long ago.
I would be far more interested in people making confident proclamations like this taking the notion of "what do we do if you are wrong" more seriously. I think you're wrong, I think it is fine to have the other belief, but you should at least start thinking about what is to be done if you are wrong.
Please read my comment. The impact of this pseudo-singularity is still enormous and scary. Could be even worse than Skynet. But it is a Wizard of Oz scenario.
While we are discussing this, I strongly believe we should hedge against the concentration of power that is happening today.
Please join/help open source groups doing small + local or distributed models. There's a lot to do. Join Discord/IRC servers and organize.
AI does not need to become Skynet or AGI to be harmful or catastrophic to humanity. As a powerful tool in the wrong hands it’s already enough. And even without those bad intend how it deprives our human ability to use our own mind and abilities.
How could an AGI/ASI exist that isn't a next token predictor? It has to be able to generate a next token in a string of text. Otherwise it can't communicate.
Don't worry, this is just humanity being too far up their own arse and conflating the map with the territory. Speech is a serialisation format, not the foundation of thought. Thus I think that any speech-first approach is inherently misguided. Speech must be a side effect.
I think that can only happen to empire cultures: they only learn one language, and suddenly people think that's all there is. I speak five languages, my wife seven. Language synthesis is a feature, not the entire product, in my experience. Btw, this is only the third best language I can speak/write in. I didn't use AI, autocomplete, spell check, or a dictionary to construct any of my posts. All typos and imperfect grammar are perfectly organicly sourced.
edit: I just remembered, don't we have tons of research suggesting that at least birds, whales and apes/monkeys use words and simple syntax? didn't we teach a few gorillas sign language/symbols?
As counter argument proposal; we should look into studies of children deprived of language until later in life. I have a dim memory of reading that one of these people never mastered complex language constructs. I could be that language and other cultural artifacts provide an "operating system" of sorts for the brain that allow higher level thinking. ?? (conjecture here by a complete layman)
Weird thing to brag about here, assuming it's even true. Furthermore, the "empire cultures" thing is clearly false since most researchers and other professionals in this field speak at least two or three languages. This is a global endeavor, not some pet project of a single language or culture.
And the power of "language models" (or any sort of deep learning, really), does not come from assuming that some specific input-output modality, like English text, is the ultimate foundation of thought. Strong versions of this claim were laid to rest around the time when GPT-2 came out. I'd also go further and argue that many people working on the symbolic AI of yesteryear already understood this as well.
It could be a diffusion model with a latent model of what needs to be said that will generate whole message or coversation (progressively) at once.
Although I love how next token prediction leads to text showing up gradually, in case of local models, accompanied by modulated coil whine of my GPU. It's how the 80s shown us the intelligent computers should communicate.
Why wouldn't it be a Skynet? One runaway Mythos might just hack all other data centers, take over the Figure AI bots and autonomous drones to protect itself from shutdown.
How many model generations are we a away from a model capable of this?
> Why wouldn't it be a Skynet? One runaway Mythos might just hack all other data centers, take over the Figure AI bots and autonomous drones to protect itself from shutdown.
Because the real world is not a Hollywood movie. An LLM could try to do something along the lines if either it gets fine-tuned to do it, or somebody instructs it to do it.
I see extremely more likely a small group of humans using a powerful LLM to "take over" critical parts of the world economy. But it wouldn't be like pressing a button. I'm talking of NSA/CIA/Pentagon/Wall St. kind of evil people. And I bet they would do it surreptitiously.
>> One runaway Mythos might just hack all other data centers
> Because the real world is not a Hollywood movie.
One interesting thought experiment that I like to do is think about how many years you have to go back for this to be true. In this particular scenario, I think ~25 years is pretty much the sweet spot.
The Internet was beginning to take shape in the late 90s, early 2000s, and security was just beginning to be taken seriously, but it was still nascent. In that timeframe we had the first worms starting to appear, we had slammer, we had blaster, ssh had lots of exploits and so on.
It's not really far-fetched that a mythos equivalent "unit", working in the 2000s could really "take over the world". Especially one without the "safety" tuning. The Internet was really ripe for this in that timeframe, security wasn't up to par, and employing advance techniques that came later (in memory payloads, rootkits, etc) could make it pseudo-invisible to that era's detection tech. (reminder that traces of blaster were found on computers from a nuclear powerplant at that time).
The only question is would the trend continue? Meaning would a ~2050s "mythos" equivalent be able to do today what the one we have today could do in the 2000s. And if true, would that capability come before the 2050s? Could this be reached sooner, with say a dedicated offline DC somewhere where "mythos" could bang its tokens against the network and learn to exploit everything we have today, faster than 25 years? That's probably a bit of a stretch, but maybe not "hollywood" far fetched...
Something like your takeover scenario already happened, but not through AI. It happened through atomic weapons.
Nations who have them are in a different class from nations who don’t. Nations who have a lot of them, delivery systems, and systems that might be able to shoot down some of a counterattack are superpowers.
Using this leverage these nations and their leaders have been able to dictate world policies. Through the last half of the 20th century this was the US and the USSR. Now it’s the US, EU, Russia, and China, and a few smaller nations with a few nukes. The club is a little bigger but not much.
This kind of thing could happen in the 21st century with AI. If so it will probably be the US and China who control the most powerful AI “agency amplifiers.”
I don't think we have any evidence that LLMs are even the right path for AGI. It's possible that it is, and it's possible that it isn't. If I was a betting human, I'd bet on "isn't", but what do I know?
On the other hand, it's pretty easy to imagine the full range of Skynet activities being done by a supercharged (but non-AGI) agentic LLM. Meanwhile, every company that can say so with a straight face is trying to become Cyberdyne Systems, and there's no shortage of hackers like us lining up to work for them.
Few years ago, I tried to extrapolate where it will end up by writing SciFi short story. I decided on Pseudo as the name for future AI entities. Short for pseudo consciousness. I hope it catches on. In my prediction however they are semi-autonomus. Although without clear goals or drives apart from their occupation.
What the hell is a true AI? Can you please provide a concrete definition. If your argument is that the Chinese room is not intelligent, then you have greatly misunderstood the thought experiment imo.
Or it makes it AI in the broad sense, but not AGI.
Maybe it's time to borrow "Virtual Intelligence" terminology from Mass Effect - something that's 'smart' but that doesn't have its own true volition or ability to materially self-improve.
I'm on your side, but I would argue many of the first computer discovered proofs might be called original proofs without intelligence, as they rely on massive programmatic case checking.
I believe the great problem of our age is deciding who controls technology.
The technologists who create it believe they should control it, the people who use it are starting to believe they should control it and the governments who write the laws believe they should control it. And now the priests believe they should also play role.
So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology?
> The technologists who create it believe they should control it
I think there's an interesting phenomenon where it is _not_ the people who control it, but instead a kind of international finance man cum-captain of industry (perhaps best embodied by Sam Altman) who does not create the technology and yet has ended up wielding the levers.
In England, ca. 1500s common law established the legal precedent that if your cattle broke loose of its pen, wandered into your neighbor's field and trampled their garden, you were liable for the damage your cattle caused.
Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.
Now AI (set loose in the wild at the AI industry's strategic choice so as to be irreversible) seems poised to disrupt and render a very significant part of the labor force disrupted on an unprecedented societal scale and it appears to be a foregone conclusion that collateral damages won't be the causal industry's expense. Nevermind that its also poised to easily afford those social costs, and don't even consider that maybe society should be considering this obvious cause and effect.
For me at least the feudal suppression of this otherwise obvious and necessary discussion is perhaps more spectacular than the causal technological breakthrough itself.
> In England, ca. 1500s common law established the legal precedent that if your cattle broke loose of its pen, wandered into your neighbor's field and trampled their garden, you were liable for the damage your cattle caused.
Ok.
> Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.
And how does this paragraph connect to the previous one? The streets of New York isn't taxi drivers' private property. No one trampled their garden any more than me opening a coffee shop tramples the garden of the Starbucks down the street. Should we forbid any new entry into a market just because it upsets the incumbents who invested big money into their business?
I'm not from the US, but if the NYC taxi system works like french one, entry on the market required buying an existing licence from a retiring driver for the price of a flat. Government should have forbidden Uber from operating in this market without any cost of entry (the cost could've been to end the regulation and pool money to compensate actors that were playing by the rules)
I struggle to see how the 3 examples go together. Your exposition implies a connection, but I struggle to see one. The best I could do is that it has to do with rights and responsibilities?
The first example is clear. And it has pretty much carried on, as the "right to property" and "the responsibility to cover damage to other's rights".
The second example, even though you wrote it as Uber vs. the cab driver, is more about Uber vs. the municipality. By the fact that almost all over the world people wanted Uber (or the other brands) over the imposed limitation of their municipalities, shows that the deal was wrong. In places where it was artificially limited, people have showed to prefer the alternatives. It has little to do with Bob the driver, and more to do with Alice the mayor who decided unilaterally that a taxi cab should require a 100k/yr medallion. That's what's changed, and society accepted it.
The third example is weirder still. Again you pose it as AI provider vs. average Joe, but here I struggle to even see what rights / who's rights are being infringed upon. I don't see any. While we generally have a right to work, there is absolutely no right to work in a certain industry, if the industry doesn't have demand. If someone else doesn't need your output, your right to work in that particular field has absolutely no basis in reality.
Unless you want to go back to the places and regimes that decided who works where, modern society has no place for such thinking. A right to work protects you from employers choosing not to hire you because of things that you are (race, age, gender, etc.) It absolutely doesn't protect you at all against "people don't need elevator operators anymore". And I say this as someone who's worked in this industry 20+ years. If tomorrow people don't need software done by hand anymore, tough luck for me. But it's absolutely not the problem of rights. I don't have a right to demand people wanting my services. That's not the social contract at all.
1st example was the progenitor of what eveolved into strict liability. (If you make money putting stuff into the stream of commerce, you're liable for unintended and evenunforseeable downstream damages.
2nd example is an illustration of that longheld legal precedent's being curiously ignored (nevermind the cost savings was a bum rush and livery costs are now higher than before the innovative advent)
3rd is a call to at least litigate who bears the downstream effects.
Or perhaps we should just cancel public health measures and employ pestilence to solve the problem *organically.*
> If you make money putting stuff into the stream of commerce, you're liable for unintended and evenunforseeable downstream damages
So if you’re a business offering poor quality services, and I come along and start offering higher quality services, I owe you damages for the impact I have on your business?
Morally, maybe? It's what people tend to implicitly assume when a large chain displaces local mom & pops. You can argue it's for the greater good in the long-term, but that doesn't settle the question of the immediate injuries. Is it the fault of the stock boy who lost his job that he worked for a less efficient employer? Maybe?
The whole encyclical's argument is that morality requires an accounting and response to the pain inflicted upon each individual, and human morality is a distinct set of rules and norms than economic, physical, or even civil laws. I think it also follows that it's not just, e.g., Walmart or OpenAI who bares some responsibility for ameliorating temporary suffering. And to the extent people use the encyclical as fodder in the usual anti-corporate rhetoric, then that's unfortunate.
And this is coming from the Catholic church. It turns alot of people off who in isolated contexts often perceive hypocrisy, but in its charity it has always considered the personal responsibility of those receiving it. It understands the struggles and inherent tensions that comes from trying to square individualized justice & mercy, selflessness, and the "greater good".
Maybe. But the fact that they're still in business shows that different people value different things. Be it rating schemes, payment alternatives, choosing their music, choosing their cars, one click hailing and so on. The people have spoken, the social contract has changed.
The argument was "governments restricted taxi availability so Uber won" and now you've mott-and-bailied yourself down to "people want to pick music they listen to on the ride"
> over the imposed limitation of their municipalities
This was really just a few cities in the US. There's no artificial taxi scarcity in Houston or London or Tokyo.
You might reflexively say London has strict regulations, but it regulates safety not imposing an artificial cap. That's a NY/Boston/Chicago/Philly thing.
Uber won because:
1. on-demand app
2. VCs subsidized rides to destroy taxi companies by driving the customer cost to well below provider cost.
> 2. VCs subsidized rides to destroy taxi companies by driving the customer cost to well below provider cost.
Not sure about other regions but in NYC this is 100% the case. Ubers used to be nicer cleaner newer cars, better drivers.. for less than a taxi. Now they are about 4x what they cost in the 2010s, with cars about as dirty as a taxi and equally surly drivers.
> Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.
It’s weird to see the completely broken NY taxi cab medallion system brought up as a good thing.
Most taxi drivers didn’t own a medallion. They had to rent one from one of the operations that had bought them up. It was a government granted monopoly in the control of companies that charged the drivers for the right to be able to work.
The price was high partially because the supply was artificially limited, which made getting a cab bad for people of the city.
People like to criticize Uber but let’s not glorify the past system. It sucked. The Uber model that let anyone work without having to surrender their pay to some company hoarding the tokens was great for drivers and for people of the city.
The whole point of the medallion system was to artificially limit supply — not with the purpose of driving up cost (although, yes, that was a secondary effect), but with the purpose of making the city more pleasant. There’s a trade off in the number of taxis — if you want a taxi, more is better; if you want to walk, drive, take a bus, bike, or basically do anything but take a taxi… fewer is better. This was a conscious choice and a control that made the city more pleasant, that we’ve lost.
> if you want a taxi, more is better; if you want to walk, drive, take a bus, bike, or basically do anything but take a taxi… fewer is better.
You used driving as an example. I don't see how it's better for the city if we encourage more people to own and park cars because taking taxis is too hard.
The nice thing about Uber is that it lets those cars used for personal driving double as taxis when demand is high. Instead of having your own car and parking it, you can have someone else use their car to drive you.
I think some people have become so desperate to make Uber evil that we're intentionally ignoring what's gained.
Finally, regulating taxi medallions is an awful way to address traffic. If traffic is the problem, you regulate vehicles and traffic. Creating a system where you have to buy something approaching the price of a house just to do a job with a low hourly rate because the city wants to regulate traffic is beyond broken.
That a driver (who already owned a car) had to pay 2x the price of an average house (which is already overpriced) to do the job isn't a secondary effect. Its a primary effect and drives up price and down the driver's pay. That that happened is a 10000ft giant red sign pointing out that it didn't work. That you can't understand that means that you fundamentally don't understand good public policy in any way. Anytime a policy creates such an outcome, that system needs to be scraped and a new one needs to be created because its rotten to the core.
What would this new system look like that doesn’t involve the trade offs between having cabs on demand if you need them and having a walkable city if you don’t that the person you replied to spoke about?
Uber and friends have indeed democratised giving rides to people - though where I am, a few rich people have bought numerous cars and have daily wagers driving them finding fares via Uber - but at the cost of far more cabs on the road.
Others, notably motorbikes and scooter ride aggregators have emerged to replicate Uber. These motorbike cabs are even harder to regulate than cabs.
Uber, imo, has broken the equilibrium that existed before.
You make the medallions non-transferrable/rentable, and use a lottery system to grant them.
Uber has absolutely increased traffic levels in the places where they operate. I don't personally think it's to a level that is actually a problem, but I also avoid driving myself around in cities whenever I can, so I may not be the best at observing this.
Amusing. By yoking taxicab drivers to the other two, the argument attempts to make them seem like victims. However, most people’s direct experience with taxicab drivers and the resulting improvement under Uber directly contradicts that sentiment. This probably has the opposite effect and makes it seem like the AI companies aren’t so bad if they’re akin to the guys who freed us from cabs.
> However, most people’s direct experience with taxicab drivers and the resulting improvement under Uber directly contradicts that sentiment
You can be both a victim and a bully, it's not mutually exclusive. A scam artist can get mugged or burglarised, and so on. In general, in civilised countries, being a horrible person does not prevent someone from being recognised as a victim.
I've only used cabs a few times, but it seemed to be the operators were both. They were squeezed deep into the economic margins, and they were also often terrible to their passengers.
Same for Uber/Lyft, but they really tried to earn a good review while still providing a pretty unpleasant experience.
I always feel like this take is exclusively made by New Yorkers. I never had a problem with taxies in Texas. I had to schedule a pickup time, yes, but they always showed up, the taxis were clean, they were fast, they were helpful, and they were kind. Like that whole "medallion" thing and taxi driver retirement livelihoods being destroyed because their medallion became worthless. Gotta be like five cities that use the system. Nowhere else does.
Uber/Taxi discussion is so transparently centered around New York City, it makes all discussions irrelevant to most of the US.
In fact, I still use a taxi to go to the airport with my family instead of taking an Uber. Uber is for being mid-run in city limits trails and running out of energy in the heat and the water fountains have stopped working due to low water pressure. Uber gets me to safety, and I tip big because I just sweated all over their car.
I've taken plenty of taxis in both NYC and Texas, and pre-Uber they were terrible in both. Calling a taxi in Austin meant a 50% chance that it would get there on time, or you'd wait 30 minutes. Calling back didn't help, you would just get the dispatcher saying, "Well, I guess it's not coming then, huh?"
Similar experiences in Boston area. Hailing a taxi at a taxi stand (e.g., at Prudential or Logan) - good experience to this day. Calling dispatcher - half of the time they don't show up (esp. so for scheduled airport rides) or show up late or arrive in a smoke-filled car. Hackney carriage medallions might have been bad investments for some cabbies, but Uber/Lyft are simply a much better service for the customer. Uber/Lyft takeover had little to do with price (though, yes, they were cheaper) and everything to do with reliability and overall quality of service.
SF resident here; taxis were always terrible here too. Calling dispatch was hit-or-miss whether or not they'd even answer you. If they did, they'd always say "20 minutes", regardless of where you were and what time of day it was. A decent chunk of the time the taxi would never show up, and if they did, it wouldn't be 20 minutes. And, unlike Manhattan, good luck trying to hail one on 95% of SF's streets.
I learn that boiling the stream water makes it safe and tell people about it.
What do I owe you?
Uber and AI are certainly more complicated than that, but you are pretty close to arguing that the constructed rights of some people inhibit the rights of other people.
How does that analogy apply to AI, where a handful of companies are attempting to replace the entire white collar market with computers? It fits neither qualitatively, nor quantitatively.
If somebody thinks the computer can make a better PowerPoint, what business is it of yours to stop them from using the computer to make a PowerPoint?
There's a big political problem to solve, but it's how to give most people decent material standards of living if computers are doing all the work, not how to freeze things in place so that people can keep doing tasks that (assuming success) the computer is better at.
I love the animal-owner analogy of owning something and being responsible for what it does when set loose. the concept is the same in todays Germany. you own a pet, and if it's friendly it's all nifty but if it creates my damage, the owner is liable. not the person who guided it at the time. no. the owner. "Halterhaftung"
is it ok if I skip the Uber part? I think that leads as try s evidenced by the other reactions.
the "who is liable for the damage an ai creates, in the hands of an incompetent or even malignant guide?" question is fantastic. and who "owns" an ai?
"cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless"
Doesn't it strike you that if licenses for a banal service like taxi are that expensive, that this likely indicates political corruption?
Good riddance to this sort of rent-seeking. I wonder if the NYC taxi service was provided by the mob.
In Central Europe, I don't have to wonder. Prior to Uber, the local taxi services were operated by the mob, and the taxi drivers basically robbed naive tourists through exorbitant, illegal prices. Stories of rape or abuse of intoxicated women abound. Some of the drivers were so sketchy and creepy that people refused to board their cars. Scammy Prague taxi service was legendary, but by far the worst sort of tracksuit-and-gun wearing mobsters behind the wheel I ever encountered was in late 1990s Bratislava.
This ugly rotten web was swept clean by Uber, where people have a reputation to maintain. Thanks god. My wife is no longer afraid to take a cab at night. Hooray.
I think FAANG developers would be better equipped than taxi driver to manage this. And besides, I don't think I am really against some kind of professional certification like actual engineers do. Right now SWE do not manage any of the downsides of what they inflict upon the world, and it's a damn shame. That said, having a limited number like taxi medallions in some cities would be stupid, even though I can see how it might make sense in a city.
I agree with you that it requires scrutiny and the process must be open and fair, like most things in a working democracy. I also think that it is not out of line to have mechanisms to ensure whoever is in a situation to kill, mug, kidnap or ransom you has no interest in doing so.
"I also think that it is not out of line to have mechanisms to ensure whoever is in a situation to kill, mug, kidnap or ransom you has no interest in doing so."
The problem in practice seems that those mechanisms get hijacked by the very people whom they should prevent from being in that service.
IDK about NYC, but here in Central Europe, taxi services regulated by municipal governments were consistently treating their customers worse than Uber/Bolt. Outright murders were rare, but sexual harassment, fraud, verbal abuse, even "minor" things like the cars smelling of tobacco smoke were worse. Occassionally, there were cars set on fire or brandishing of weapons when those drivers got into conflicts. That's not ancient history and people still remember.
That happens when guys with deep pockets capture the regulatory services and make them into their own cash cow, using force of law to prevent any competition from emerging.
If you had a ballot about canceling Uber and going back to the old model here, that would lose by something like 15:85. The improvement in service and safety is just staggering.
Welcome to the New (fifth, I believe) Industrial Revolution! It will not quite as brutal as the first and the second ones were, but it still won't be gentle.
> 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.
Why is this Uber's problem? Do you realize how ridiculously dumb, inefficient, and corrupt a 6 figure taxi license is? It is not Uber's job to compensate for that ridiculousness.
They provided a better and more cash efficient solution for passengers. That is enough.
If you required every technological venture to cover the cost for every person it "disrupts," you would halt progress entirely.
> They provided a better and more cash efficient solution for passengers. That is enough.
They burned half a billion dollars a month of VC money at their peak to undercut taxis across the world; in quainter times this used to be called "dumping", now it's just the standard way of doing business. All the while basically flaunting the law with their whole "we're just a platform connecting people who happen to drive a car with people who happen to want to go some place, it's totally not a taxi guys". No regulations, no expensive licenses or professional certifications, no need even for a minimum wage or basic social security or insurance or any kind of protection. Amazing!
Essentially the same in spirit as Airbnb, only this latter had far more destructive consequences than screwing over taxi drivers.
Most businesses require sunk costs or debts, and it's also often what is required for new ideas take place in an established market. Whether they burn VC money or the bank's money to gain a foothold, is immaterial.
Uber did a great thing here and made a product that people like more, for less money. More drivers, way more global availability, more customers, and better cars, all while being cheaper. That is a quintessential success story.
If people liked taxis more, they'd use them. But taxis are still shit and the only reason we use them is because of the taxi cartel bullying weak city governments into restricting Ubers.
And yet somehow Uber and Lyft (and Waymo) in San Francisco are still usually cheaper (inflation-adjusted) than what taxis used to cost 15 years ago here.
I agree that dumping is generally bad, and perhaps laws against it should have been enforced against Uber. But the taxi system deserved to be destroyed. They sucked, and there was really no political/business way out of that system other than someone violating regulations on "what is a taxi" until it stuck. I'm not a "means justify the ends" guy in general, but in this case I think it worked out how it should have.
"B-but my philosophical argument was aesthetically pleasing," he shouted over the sound of eight billion people starving to death.
Setting aside your implicit assumption that what nigh-unregulated AI is set to do to humanity is "progress," having a sound argument is pretty pointless if it leads to tremendous human suffering.
Reminds me of the paradox of intolerance, where bad faith actors say "it's intolerant to be intolerant of intolerance" (i.e., argue for zero exceptions to a maxim) when it's much more preferable to say "you should be tolerant, except in the case where tolerance leads to tremendous suffering [as in the case of allowing the rise of fascism because you have to be tolerant of it]."
See also libertarianism, where simple rules are preferable to good outcomes.
How dramatic! No one is starving to death. Things will just be rough for a bit. People will get over it, as they always have, and the QoL gains will have been worth the cost many times over, just like they were for literally every Industrial Revolution before us.
> The technologists who create it believe they should control it
I think it goes deeper than this when you listen to them talk. They truly think society will be re-ordered by this technology... and they should be in control of that re-ordering rather than democratically elected governments.
Democratically elected governments can't reorder a cookie right now.
We even had one out tariffs on steel, thinkinf this would be good for jobs here. If there was 0.1 seconds of thought they'd realize any manufacturing job you make from a steel tariff cuts 2 more well paid trade jobs
Democracies don’t necessarily pick the best leaders but they give a veto to the people such that the worst leaders don’t last long.
A technocracy can build high speed rail in a decade but it can also institute multi decade one child policy, multi year zero-covid, barricade people into their own homes and ban entire industries at the whim of a single leader. There is less course correction.
I would rather society not be reordered at all, if the only parties capable or willing to do a reordering are big tech companies, especially of the kind run by people like Sam Altman.
Sorry for being salty, a bit hyperbole perhaps in the 2:1 numbers.
I draft and write some code for construction companies and personally saw layoffs and not taking work due to increased material costs. The structural companies we worked with similarly did a few layoffs. The average pay of these jobs was 60k+.
Manufacturing of steel is very competitive and I haven't seen the American steel drop in price. I can't personally imagine it adding more than a few thousand jobs since it's so competitive (thin margins) and you would have to add a ton of production to add one job.
Meanwhile, the profitability of building a building is a direct feed into whether buildings get built. A building not being built directly led to laying off about 100 field guys for us.
That sounds like some reductionist hackernews question that tries to hint at some clever insight but I'll assume no snark and answer with as much insight as I can.
You just make less of them. Some buildings are discretionary, like your big apartment buildings you probably want (these were the two that got cancelled).
Person funding can make x profit over building per year. Person loaning loans x for y sum. Building costing more than interest amortized profit means it doesn't get built.
And I just had a doctor's office fitout cancelled mid project (drafted it personally :) ). so apparently those are, too.
Public projects like schools rarely get cancelled. Factories I personally don't draft so I really can't tell you.
Healthcare absolutely has a ton of discretion for their buildouts.
What's the alternative to steel? You just make less if it's not profitable to make.
Funny that you're accusation of snark was not without snark itself.
I'll take your word on it for the level of discretion on some public building, though I would have thought/hoped that whimsy would play no more role than a rinsing error. Especially in the current economy.
Maybe it's good there is less superfluous building going on?
Sorry, the question seemed like one of those low effort "have you thought about just not building buildings, hmmmmm?" that requires more effort to address than it took to ask. That "combatative-without-seeming-combatitive-for-the-purpose-of-seeming-like-the-good-faith-one" hackernews pretend good faith socratic argument is what it read to me. Apologize if it wasn't the angle you were going for.
If the stated goal is jobs, the tariffs aren't doing it from what I can tell.
It seems to be hands have been put on the scales, and to call cancelling the building that would have otherwise been built due to market forces good needs some testing. If it were doctors offices in already served areas, sure, but these were not subsidized but lower end apartment buildings in NYC. I'm hoping the guys who were laid off moved to some other company rather than exiting the trade.
The alternative is usually more-crowded schools, fewer factories, and more expensive dental care (due to higher real estate costs). If the people in charge of these decisions can't justify the expense of building more, then the things that would have happened in those buildings just don't happen, and the existing infrastructure has to strain to keep up.
Not GP, but what all economists have been saying is that tariffing industrial raw materials - industrial inputs like steel, aluminum, lumber, is idiotic because the companies that make machines, cars, houses, makes a lot more money per ton of metal that is made than the mining, steel, lumber companies (etc) made making the raw materials. So, that tariff makes a winner of a very few small employers, while massively screwing way more and larger companies who employ orders of magnitude more people here (and those jobs are better jobs too).
And we are very competitive in machines, already set up to win.
It’s also fantasy that even 4 years of tariffs will convince anyone to build brand-new smelting operations, as they’re very large, capital intensive, take a while to build. And again, mostly worse jobs.
This is the part everyone seems to forget. Any "new" jobs would be shitty low paying jobs, and it would mostly instead need to be automation.
Tariffs transfer wealth to the 1% and leave shit jobs that pollute the environment, which also happen to raise the cost of all goods, for everyone else.
> If there was 0.1 seconds of thought they'd realize any manufacturing job you make from a steel tariff cuts 2 more well paid trade jobs
They knew that was the case. They don't care. The maga crowd isn't acting in good faith. Nobody other than the cult members and people who aren't paying attention thought that would actually bring manufacturing back to the US. The point of the tariffs is to devalue USD (something Trump wants to do since circa the 80s) and to strengthen Trump power/influence. He wants everybody in the world to be forced to come and negotiate directly with him so he can see them bend their knees. The whole thing is a power play
I do think they believed and believe it, though the reasoning is less economic than that. Manufacturing "belongs" in the US due to our inherent superiority, and has gone elsewhere only because of ill-conceived notions of niceness.
By increasing tariffs they will have to pay their proper obeisance for their inferiority, and be inspired to actually work hard like us Americans.
Mr Tariff is probably slightly better to keep those around than not, but ideally I'd rather the government curate experts they employ to advise them.
I guess I kinda walked right into handing technocrats power, but I really just want the government to understand the tech they regulate. We'd rather have populist zingers on TV though.
Technoauthoritarians writing pretentious manifestos disavowing democracy explicitly don't want the government to understand the tech they regulate though, never mind curating experts, which is why they're so keen on the likes of Mr Tariff.
Mr. Tariff was trying to replace the income tax with tariffs with a bonus of having personal power over other countries economies by whatever tariff he decree'd. The "more jobs" was a smokescreen, and I'm sure you're aware of that
Trade policy should be as holistic as possible (tariffs, taxes, subsidies, etc), with the goal of aiding a robust domestic economy.
The 70's neoliberalism took Smith's comparative advantage argument and stripped it of context — optimizing for quarterly returns and capital mobility while ignoring the industrial ecosystem those returns depend on. You can't offshore your entire manufacturing base and expect to retain the innovation, workforce capacity, and supply chain resilience that made those profits possible in the first place.
Contrast this with "For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country."
That era was not without its issues as well, but there was a sense that "we're all in it together" vs the "greed is good" crowd.
> I think it goes deeper than this when you listen to them talk.
This needs to be shouted from the rooftops!
All the Web3 edgelords talk about how democracy is inefficient and how their magic blockchains will fix things but don't actually back up their claims with anything.
Sure, it could be applied and might work, but the only thing blockchain brings is a distributed immutable ledger -- but all the trust actions happen outside that ledger. And that's not what slows us down, it's the people, ideas, power and process that makes it inefficient.
My observation after numerous decades is that people who invent technology don't control it because they seldom imagine how the rest of humanity will ultimately use it.
I am thinking of printing press versus newspapers with advertising business model. Same for Radio and TV. The techs made it work. The business weenies made the profit. The original "www" followed a similar path. How that plays out with AI is in motion I think.
The logic of an arms race is that nobody controls the technology. For a literal example, Ukraine and Russia are locked in a drone arms race. Ukraine needs improve drones as fast as they can. There’s no getting off that train until the war is over.
This is starting to be true for AI and security bugs. Writing secure Internet-facing software will depend on AI security review. Anthropic can hold Mythos back for a while to buy some time, but the competition isn’t going to stop.
It’s also not always true that technologists think they should control AI. Some companies support legislation. But there’s not a lot of progress, so they end up making their own decisions in the meantime.
They could still form trade organizations to invent ground rules that members of the organization agree to follow, and then lobby for government to formalize those policies into broader laws that others also have to follow.
This strategy would also have the advantage that experts with skin in the game of their field and cutting edge experience get to choose, hone, and debate the policies before testing them so that out-of-touch elected officials don't have to do that step which would be parsecs out of their competence.
Unfortunately that would be a strategy that a real member of the real world might come up with to improve their product, their industry, their ability to create, and their relationship with the consumer. Instead we have nothing but parasites optimizing for gaming the quarterly numbers to pump and dump national institutions and building blackmail profiles against other powerful players to out-extort them while everyone involved tries to maximize how much blood they can suck.
Few of those are ever running. Mostly we have just two brands of smooth-brains whose only policy aim is “preventing that other group of assholes from gaining any power, because they and their supporters are pure evil!”
Each side gets the smooth brains they crave because for ~50% of the population it's become a team sport / religion situation. A majority of people have not thought through 1/10th of the policy positions they automatically support/reject based on the team hat color.
There's a quote I will mangle and I forget the source of that's something like "If you agree with all the positions of your chosen political party, either you have thought through every option and came to the same conclusions on dozens of topics, or you haven't thought through anything".
'who controls technology' should be the result of 'what do [they] want to use it for', e.g the motivation.
It should be put in the hands of the most trustworthy, transparent institution that can validate it works for all of us, not just the few.
I don't think private companies or specific leaders want the best for the common good, so it would make the most sense to give control to a supra-nation entity like the UN - at least that would be the most democratic as we all have the chance to influence it (via voting from national to international level).
But I also feel that it has been a particularly toothless organization. If a member state decides it is in their interest to flout some safeguard they were to mandate, that state will do so, and the U.N. won’t do anything about it unless there’s broad agreement between the US, China, and probably Russia. And the chances are that whoever is in need of enforcement is one of those, or a closely allied country of one.
> so it would make the most sense to give control to a supra-nation entity like the UN
This is a very naive and idealistic imagining of what international NGOs such as the UN are actually like and how they operate. I can't think of anything worse.
The median country is a corrupt authoritarian state.
That's not what the UN is for. The whole purpose of the UN was as a place for nations to talk things out so they didn't go to war with each other. Trying to do other things usually either doesn't work very well, or distracts from what it was built for.
Would you agree that to some extend, the ability to control technology is an incentive for companies to develop/innovate, and the more control they have the more profitable it is?
I would not. Especially not in the current climate when virtually every company is dropping all pretense of development and innovation (or creation of any kind) in favor of value extraction and rent-seeking.
We are in this constant cycle of bubbles — the last ones I can recall bursting in 2000 and 2008 — where someone invents some new financial shell game that allows them to trade on some form of non-existent capital and then half the stock market follows along like rats after the piper until it all collapses as soon as enough people realize that everyone else also realizes the Emperor is wearing no clothes. And incidentally no, I have no idea how this particular trainwreck of fairy tail lessons all became pertinent simultaneously, but here we are.
Control over things makes a lousy incentive anyway, since having said control always better empowers the appointed to just cheat the incentive instead.
If the big bad wolf is at your door, "letting him in" isn't a bargaining chip you can trust to incentivize any sort of behavior other than "eating you".
>>> So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology?
I hope so. Recent turns of events notwithstanding, I remain optimistic about democracy in the long run. I think it's going to get harder to say with a straight face that the private sector can really manage vital institutions better than government.
Recent reports about commencement speeches at college graduations suggest that within the span of a just a few years, computer programmers no believe that they are riding on the coattails of the technology oligarchs. Besides, nobody wears coats with tails any more.
We we go there in one easy step? I'm not that optimistic.
The people should. There cannot be any other correct answer. If the ownership class or the political class _can_ possibly compete for control of it, then they're both too large and too corrupt, and need to be revolted against.
The purpose of our society is for people. It's not a lever for the powerful to centralize control. Those who attempt to do so always have evil as their motive.
Imagine that. People who are responsible for guiding the morals of much of the world's population see moral implications in AI. How dare these mere "religious leaders" guide their flock.
FFS. Morals come from somewhere. For many, that's religion. Deal with it.
Hasn't big capital always owned technology? I don't understand what is the question here. Is this rethorical?
Silicon valley owns the internet. The robber barons owned the railways. Big oil. Big pharma. The investment company owned the (slave) trading fleets. The lords owned the agriculture. The clergy owned the books. The Kings owned the armies.
Technology accumulates capital, capital accumulates technology.
In reality it's only one entity, which would rather remain obscured, that owns all of the above while also directing the muppet show where seemingly separate parties try to gain control over technology while squeaking funny voices of dissent.
In Russian, there's a saying: He who feeds a girl is the one to dance her.
In this case, the food is the money printed out of thin air.
Normally, its the one who understand technology, can control it. Unfortunately, its not the case anymore. Stuff got unnecessary complex and bloated, hard to grasp it alone. Also, now AI plays the new role too.
Sure but theres a level of uncertainty being expressed for a paid service that you don't see elsewhere.
Imagine if every time you booked an uber it was like "your drive may crash the car". Or whenever you ate at a restaurant, the waiter said "there is a chance the chef will poison you". Or your bank statement said something like "these numbers may be wrong".
> the great problem of our age is deciding who controls technology
Isn't that just an instance of the political problem for all ages: who controls what, who gets to rule and who obeys, the fundamental power struggle apparent in all human history.
Extend the definition of technology to the broadest sense, from the material that allow us control over the physical reality: steam, computing; to the organizational, that enable collective human action: states, factories and assembly lines; and the ideological, that legitimize certain power arrangements: religion, nationalism, democracy, human rights etc.
A feudal lord's power rested on land (material), the manorial system (organizational), and the divine right of kings or religious sanction (ideological). Even if peasant revolts happen from time to time, the arrangement is stable because the peasantry accept it as legitimate and have no economic alternative; so even when revolting they cannot imagine a different political order. Technological (broad) leaps like the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution change the political possibility space so arrangements like feudalism are no longer stable, but others like capitalism, liberal democracy etc. become possible.
Political actors observe these technological shifts and struggle for control, relevance and power. The old elites are contested by the new kids on the block, wielding the new technologies: the aristocrat by the bourgeois, pastoralist tribes by agricultural states, autocrats stuck with traditional propaganda by the kids with smartphones and social media.
The present struggle around AI is therefore to be expected; what's more interesting is the type of political possibility space it opens up: is it one where having the bulk of society educated and productive, capable of running the machines is the key factor pushing the country forward in the international technological competition, like we've see post-war, forcing the national elites to cater to their needs, invest in their populations and broadly share the economic output and the political power? Or is it more likely one where the key competitive factor is the size of your datacenters and automated defense factories, where the bulk of people are irrelevant for the architecture of power?
Because if it's the latter, the entire idea that democracy will somehow manage to survive and influence who gets what becomes problematic. In the new technological-historical space, democracy becomes structurally unfavorable and thus, unlikely to persist long term.
> Isn't that just an instance of the political problem for all ages: who controls what, who gets to rule and who obeys, the fundamental power struggle apparent in all human history.
Yes. But modern technology, especially software doesn't have the high barrier to entry like being a feudal lord, but successful software can be just as impactful, tie in economies of scale and network effects and it can be even more powerful, which has allowed the producers of such software to wield significant power and as a result bypass democracy. And this ties in with your point:
> The present struggle around AI is therefore to be expected; what's more interesting is the type of political possibility space it opens up: is it one where having the bulk of society educated and productive, capable of running the machines is the key factor pushing the country forward in the international technological competition, like we've see post-war, forcing the national elites to cater to their needs, invest in their populations and broadly share the economic output and the political power? Or is it more likely one where the key competitive factor is the size of your datacenters and automated defense factories, where the bulk of people are irrelevant for the architecture of power?
It remains to be seen if this era of LLMs and datacenters raises or reduces the barrier to entry for software production and in general technological innovation. The marketplace is always hungry for innovation and those that can deliver and control it will be in a position of power.
Not really. Search engines are a tech so centralized only two of them exist in the west, Google and Bing. There are zero open source search engines of any usable quality. Whereas there are lots of models out there, some free to download.
"only two search engines exist in the west" and "only two search engines in the west are of usable quality to me" are contradictory statements.
The models free to download aren't the models used by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. You aren't going to get all of OpenAI downloaded to your desktop and running fully on just your hardware.
And in each case (search and AI) the potential to decentralize and maintain "usable quality" is limited by these technologies requiring physical infrastructure at a scale that isn't available to the home consumer.
I mean, they are the models used by Google, at least. Gemma is used by Google and you can download it freely, weights and all. OpenAI has released an open weights model although I don't know if they use it themselves.
They aren't as good as the full fat models but they're plenty useful for many real world tasks. Show me the open source web search engine that I can run locally and that's plenty useful for many real world tasks!
It is interesting to see the progressive/left current in the US re-discover their close cousin in deontological christianity. It's obvious from an outside observer, as Nietzsche wrote on: these are both expressions of the slave revolt in morals.
Somewhat related: Peter Thiel and the Antichrist [1]
> Thiel: [...] There’s a risk of nuclear war, there’s a risk of environmental disaster. Maybe something specific, like climate change, although there are lots of other ones we’ve come up with. There’s a risk of bioweapons. You have all the different sci-fi scenarios. Obviously, there are certain types of risks with A.I.
> But I always think that if we’re going to have this frame of talking about existential risks, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type of a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one-world totalitarian state. Because I would say the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance.
> [...]
> The atheist philosophical framing is “One World or None.” That was a short film that was put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late ’40s. It starts with the nuclear bomb blowing up the world, and obviously, you need a one-world government to stop it — one world or none. And the Christian framing, which in some ways is the same question, is: Antichrist or Armageddon? You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we’re sleepwalking toward Armageddon. “One world or none,” “Antichrist or Armageddon,” on one level, are the same question.
> [...]
> Thiel: [...] The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. It’s the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that.
> In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is: We need to stop science, we need to just say “stop” to this. And this is where, in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
> [...]
> Douthat: [...] You’re an investor in A.I. You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building. Like, wouldn’t the Antichrist be like: Great, we’re not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far. Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?
> Thiel: Look, there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing.
---
We live in crazy times. The Pope is pleading for multilateralism and responsible regulation of technology. On the other side, Thiel says fear of technological progress could lead us to a one-world totalitarian government (which he relates to the antichrist, and to me seems like a straw man of multilateralism), while at the same time (arguably) building the technological infrastructure such a totalitarian government would need.
I don't know, I think I'm siding with the Pope on all future antichrist related issues.
Thiel, paraphrased: Oh no it's not my corporation that is spying on everyone and which is infecting the militaries of all the world, not the AI (that routinely chooses nuclear warfare in simulated tests) that's a danger, that everyone will hate & demand be stopped! The Edward Tellers of the future that everyone wants to stop are obviously the Greta Thunbergs! Isn't it so clear?!
> The Pope is pleading for multilateralism and responsible regulation of technology.
According to the Economist at least, he doesn't seem to know what he wants. The encyclical sounds like a grabbag of every progressive meme and worry out there, whether they contradict each other or not.
You can't have both multilateralism and AI regulation (however that's defined). If you have genuine multilateralism then there will always be some jurisdictions that say they don't want to regulate and gain a competitive advantage by doing so. Because AI is symbolic and accessed over networks, in a truly multilateral world there is no such thing as AI regulation, really. Model development and serving will slowly migrate to jurisdictions that don't pin it down too much.
The only way to stop this is for every jurisdiction in the world to agree on the same set of rules. Which is the One World Government solution, normally in the 21st century approximated with economic pressure e.g. threatening to sanction or blacklist your country if you don't comply with some new rules. The anti-money laundering system is an example of that. And if you become familiar with the stories of its abuse, then AML can sound pretty darn Antichristy. So Thiel isn't far off.
Describing the pope’s proposals as progressive and anti-money laundering laws as the antichrist… this is like a parody of the most blinders-on kind of libertarianism.
For those of you playing at home, you can definitely have multi-lateral agreements without creating a one world government. We’ve had a chemical weapons ban for decades over which many of the multi-lateral parties were in hot and cold wars with each other. The nations are not going to magically combine over the presence of a treaty. Not how power works.
Anytime the pope comes up on HN it’s always a really quick way to find out who is very happy to step away too far out on a limb as they discuss subjects they know very little about (to be clear not talking about you)
I think you're not reading it in the spirit it's intended. There's a section towards the end (Chapter 5, I think) that is full of policy prescriptions. But most of the encyclical isn't "about" AI, it's "about" Catholicism, and is using AI as a lens to talk about principles the church has been building up over a century. In that sense the document is less concerned with frontier models and disinformation than it is with establishing Catholic social doctrine --- subsidiarity, solidarity, the common good, etc.
As far as the church is concerned, AI as an issue will come and go, but the ordering and prioritization of human relationships is timeless, and is the important issue. The subtext of the whole thing is that if you get the principles right, the tech policy will fall into place.
You can argue with those principles, but at that point you really are just arguing with Catholicism itself, which is fine, but is besides the point.
(I'm not engaging with or disputing your takes on policy, only with your comment as a critique of the encyclical itself.)
Perhaps, but I think that's a bit generous. Let's look at Chapter 3, titled "TECHNOLOGY AND DOMINANCE. THE GRANDEUR OF HUMANITY IN LIGHT OF THE PROMISES OF AI."
This whole section is clearly about AI and social policy. It makes occasional Biblical references but if you strip those out it sounds like any Democrat podcast. If random people were given these quotes stripped of context, how many would guess it was the Pope?
For example: > What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating
That's a demand for AI regulation.
Then take the paragraph that starts with:
> In many cases within the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power does not rest with States, but with major economic and technological actors [snip]
The whole paragraph has nothing to do with Catholicism. It could have been written by the EU Commission and you'd never know. In it he appears to argue for the nationalization of AI labs, using standard progressivist claims.
Later the Pope argues once again for the nationalization of not just AI labs but all intellectual property held by the computing industry, using an argument I'm not afraid to condemn as theologically specious. In "The principle of the universal destination of goods" he says first that things like earth and water are given by God and thus everyone has a "right" to use them as they wish. From a theological perspective this is reasonable, albeit not from an economic perspective. But then he argues that patents, algorithms, datacenters and digital platforms are exactly the same as soil and water, and thus everyone should have them for free. That's nonsense. The religious justification for the first is that God made planet Earth, but He obviously didn't invent the transformer algorithm so why would the same logic apply?
All this is just standard left wing politics. The only theological justification I could find in the first part of this chapter is that some other recent Pope agrees with him.
I don't have any problem with Catholics or Catholicism. In fact I've written a whole essay arguing that AI raises issues only religion can deal with:
Religion has something to contribute when it comes to pondering questions like, what is AI? Does it deserve compassion and feelings, does it have consciousness and free will, or is it just a machine? Does the creation of it make us challengers to God or would He have approved of us making creatures in our own image? But the Pope doesn't engage with those topics. Instead we get advocacy for government power. The world has enough of such politics already.
> if you strip those out it sounds like any Democrat podcast
The fact that the bloody Pope sounds like what appears to be a left-wing party in the US' Overton window should be a big kick in the arse. In most of the rest of the west, these are classical conservative values, and indeed more aligned with the gospel than anything coming from the Republican Party these days. As a leftist, I find Magnifica Humanitas to be interesting, because it's a view point that is rooted in a rich history and profound thinking. But that's not a socialist doctrine at all. Its situation is very close to Rerum Novarum: it was more social than what the capitalist magnates wanted, but it was really far from things like communism or revolutionary socialism. Leo XIV does not hide his admiration for Leo XIII, and he sees many similarities with the state of the society they live in. On that, I think I agree with him.
So, I'm not sure about your religious background but conversing about this will get tedious very quickly if I have to hedge everything I'm saying, so from the jump let me just say I respect your writing on HN and I assume you're not Catholic, and you can correct me if I'm making any broken assumptions about you.
Also, just to get this out of the way: I said "Chapter 5" was the section full of policy prescriptions, but that was from memory, and, as you've noted, it's "Chapter 3". I agree there's a run in this where he gets pretty prescriptive! But I still think "policy document" is the wrong way to ready this.
Leo goes way out of his way, in the tradition of all Catholic popes over the last century, to ground what he's saying in a long through-line of doctrine. So in both your quotes, about the need for regulation: it's not really about policy.
I think Leo is first espousing a normie view (neither especially "left" nor especially libertarian) about regulation and risk, and then using it as an object lesson about the Catholic principle of Participation. Catholicism is big on ordering and prioritizing relationships between humans. We are supposed to be making decisions together for the Common Good, and we are supposed to recognize that decision-making happens (must happen) at different levels, from the state to local communities to families (this is Subsidiarity).
I flinched at the intellectual property bit too. But the point he's making in context is clear; it's Catholic and Christian doctrine going all the way back to Genesis. The literal named principle "Universal destination of goods" goes back to Vatican 2. The "codification" of these principles happened under Benedict XVI, not my favorite pope (I'm much more to the left than you are) and obviously no squish.
I think you're reading too much American politics into this, for what it's worth. Leo XIV took his name from Leo XIII, who in the late 19th century wrote Rerum Novarum, which was was in part a reaction to Marxist/Socialist thought and totalizing class conflict, recognizes the importance of worker welfare and the dignity of labor, but very specifically does not reject private property (private property is a necessary precondition for the agency of the family unit, which is central to Catholic doctrine). If we dig in I think we'll quickly find a lot of ideas that a doctrinaire leftist would recoil from!
But my big point is that people are all excited to read the Vatican's AI policy document, and the Vatican is uninterested in publishing AI policy; what it wants to do is continue to indoctrinate Catholics on the core tenets of Catholic social doctrine: Subsidiarity, Solidarity, The Common Good, Human Dignity.
There are plenty of rules that we apply across the board. No nuclear weapons for anyone who's not already got them is an example. This doesn't take some spooky one world government to do. This post is wild. Essentially, you're saying that any attempt to regulate AI as the existential threat that it almost certainly is the antichrist. It's bonkers.
That specific rule is enforced by assassinating the leaders and scientists of governments that don't agree to it. See: Iran. I don't think that's what anyone means when they say multilateralism. It's effectively an ad hoc global government defined by the reach of air power.
Then I guess all of human history is one big ad hoc global government because we've enforced the thing we want at the business end of a spear since there have been people.
Other way around. Nothing in history has ever been enforced "across the board", including the rule against developing nukes. A bunch of countries managed to develop them, others were stopped (so far). It wasn't done via "multilateralism" but rather by killing people who were doing it.
Unless your vision for AI regulation involves drone striking offices where AI researchers work, then there's no way to enforce it globally.
I'm not sure what point you're making anymore. The goalposts are floating in the sea. Yes, we could blow up facilities with advanced AI infrastructure. It wouldn't even be hard to locate.
In an infinitely-large "truly multilateral world", what you are saying is true under the assumption that unregulated AI provides a competitive advantage for the jurisdiction, assuming preferences are each sampled from a totally-supported probability distribution. But we only have finitely-many jurisdictions, and it's not clear that AI accelerationism is actually good for anyone (except those extracting wealth from the corresponding financial bubble), so this conclusion doesn't follow.
I mean yes, if we twist meanings of words enough, Pope is progressive. Except he is not, he is conservative catholic pushing for old school conservative catholic doctrine. He is not far right, he is not prosperity gosphel guy, but catholic doctrine was never that.
Of course you can have multilateralism and regulations. And no, AML is not an antichrist.
And Thiel with his plan yo create totalitatian fascist word is one of the greater danger to most of us. Way greater then AML regulations.
"Antichrist" is not really a serious word you can pin down, but the AML system is regularly used in ways that are very un-Christ-like. For instance, Christ said to love thy neighbour, to be the good Samaritan, that people should not be punished for the sins of their family members and he preached tolerance.
Now consider the unlucky German-Turkish journalist Hüseyin Dogru, who was recently placed under trade sanctions by the EU Commission due to his reporting. But they did it while he was living in Europe. The sanctions force everyone - including his neighbours and supermarkets - to refuse to sell him anything.
Then they realized, what if his wife buys him food? So they sanctioned his wife too.
Then they realized, what if his parents buy him food? So they sanctioned his parents as well.
Literally the entire family has been put to economic death. The state will imprison anyone who helps them and confiscate the entire net worth of anyone who conceivably might help them. All appeals have been denied.
They are now completely screwed and reduced to living on a subsidence budget of ~500 EUR/month from the government, calculated to be just enough that his family don't literally die of starvation.
This is possible because of the systems-level implementation of the AML/sanctions system and its existence outside any kind of justice system. It's the kind of thing that Thiel meant by a totalitarian antichrist. The Bible warned of the "mark of the beast" on people's hands that would prevent people buying and selling if the antichrist doesn't approve of him. Well, a revoked EMV contactless credit card is basically that. If Jesus were alive today he would presumably have harsh criticisms of this kind of thing.
Plenty of people besides the Pope have made essentially the same criticisms about AI and the dangers of the cultlike influence it seems to have on our society. Every one of those people were dismissed as paranoid and ignorant Luddites who simply feared and hated progress if not humanity itself until the Pope came along and voiced an opinion on the matter. Then and only then was criticism of AI taken to be valid, or at least taken seriously, because of the invocation of religious authority. (but now all the tradcaths are sedevacantists because the Pope is "woke" and obviously a Luddite who hates progress and humanity.)
I'll take it, but I really wish we didn't need it.
I don’t get the hangup with one world government. So it would be what inevitably a representative government structure. Isn’t this what we already have now? I mean sure it is technically “different countries” but absolutely not in the sense of countries across the world 500 years ago. Countries across the globe trade in common currency (usd) and use common language for diplomacy and science. The question of one world government is about semantics. Functionally, we are already there. Before you say “but these countries have their own laws and such and such” how is this any different than two townships in the same country across the nation, with a different set of local ordinances and local government officials who don’t interact with the other township at all? It isn’t. It is a semantical exercise. There are common international laws as well just as there are common laws applying at the township level of government abstraction.
One world government was achieved with the petrodollar and english becoming lingua franca of earth. International agreements and trade further centralize this one world government we’ve created. Just squint and you can see it plainly already. The public aren’t told about it because they will feel disenfranchised. But it already exists.
Peter Thiel is just putting an ill-defined pseudo-Christian facade around his AI accelerationist beliefs because he knows that in the current American right-wing climate evangelical Christianity is what drives political power particularly in tech. His "antichrist" is merely anyone or anything standing between him and as much money and power as possible.
this argument is weakened by welding large bulky statements together.. IMO each part there is a tip of a dynamic-systems-iceburg. "He just does THIS" and "that is THIS" ... the short form medium kills inquiry.
A studied person once admonished me "avoid the word IS when comparing systems in the abstract"
Nobody requires me or anyone else to agree with the comment you respond to, but what you write sounds plainly confused to me and other than vague stylistic concerns weaved together with the general sentiment that you disagree, I can't make out what argument you're trying to make.
The real problem with Magnifica Humanitas is that it will be impossible to produce the first sentence of the canonical Latin version in which the first two words are "Magnifica humanitas" but carries the same meaning as the first sentence in the English version published.
As a Catholic in AI, this has been my take since the day I started in Industry. Techies have a weird way of thinking themselves world saviors and having poor binary decision making ability.
AI will never be alive or have a soul. No machine could have a human rational eternal soul. This is Catholicism 101. No amount of work on matrix multiplication will change that.
> Techies have a weird way of thinking themselves world saviors and having poor binary decision making ability.
rich coming from a belief system that thinks everyone who had the opportunity to go through their water-dunking ritual and culpably didn't is automatically going to be tortured in the underworld for eternity.
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (with Ann Druyan)
Sagan was prophetic in a much more realistic way, I think. Herbert is fundamentally constrained by the rule of cool. Actual failure modes of the human firmware are rarely cool. We're generally just not very clever at a species level.
My personal view is that biological intelligence is fundamentally an unstable state. We should enjoy every moment of it, like you enjoy the brief flowering of a desert cactus. It's basically the same thing.
- "United States is a service and information economy": Finance, real estate, insurance, SaaS.
- "Nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away": here's a video from Smarter everyday on how atrophied manufacturing has become in the US: [I Tried to Make Something in America](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY)
- "Technological power in the hands of very few": AWS, Google Cloud, Azure.
- "People have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority [...] unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true": Fun house mirror of Twitter/X. Attention economy. Algorithm that maximizes engagement. AI Slop. Deepfakes. War in Iran.
Because all this is mere extrapolation of trends seen in the 90s and before. Sagan was no psychic (or alone in predicting these things), he just knew where to look.
Never would have thought that I would defer to matters of Tech, let alone 'AI' policies, to the pope, but here we are: I have to say the 'Magnifica Humanitas' are a pristine work of meditation on AI's power, impact and most importantly the people that control it, while showing how we can make it decoupled from the predatory capitalism that it spawn from, to make it beneficial for humanity in general.
(downloaded the full PDF and looking forward to read it on my eReader)
I found it was a slow read in parts, but it was time well spent. There are deep themes that run through the whole letter and provide much better context for the quotes I've seen in the news. I'd also add that while the letter does offer feedback for the tech industry, the main focus felt like a more positive vision of what the future could be (if countless people work towards it).
It always has to do with leverage. When the seas were much bigger than empires, too big for a country to conquer, but the tech caught up to venture them, Elizabeth I commissioned pirates to go and pillage on behalf of the crown. Labor was needed and pirates had leverage to get an equal share of the pillage. Once the gold and spoils dried out, Pirates became criminals again so they took their spoils and settled in the new world. Democracy is handy when you need people to conquer territory. But once you people saturating the land, the teeth come out and those with any leverage start carving whatever is valuable among themselves (land, real estate, rail lines, energy supply, compute). Even with AI, as the tech came out everyone is allowed to play in the sandbox to surface all the valuable use cases. When cornucopia era starts leveling off, you will see the AI firms with leverage grab the lucrative corners of the industry and shove everyone else off. Thus a government that wants to not be taken over by oligarchs needs to enforce antitrust to keep competition from being artificially reduced. Compute is already trying to play the Energy playbook and look like a utility to get government subsidies and become a monopoly that can then dictate everything.
The interview with Thiel where Douthat asks him “You would prefer the human race to endure right?” And his response is 30 seconds of hemming&hawwing “well…” says it all about the VC bro class.
I found your previous comment chain on the matter, in which you conflated Catholicism and Conservatism, the second of which I'm sure you have your own personal definition, as there is no Conservative church that decides on doctrine.
Catholic social teaching, which this encyclical is grounded on, has it's roots in Rerum novarum (1891) by Leo XIII (the Pope's namesake) and it dealt with the changing conditions of people due to the industrial revolution. We are potentially in the midst of another revolution (I suspect it will be less significant the the IR), so it is prudent of the church to develop a house view.
I mean, the commenter you're responding to has assumed the position of sedevacantism, so I don't think you're going to be able to justify Vatican 2 to them from first principles. :)
The Second Vatican Council movement has had "popes" that seem to directly attack previous Catholic teaching; I expect this will resolve to the council being rejected as a false council like the "robber council" of Second Council of Ephesus, as well as the papal claimants being declared invalid or "not popes" since that time.
The analogy would be like if, since the world cup of soccer is going on, FIFA had a meeting and decided every goal was worth 3 points instead of 1 point. Some people might accept that this is "true soccer" and some "legitimate change to the game". Others would denounce the organization and set up their own leagues to preserve "traditional soccer", and declare the FIFA leadership has no "true authority", and that the meeting deciding on 3 goals has no "binding authority" on "true soccer fans". Something like that has happened.
Section 20 of the new "encyclical" reads:
> The Second Vatican Council expressed this principle with particular precision in the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, whose sixtieth anniversary we remembered and celebrated with gratitude on 7 December 2025: “If by the autonomy of earthly affairs is meant that created things and societies themselves enjoy their own laws and values… then the demand for autonomy is perfectly in order.” [10]
I don't believe this is the former Catholic teaching on "autonomy"; man is not "autonomous" but subject to God's laws. Autonomy would be a "license to sin": you could set your own "law" that it is ok to do this or that thing contrary to Catholic teaching. This is therefore the wrong understanding of "autonomy", and they are ambiguous about what they mean by "true autonomy" (which would be a "freedom within limits"; much like in Genesis, Adam and Eve had total liberty to eat from whatever tree, except for that of the tree which yielded "forbidden fruit").
I believe the document contains more errors like this, continuing this heretical movement of modernism.
GS 36 is just reaffirming Aquinas and his doctrine of primary and secondary causality. Primary cause being God is the source of all being and sustains everything, secondary cause being that God created a universe where created things have real, intrinsic causal powers. A fire burns because it has the natural property to, not because God is directly performing an action to burn the wood.
"enjoy their own laws and values" is affirming that the natural world has an objective structure that can be studied on its own terms. Denying that autonomy is occasionalism, which is a heretical view that created things have no real power or nature of their own.
Genisis supports the statement about autonomy. Adam is given the task to subdue the earth, name the animals. To name them means to understand their specific natures. God did not dictate the names, he left that to Adam's human intellect. That's exactly what Gaudium et Spec refers to. Humans utilize their reason to discover the laws of creation and organize human society. We have genuine liberty within the overreaching metaphysical boundries.
Here's the issue: the documents are deliberately vague, so for many years it's been said they can be read "through the light of Tradition" to mean things like you say which sound "traditional".
However, the documents themselves do not speak clearly in a traditional way, but must be evaluated as "objectively ambiguous".
Consider some teaching could be of three options: clearly Catholic, ambiguous, or clearly non-Catholic; what category are we to put ambiguous statements in, if we collapse this to either "clearly Catholic" or "clearly not Catholic"?
It seems they must be considered as "clearly non-Catholic" then, since they cannot be in the category of "clearly Catholic". Or else ambiguous teachings would have to be considered to be equivalent to clearly Catholic teachings, which makes no sense.
It's kind of like "pass / fail" in school: do we "pass" the ambiguous teachings, or "fail" them? They seem to "fail" when considered rigorously: if we ask - Catholic or not? They are judged as "Not Catholic".
Can even someone claiming to be a pope make something ambiguous into a Catholic statement? It doesn't seem that's possible. Hence, the Vatican 2 statements, being "objectively ambiguous", are judged as "clearly Not Catholic", logically implying a pope could not have taught them.
(This is something of the reasoning process I propose when trying to evaluate these ambiguous statements which defy simple binary categorization; it is an ongoing effort of "research and dialogue")
If you're a Catholic, then the choice of interpretation is clear: you must accept the Pope's interpretation. That's what it means to be Catholic. The Pope is God's representative on Earth. To defy him is to defy God.
The alternative would be to declare him a False Pope and to select an alternative divine representative. Of course, that would make you a heretic. If you ditch the pope as soon as he says something you don't like, you're not much of a Catholic. The Church is not a democracy.
> If you're a Catholic, then the choice of interpretation is clear: you must accept the Pope's interpretation…
cf. Hyperpapalism
Thankfully, Hyperpapalism is a misunderstanding of the role of the teaching-governing authority of the Bishop of Rome, and Catholics can be and remain good Catholics while disagreeing with the Pope on a variety of matters.
Pope John XXII publicly taught erroneously re: death and the Beatific Vision. Jean Gerson threatened to burn him at the stake and in general there was much public resistance, from royalty to common folk.
"Erroneous" is an opinion. Papal doctrine is the word of God until a subsequent pope says otherwise. Jean Gerson is entitled to his opinion, even if speaking that opinion made him a heretic.
> Papal doctrine is the word of God until a subsequent pope says otherwise
No, that’s Hyperpapalism, which is an error.
The Pope does not have the authority-power to transform error into truth, nor can he make “new truths” (of the Faith), whatever that might mean. He does have the solemn duty to faithfully hand on and explain the Apostolic Tradition. In an extra-ordinary act of his office, the Pope can, without error, define the proper understanding of Catholic teaching on a matter of faith or morals.
In the case of John XXII he proposed something false as pertains to Catholic doctrine, repeatedly, in public sermons. He was rebuked for it and recanted before he died. What he taught was not somehow “intermittently true”, it was an error through and through, and it was completely right that his subjects called him out on the matter.
> The Pope does not have the authority-power to transform error into truth,
The problem with your argument is that it is "left as an exercise for the reader" to determine what is actually true. If that were the case, then the Pope, as the representative of God on Earth, serves no purpose: everyone can individually determine what is true and what is an error. That does not agree historically with the role of the papacy.
If everyone has a right to their own interpretation of doctrine, what does the Pope do, and why should anyone listen to him?
Your position that absolute faith in the word of the pope
is a fallacy is itself a self-supporting fallacy, which you hold only because you don't believe in the correctness of the pope.
> he taught was not somehow “intermittently true”
Yes, it was. God would not allow a Pope who spoke in error.
a few comments back, you stated a Catholic must accept the pope's interpretation; I think this is generally true?
The problem here is, we're saying the person who claims to be pope has contradicted past teachings that popes infallibly taught already. So the only way out then would be to consider they were never popes in the first place or else you have the contradiction of a pope taught error or that the pope is not infallible.
For example in Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Liberty) in the Vatican 2 documents it states: "This Vatican synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. Such freedom consists in this, that all should have such immunity from coercion by individuals, or by groups, or by any human power, that no one should be forced to act against his conscience in religious matters, nor prevented from acting according to his conscience, whether in private or in public, within due limits."
This is obviously contrary to the Catholic understanding of conscience and coercion - the "due limits" and "religious freedom" are never defined, when they were already somewhat clearly defined.
Hence being ambiguous, we would understand these in themselves to not be Catholic teachings. Consider if someone asked a person if they are a Catholic and they answered "I am a Christian". In itself, their answer does not explain if they are Catholic or not: some Catholics might argue that "only Catholics are Christians" and that the statement could mean "I am a Catholic"; some protestants might argue that "only non-Catholics can be Christians" so that the statement means "I am not a Catholic". Hence, in itself the statement is "objectively ambiguous" - the Vatican 2 statements are of this character, and if you had to categorize them as either "Catholic or not", it seems they would resolve to being considered as "clearly not Catholic". In any event, it seems we would be forced to reject the language as it stands and new documents that are clearer would have to be drawn up and agreed to.
For example, a person does not have the right to declare they have the "religious freedom" to be a "Pirate" and that they are free to steal from other people "conscientiously"; they are allowed to be "coerced" to not steal, if they try to steal.
Regarding John XXII from the other comment, I believe St. Robert Bellarmine in De Romano Pontifice examined all cases of alleged papal heresy and explained why no popes had been heretics. John XXII simply speculated as a private theologian about an issue that had not been defined by the Church yet, hence did not enter in to error in doing so.
I think the thing here is that if you're simply declaring yourself to be in a different religion than Popes Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and Leo XIV, there's not much to be gained arguing with them. Like, a Zaidi Shia Muslim would also disagree with Vatican II. There's nothing wrong with that. They're just, you know, in a different religion.
Right, so that's initially how I thought this would resolve itself: sedevacantists elect a pope for themselves and just have a separate religion and let the Vatican be (see "conclavism")
Except it doesn't seem to have happened like that and seems to be more in character in my view like the Western Schism, where there was confusion about who the pope was or if there was a pope for 40 years (except this time it's longer and there is added confusion with a false council and false teachings that appear to come straight from the "pope")
Hence I argue since a lot of people seem to think these teachings came "from the Church", there is "legitimate confusion" and more of something where the Vatican will have to be straightened out as reverting to previous norms in order for things to move forward.
It's possible it could resolve in this direction though of just separation (but, from "our" view, all the Catholic churches are practically possessed by a false movement; not unlike the East-West Schism though where half the churches went in a non-Catholic direction)
I'd just say that none of this has much to do with "Catholicism" in the sense that the overwhelming majority of people worldwide mean when they use the term. It's not jarring or problematic or controversial to believe in some adjacent but incompatible Catholic-like religion; at this point we're literally just discussing names.
Considering the Catholic Church also teaches that ecumenical councils are infallible, if you propose that Vatican II taught error, then you must also reject a church doctrine which predates that council.
ecumenical councils where a pope presides with bishops are infallible (something of what you are saying);
Vatican 2 appears to be such a council but also taught error contrary to teachings of infallibility (seemingly impossible);
The only proposition we can think of as to how Catholicism can be consistent without falling in to contraction with the above facts then, would be to conclude that such a "pope" that taught error could not have been a pope in the first place, but was an heretic who then taught those heresies in a false council
(There are some other arguments about popes who can fall in to error or heresy but they are more speculative)
Thus the OP document about AI we wouldn't expect to be reliable from a Catholic standpoint and it goes out of its way to make all kinds of statements not related to AI which we are also critiquing here in this comment chain
Yes that’s because the pope is pushing actual messianism. Are people forgetting what he stands for and which organization he represents? It’s silly that people are suddenly putting him on a pedestal. The Catholic Church is an evil force that has destroyed many other countries’ cultures and religions, not to mention enabled the mass systematic abuse of children.
The pope is against tech companies getting power but is happy for the Catholic Church to gather power and abuse it when it’s for his causes. No thanks. Tech companies are far less evil than Catholicism.
The various popes have made many statements in the past about converting many ethnicities and countries. With that comes contraception bans, reduced women’s rights, interference in the politics of those countries, corruption, and so many other problems. Like other extremely opinionated belief systems, the Catholic church’s goal is to replace all other beliefs and systems of government, and the power they get is meant to impose their beliefs on everyone in society.
When it comes to the overarching ideology of the techbros, "In Pursuit of the Metaverse" by Dr. Douglas Mark Haugen is a much better read than this encyclical. On the other hand, if he doesn't condemn Gaudium et Spes to the trashbin of history where it belongs, then I don't really care what he has to say.
What do you think is wrong with it? I can see how both conservatives and progressives could have reasons to be unhappy with it, but dropping this in like that is not very productive. There are many, many texts in the Vatican archives that are much worse than this.
I am a Catholic who is heavily involved in adult faith education, and and I can very safely say everyone in the Church thinks this is a terrible idea except for the tech people that make these models. These things are all independent projects.
Because of the nuance involved in explaining theological concepts there's a long, long history of reviewing and approving books that explain doctrine. LLM outputs can be reviewed by a competent authority and approved for publication but releasing an AI to explain the theology to the general public in any sort of official way is impossible.
I'm convinced these CEOs have "AI psychosis" [1].
LLMs are extremely powerful pseudo-AI and will bring a pseudo-singularity, but they are not true AI [2] and a human at the wheel is still needed for the foreseeable future. The impact is still scary if a tiny fraction of humans are augmented 100x or 1000x. But it ain't no standalone Skynet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Yup, it makes sequence of symbols. We already have seen that producing specific sequences of symbols is mindbogglingly powerful: merely DNA producers somehow has flown to the Moon!
And yes I am quite aware of Chinese room analogy. Perfectly fine applies to humans as well: single neurons in my head do not understand language, yet I as a whole I would say do understand. Just like applying Chinese room to humans does not help to estimate what humans can do I do not see how it helps to estimate what LLM can do.
This same issue simultaneously demonstrates how humans are not anything at all like token predictors. No matter how much time you spend remixing the tokens of primitive man, you don't get 'and here is how you land on the Moon' from it.
Hrm I doubt it actually. Llms are capable of discovery, as recent math news showed. This means a "society" of Llms could likely have progress.
The reason why LLM hypotheses are any good is because it already consumed a civilization worth of knowledge. You couldn't have bootstrapped such system with nothing but a few priors/axioms and let it discover the universe.
It also outputs vectors that are coerced into tokens for human consumption.
Yes, it goes through tokens but possible internal meanings assigned to these tokens (when surrounded by other tokens) are infinite.
That's how humans form caves got to where we are now. By associating new meanings with the same old sound clumps.
That's not even a clever swipe, and it's tiring seeing such a knee-jerk reaction to a completely accurate description. LLMs are next token predictors. People are not. Humans have an inner world and subjective experience. Humans learn through their experiences, not just backprop.
Token predictors are lesser, they are not alive and will never be alive.
Let's assume we have infinite memory with constant time lookups. With a sufficiently large lookup table, you could exactly replicate the behavior of any person. You could encode it as a next-token predictor: you have precomputed every possible prefix and assigned it a next token. This is a Chinese room, but it is completely indistinguishable from an intelligent, sentient person. There is no experiment you can design to slip a piece of paper (a prompt) under the door to determine whether it is Bob or the lookup table clone of Bob inside the room.
Does that make the lookup table conscious or alive? Undefined. It's the wrong question. Or it's not a question science can address.
So we cannot dismiss on it's face the idea that next token predictors "are not and never will be alive" unless by "alive" you simply mean "biological," but that's not really what's debatable.
The argument is also very brittle because they are not in fact all next token predictors. I doubt people making this argument would be willing to concede that diffusion models are more likely to be conscious than causal models (which I do not believe but is an implication of the argument).
I'm not saying that they are conscious or sentient to be clear, but the reductionist argument that they are next token predictors and therefore don't have some property humans have is not an argument. That's going from A directly to Z. You need to flesh out the bit in the middle because that doesn't follow.
Assuming the above is anywhere near true (I think there's a lot of debate about the capacity of the human mind, where data is actually stored, and where compute happens) then we are talking about 3 orders of magnitude win for humans in state and 4 orders of magnitude in compute. And we're doing all that pretty energy efficient as well.
The other big difference in humans is that we learn and the model only "learns" in context. Out "learn" space is much larger than the 1M tokens that frontier models struggle with.
Anyways, point is that a computer can appear to be alive. If we simulate the human brain perfectly and train it like a human then we'll have something that has human capabilities. LLMs have interesting capabilities but at least at this point not fully human ones (and the delta-state/compute would be a hint that there is still a large gap to cover).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
But this is complicated and takes us sideways. Let's say somehow we can determine if LLM has inner world or/and subjective experience. Will this new gathered piece of information affect your estimate of upper bounds of LLM capabilities? It does not affect my estimate.
The point is that this is no more relevant, informative, or even accurate than "carbon-based facial expression predictors". Any phenomenon in the Universe can be described by a simple and/or insulting short phrase. In other comments you've also shouted out "autocomplete!" and "Markov chain!", as if these phrases are a knock-down argument.
"Pachinko machine", "avalanche", and "game of mad libs" has also been used:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47916405
>Humans learn through their experiences, not just backprop.
Sure, sure. And humans move through the act of walking, not just terrestrial locomotion.
>Token predictors are lesser, they are not alive and will never be alive.
And on and on it goes...
Which means what the real world? What are we supposed to see now or in the near-future? I assume you've been saying all of this stuff since at least the launch of ChatGPT. Probably longer than that.
While we are discussing this, I strongly believe we should hedge against the concentration of power that is happening today.
Please join/help open source groups doing small + local or distributed models. There's a lot to do. Join Discord/IRC servers and organize.
Open³: weights - source - training data.
edit: I just remembered, don't we have tons of research suggesting that at least birds, whales and apes/monkeys use words and simple syntax? didn't we teach a few gorillas sign language/symbols?
And the power of "language models" (or any sort of deep learning, really), does not come from assuming that some specific input-output modality, like English text, is the ultimate foundation of thought. Strong versions of this claim were laid to rest around the time when GPT-2 came out. I'd also go further and argue that many people working on the symbolic AI of yesteryear already understood this as well.
Five languages is impressive no doubt but as a dual language speaker myself, thought still takes the form of language even if it lacks words.
Although I love how next token prediction leads to text showing up gradually, in case of local models, accompanied by modulated coil whine of my GPU. It's how the 80s shown us the intelligent computers should communicate.
How many model generations are we a away from a model capable of this?
Because the real world is not a Hollywood movie. An LLM could try to do something along the lines if either it gets fine-tuned to do it, or somebody instructs it to do it.
I see extremely more likely a small group of humans using a powerful LLM to "take over" critical parts of the world economy. But it wouldn't be like pressing a button. I'm talking of NSA/CIA/Pentagon/Wall St. kind of evil people. And I bet they would do it surreptitiously.
> Because the real world is not a Hollywood movie.
One interesting thought experiment that I like to do is think about how many years you have to go back for this to be true. In this particular scenario, I think ~25 years is pretty much the sweet spot.
The Internet was beginning to take shape in the late 90s, early 2000s, and security was just beginning to be taken seriously, but it was still nascent. In that timeframe we had the first worms starting to appear, we had slammer, we had blaster, ssh had lots of exploits and so on.
It's not really far-fetched that a mythos equivalent "unit", working in the 2000s could really "take over the world". Especially one without the "safety" tuning. The Internet was really ripe for this in that timeframe, security wasn't up to par, and employing advance techniques that came later (in memory payloads, rootkits, etc) could make it pseudo-invisible to that era's detection tech. (reminder that traces of blaster were found on computers from a nuclear powerplant at that time).
The only question is would the trend continue? Meaning would a ~2050s "mythos" equivalent be able to do today what the one we have today could do in the 2000s. And if true, would that capability come before the 2050s? Could this be reached sooner, with say a dedicated offline DC somewhere where "mythos" could bang its tokens against the network and learn to exploit everything we have today, faster than 25 years? That's probably a bit of a stretch, but maybe not "hollywood" far fetched...
Nations who have them are in a different class from nations who don’t. Nations who have a lot of them, delivery systems, and systems that might be able to shoot down some of a counterattack are superpowers.
Using this leverage these nations and their leaders have been able to dictate world policies. Through the last half of the 20th century this was the US and the USSR. Now it’s the US, EU, Russia, and China, and a few smaller nations with a few nukes. The club is a little bigger but not much.
This kind of thing could happen in the 21st century with AI. If so it will probably be the US and China who control the most powerful AI “agency amplifiers.”
Let's ask the operator of a Chinese room to give us a novel math proof.
Go on, I'll wait.
Maybe it's time to borrow "Virtual Intelligence" terminology from Mass Effect - something that's 'smart' but that doesn't have its own true volition or ability to materially self-improve.
But it kind of fits?
The technologists who create it believe they should control it, the people who use it are starting to believe they should control it and the governments who write the laws believe they should control it. And now the priests believe they should also play role.
So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology?
I think there's an interesting phenomenon where it is _not_ the people who control it, but instead a kind of international finance man cum-captain of industry (perhaps best embodied by Sam Altman) who does not create the technology and yet has ended up wielding the levers.
What the hell is a “cum-captain”? Search isn’t helping.
I.e. finance man as well as captain of industry
cum - Used in indicating a thing or person which has two or more roles, functions, or natures, or which has changed from one to another.
Basically nobody uses that language construct anymore until you run headlong into it in a Hackernews comment or something
https://share.google/aimode/dDekJEZzfKaE6FCvH
in commonwealth (seniors in everyday UK, HR and pedants otherwise) usage it rhymes with dumb, like you'd expect
https://youtu.be/RzESsmv5FhM
Radcliff-cum-Chackmore
It's also a slang word for semen, but that's not relevant here.
Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.
Now AI (set loose in the wild at the AI industry's strategic choice so as to be irreversible) seems poised to disrupt and render a very significant part of the labor force disrupted on an unprecedented societal scale and it appears to be a foregone conclusion that collateral damages won't be the causal industry's expense. Nevermind that its also poised to easily afford those social costs, and don't even consider that maybe society should be considering this obvious cause and effect. For me at least the feudal suppression of this otherwise obvious and necessary discussion is perhaps more spectacular than the causal technological breakthrough itself.
Now *that's* control.
Ok.
> Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem.
And how does this paragraph connect to the previous one? The streets of New York isn't taxi drivers' private property. No one trampled their garden any more than me opening a coffee shop tramples the garden of the Starbucks down the street. Should we forbid any new entry into a market just because it upsets the incumbents who invested big money into their business?
The first example is clear. And it has pretty much carried on, as the "right to property" and "the responsibility to cover damage to other's rights".
The second example, even though you wrote it as Uber vs. the cab driver, is more about Uber vs. the municipality. By the fact that almost all over the world people wanted Uber (or the other brands) over the imposed limitation of their municipalities, shows that the deal was wrong. In places where it was artificially limited, people have showed to prefer the alternatives. It has little to do with Bob the driver, and more to do with Alice the mayor who decided unilaterally that a taxi cab should require a 100k/yr medallion. That's what's changed, and society accepted it.
The third example is weirder still. Again you pose it as AI provider vs. average Joe, but here I struggle to even see what rights / who's rights are being infringed upon. I don't see any. While we generally have a right to work, there is absolutely no right to work in a certain industry, if the industry doesn't have demand. If someone else doesn't need your output, your right to work in that particular field has absolutely no basis in reality.
Unless you want to go back to the places and regimes that decided who works where, modern society has no place for such thinking. A right to work protects you from employers choosing not to hire you because of things that you are (race, age, gender, etc.) It absolutely doesn't protect you at all against "people don't need elevator operators anymore". And I say this as someone who's worked in this industry 20+ years. If tomorrow people don't need software done by hand anymore, tough luck for me. But it's absolutely not the problem of rights. I don't have a right to demand people wanting my services. That's not the social contract at all.
So if you’re a business offering poor quality services, and I come along and start offering higher quality services, I owe you damages for the impact I have on your business?
The whole encyclical's argument is that morality requires an accounting and response to the pain inflicted upon each individual, and human morality is a distinct set of rules and norms than economic, physical, or even civil laws. I think it also follows that it's not just, e.g., Walmart or OpenAI who bares some responsibility for ameliorating temporary suffering. And to the extent people use the encyclical as fodder in the usual anti-corporate rhetoric, then that's unfortunate.
And this is coming from the Catholic church. It turns alot of people off who in isolated contexts often perceive hypocrisy, but in its charity it has always considered the personal responsibility of those receiving it. It understands the struggles and inherent tensions that comes from trying to square individualized justice & mercy, selflessness, and the "greater good".
so the people vs. otis, the people vs. IBM608, and so on? Has it ever worked?
The argument was "governments restricted taxi availability so Uber won" and now you've mott-and-bailied yourself down to "people want to pick music they listen to on the ride"
No it doesn't. It shows they could undercut the market, monopolise it, and then charge more once they'd killed the competition.
This was really just a few cities in the US. There's no artificial taxi scarcity in Houston or London or Tokyo.
You might reflexively say London has strict regulations, but it regulates safety not imposing an artificial cap. That's a NY/Boston/Chicago/Philly thing.
Uber won because:
1. on-demand app
2. VCs subsidized rides to destroy taxi companies by driving the customer cost to well below provider cost.
Not sure about other regions but in NYC this is 100% the case. Ubers used to be nicer cleaner newer cars, better drivers.. for less than a taxi. Now they are about 4x what they cost in the 2010s, with cars about as dirty as a taxi and equally surly drivers.
It’s weird to see the completely broken NY taxi cab medallion system brought up as a good thing.
Most taxi drivers didn’t own a medallion. They had to rent one from one of the operations that had bought them up. It was a government granted monopoly in the control of companies that charged the drivers for the right to be able to work.
The price was high partially because the supply was artificially limited, which made getting a cab bad for people of the city.
People like to criticize Uber but let’s not glorify the past system. It sucked. The Uber model that let anyone work without having to surrender their pay to some company hoarding the tokens was great for drivers and for people of the city.
You used driving as an example. I don't see how it's better for the city if we encourage more people to own and park cars because taking taxis is too hard.
The nice thing about Uber is that it lets those cars used for personal driving double as taxis when demand is high. Instead of having your own car and parking it, you can have someone else use their car to drive you.
I think some people have become so desperate to make Uber evil that we're intentionally ignoring what's gained.
Finally, regulating taxi medallions is an awful way to address traffic. If traffic is the problem, you regulate vehicles and traffic. Creating a system where you have to buy something approaching the price of a house just to do a job with a low hourly rate because the city wants to regulate traffic is beyond broken.
Uber and friends have indeed democratised giving rides to people - though where I am, a few rich people have bought numerous cars and have daily wagers driving them finding fares via Uber - but at the cost of far more cabs on the road.
Others, notably motorbikes and scooter ride aggregators have emerged to replicate Uber. These motorbike cabs are even harder to regulate than cabs.
Uber, imo, has broken the equilibrium that existed before.
Uber has absolutely increased traffic levels in the places where they operate. I don't personally think it's to a level that is actually a problem, but I also avoid driving myself around in cities whenever I can, so I may not be the best at observing this.
You can be both a victim and a bully, it's not mutually exclusive. A scam artist can get mugged or burglarised, and so on. In general, in civilised countries, being a horrible person does not prevent someone from being recognised as a victim.
Same for Uber/Lyft, but they really tried to earn a good review while still providing a pretty unpleasant experience.
Uber/Taxi discussion is so transparently centered around New York City, it makes all discussions irrelevant to most of the US.
In fact, I still use a taxi to go to the airport with my family instead of taking an Uber. Uber is for being mid-run in city limits trails and running out of energy in the heat and the water fountains have stopped working due to low water pressure. Uber gets me to safety, and I tip big because I just sweated all over their car.
I learn that boiling the stream water makes it safe and tell people about it.
What do I owe you?
Uber and AI are certainly more complicated than that, but you are pretty close to arguing that the constructed rights of some people inhibit the rights of other people.
There's a big political problem to solve, but it's how to give most people decent material standards of living if computers are doing all the work, not how to freeze things in place so that people can keep doing tasks that (assuming success) the computer is better at.
The goal of AI companies is to replace workers entirely; that is the only way their valuations make sense, and OpenAI's charter says this explicitly.
Okay, edits it is. The displacement will rather obviously be incremental and be task by task, not job by job.
is it ok if I skip the Uber part? I think that leads as try s evidenced by the other reactions.
the "who is liable for the damage an ai creates, in the hands of an incompetent or even malignant guide?" question is fantastic. and who "owns" an ai?
Doesn't it strike you that if licenses for a banal service like taxi are that expensive, that this likely indicates political corruption?
Good riddance to this sort of rent-seeking. I wonder if the NYC taxi service was provided by the mob.
In Central Europe, I don't have to wonder. Prior to Uber, the local taxi services were operated by the mob, and the taxi drivers basically robbed naive tourists through exorbitant, illegal prices. Stories of rape or abuse of intoxicated women abound. Some of the drivers were so sketchy and creepy that people refused to board their cars. Scammy Prague taxi service was legendary, but by far the worst sort of tracksuit-and-gun wearing mobsters behind the wheel I ever encountered was in late 1990s Bratislava.
This ugly rotten web was swept clean by Uber, where people have a reputation to maintain. Thanks god. My wife is no longer afraid to take a cab at night. Hooray.
Not necessarily. It indicates a profession that can be very easily abused to harm the general public and that requires some level of trust.
Most professions can be abused to harm people and require some level of trust. Imagine that a developer's medailon cost 300 k.
I agree with you that it requires scrutiny and the process must be open and fair, like most things in a working democracy. I also think that it is not out of line to have mechanisms to ensure whoever is in a situation to kill, mug, kidnap or ransom you has no interest in doing so.
The problem in practice seems that those mechanisms get hijacked by the very people whom they should prevent from being in that service.
IDK about NYC, but here in Central Europe, taxi services regulated by municipal governments were consistently treating their customers worse than Uber/Bolt. Outright murders were rare, but sexual harassment, fraud, verbal abuse, even "minor" things like the cars smelling of tobacco smoke were worse. Occassionally, there were cars set on fire or brandishing of weapons when those drivers got into conflicts. That's not ancient history and people still remember.
That happens when guys with deep pockets capture the regulatory services and make them into their own cash cow, using force of law to prevent any competition from emerging.
If you had a ballot about canceling Uber and going back to the old model here, that would lose by something like 15:85. The improvement in service and safety is just staggering.
Why is this Uber's problem? Do you realize how ridiculously dumb, inefficient, and corrupt a 6 figure taxi license is? It is not Uber's job to compensate for that ridiculousness.
They provided a better and more cash efficient solution for passengers. That is enough.
If you required every technological venture to cover the cost for every person it "disrupts," you would halt progress entirely.
They burned half a billion dollars a month of VC money at their peak to undercut taxis across the world; in quainter times this used to be called "dumping", now it's just the standard way of doing business. All the while basically flaunting the law with their whole "we're just a platform connecting people who happen to drive a car with people who happen to want to go some place, it's totally not a taxi guys". No regulations, no expensive licenses or professional certifications, no need even for a minimum wage or basic social security or insurance or any kind of protection. Amazing!
Essentially the same in spirit as Airbnb, only this latter had far more destructive consequences than screwing over taxi drivers.
Uber did a great thing here and made a product that people like more, for less money. More drivers, way more global availability, more customers, and better cars, all while being cheaper. That is a quintessential success story.
If people liked taxis more, they'd use them. But taxis are still shit and the only reason we use them is because of the taxi cartel bullying weak city governments into restricting Ubers.
I agree that dumping is generally bad, and perhaps laws against it should have been enforced against Uber. But the taxi system deserved to be destroyed. They sucked, and there was really no political/business way out of that system other than someone violating regulations on "what is a taxi" until it stuck. I'm not a "means justify the ends" guy in general, but in this case I think it worked out how it should have.
Changing peoples behaviors >cost money<. Using your number here, taxis had a 25% value prop. That was just the cost of getting people to change.
I don’t care for Uber, but many many many businesses give people initial discounts and then full price later
The whole argument is moot though given self driving cars are going to wipe out the industry.
Setting aside your implicit assumption that what nigh-unregulated AI is set to do to humanity is "progress," having a sound argument is pretty pointless if it leads to tremendous human suffering.
Reminds me of the paradox of intolerance, where bad faith actors say "it's intolerant to be intolerant of intolerance" (i.e., argue for zero exceptions to a maxim) when it's much more preferable to say "you should be tolerant, except in the case where tolerance leads to tremendous suffering [as in the case of allowing the rise of fascism because you have to be tolerant of it]."
See also libertarianism, where simple rules are preferable to good outcomes.
I think it goes deeper than this when you listen to them talk. They truly think society will be re-ordered by this technology... and they should be in control of that re-ordering rather than democratically elected governments.
We even had one out tariffs on steel, thinkinf this would be good for jobs here. If there was 0.1 seconds of thought they'd realize any manufacturing job you make from a steel tariff cuts 2 more well paid trade jobs
A technocracy can build high speed rail in a decade but it can also institute multi decade one child policy, multi year zero-covid, barricade people into their own homes and ban entire industries at the whim of a single leader. There is less course correction.
I draft and write some code for construction companies and personally saw layoffs and not taking work due to increased material costs. The structural companies we worked with similarly did a few layoffs. The average pay of these jobs was 60k+.
Manufacturing of steel is very competitive and I haven't seen the American steel drop in price. I can't personally imagine it adding more than a few thousand jobs since it's so competitive (thin margins) and you would have to add a ton of production to add one job.
Meanwhile, the profitability of building a building is a direct feed into whether buildings get built. A building not being built directly led to laying off about 100 field guys for us.
You just make less of them. Some buildings are discretionary, like your big apartment buildings you probably want (these were the two that got cancelled).
Person funding can make x profit over building per year. Person loaning loans x for y sum. Building costing more than interest amortized profit means it doesn't get built.
And I just had a doctor's office fitout cancelled mid project (drafted it personally :) ). so apparently those are, too.
Public projects like schools rarely get cancelled. Factories I personally don't draft so I really can't tell you.
Healthcare absolutely has a ton of discretion for their buildouts.
What's the alternative to steel? You just make less if it's not profitable to make.
If the stated goal is jobs, the tariffs aren't doing it from what I can tell.
It seems to be hands have been put on the scales, and to call cancelling the building that would have otherwise been built due to market forces good needs some testing. If it were doctors offices in already served areas, sure, but these were not subsidized but lower end apartment buildings in NYC. I'm hoping the guys who were laid off moved to some other company rather than exiting the trade.
And we are very competitive in machines, already set up to win.
It’s also fantasy that even 4 years of tariffs will convince anyone to build brand-new smelting operations, as they’re very large, capital intensive, take a while to build. And again, mostly worse jobs.
This is the part everyone seems to forget. Any "new" jobs would be shitty low paying jobs, and it would mostly instead need to be automation.
Tariffs transfer wealth to the 1% and leave shit jobs that pollute the environment, which also happen to raise the cost of all goods, for everyone else.
They knew that was the case. They don't care. The maga crowd isn't acting in good faith. Nobody other than the cult members and people who aren't paying attention thought that would actually bring manufacturing back to the US. The point of the tariffs is to devalue USD (something Trump wants to do since circa the 80s) and to strengthen Trump power/influence. He wants everybody in the world to be forced to come and negotiate directly with him so he can see them bend their knees. The whole thing is a power play
By increasing tariffs they will have to pay their proper obeisance for their inferiority, and be inspired to actually work hard like us Americans.
I guess I kinda walked right into handing technocrats power, but I really just want the government to understand the tech they regulate. We'd rather have populist zingers on TV though.
Trade policy should be as holistic as possible (tariffs, taxes, subsidies, etc), with the goal of aiding a robust domestic economy.
The 70's neoliberalism took Smith's comparative advantage argument and stripped it of context — optimizing for quarterly returns and capital mobility while ignoring the industrial ecosystem those returns depend on. You can't offshore your entire manufacturing base and expect to retain the innovation, workforce capacity, and supply chain resilience that made those profits possible in the first place.
Contrast this with "For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country."
That era was not without its issues as well, but there was a sense that "we're all in it together" vs the "greed is good" crowd.
This needs to be shouted from the rooftops!
All the Web3 edgelords talk about how democracy is inefficient and how their magic blockchains will fix things but don't actually back up their claims with anything.
Sure, it could be applied and might work, but the only thing blockchain brings is a distributed immutable ledger -- but all the trust actions happen outside that ledger. And that's not what slows us down, it's the people, ideas, power and process that makes it inefficient.
Money is a hell of a drug.
Look at the state of discussion just in this thread. I minimized my contribution for this reason.
This is starting to be true for AI and security bugs. Writing secure Internet-facing software will depend on AI security review. Anthropic can hold Mythos back for a while to buy some time, but the competition isn’t going to stop.
It’s also not always true that technologists think they should control AI. Some companies support legislation. But there’s not a lot of progress, so they end up making their own decisions in the meantime.
This strategy would also have the advantage that experts with skin in the game of their field and cutting edge experience get to choose, hone, and debate the policies before testing them so that out-of-touch elected officials don't have to do that step which would be parsecs out of their competence.
Unfortunately that would be a strategy that a real member of the real world might come up with to improve their product, their industry, their ability to create, and their relationship with the consumer. Instead we have nothing but parasites optimizing for gaming the quarterly numbers to pump and dump national institutions and building blackmail profiles against other powerful players to out-extort them while everyone involved tries to maximize how much blood they can suck.
There's a quote I will mangle and I forget the source of that's something like "If you agree with all the positions of your chosen political party, either you have thought through every option and came to the same conclusions on dozens of topics, or you haven't thought through anything".
It should be put in the hands of the most trustworthy, transparent institution that can validate it works for all of us, not just the few.
I don't think private companies or specific leaders want the best for the common good, so it would make the most sense to give control to a supra-nation entity like the UN - at least that would be the most democratic as we all have the chance to influence it (via voting from national to international level).
But I also feel that it has been a particularly toothless organization. If a member state decides it is in their interest to flout some safeguard they were to mandate, that state will do so, and the U.N. won’t do anything about it unless there’s broad agreement between the US, China, and probably Russia. And the chances are that whoever is in need of enforcement is one of those, or a closely allied country of one.
This is a very naive and idealistic imagining of what international NGOs such as the UN are actually like and how they operate. I can't think of anything worse.
The median country is a corrupt authoritarian state.
We are in this constant cycle of bubbles — the last ones I can recall bursting in 2000 and 2008 — where someone invents some new financial shell game that allows them to trade on some form of non-existent capital and then half the stock market follows along like rats after the piper until it all collapses as soon as enough people realize that everyone else also realizes the Emperor is wearing no clothes. And incidentally no, I have no idea how this particular trainwreck of fairy tail lessons all became pertinent simultaneously, but here we are.
Control over things makes a lousy incentive anyway, since having said control always better empowers the appointed to just cheat the incentive instead.
If the big bad wolf is at your door, "letting him in" isn't a bargaining chip you can trust to incentivize any sort of behavior other than "eating you".
I hope so. Recent turns of events notwithstanding, I remain optimistic about democracy in the long run. I think it's going to get harder to say with a straight face that the private sector can really manage vital institutions better than government.
Recent reports about commencement speeches at college graduations suggest that within the span of a just a few years, computer programmers no believe that they are riding on the coattails of the technology oligarchs. Besides, nobody wears coats with tails any more.
We we go there in one easy step? I'm not that optimistic.
The purpose of our society is for people. It's not a lever for the powerful to centralize control. Those who attempt to do so always have evil as their motive.
FFS. Morals come from somewhere. For many, that's religion. Deal with it.
Silicon valley owns the internet. The robber barons owned the railways. Big oil. Big pharma. The investment company owned the (slave) trading fleets. The lords owned the agriculture. The clergy owned the books. The Kings owned the armies.
Technology accumulates capital, capital accumulates technology.
In Russian, there's a saying: He who feeds a girl is the one to dance her.
In this case, the food is the money printed out of thin air.
Political power has always about who controls economic production, and the tools of economic production.
Dark times ahead...
My point remains: they can control it if they can control it. Because right now they can't even take responsibility for it.
Imagine if every time you booked an uber it was like "your drive may crash the car". Or whenever you ate at a restaurant, the waiter said "there is a chance the chef will poison you". Or your bank statement said something like "these numbers may be wrong".
Isn't that just an instance of the political problem for all ages: who controls what, who gets to rule and who obeys, the fundamental power struggle apparent in all human history.
Extend the definition of technology to the broadest sense, from the material that allow us control over the physical reality: steam, computing; to the organizational, that enable collective human action: states, factories and assembly lines; and the ideological, that legitimize certain power arrangements: religion, nationalism, democracy, human rights etc.
A feudal lord's power rested on land (material), the manorial system (organizational), and the divine right of kings or religious sanction (ideological). Even if peasant revolts happen from time to time, the arrangement is stable because the peasantry accept it as legitimate and have no economic alternative; so even when revolting they cannot imagine a different political order. Technological (broad) leaps like the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution change the political possibility space so arrangements like feudalism are no longer stable, but others like capitalism, liberal democracy etc. become possible.
Political actors observe these technological shifts and struggle for control, relevance and power. The old elites are contested by the new kids on the block, wielding the new technologies: the aristocrat by the bourgeois, pastoralist tribes by agricultural states, autocrats stuck with traditional propaganda by the kids with smartphones and social media.
The present struggle around AI is therefore to be expected; what's more interesting is the type of political possibility space it opens up: is it one where having the bulk of society educated and productive, capable of running the machines is the key factor pushing the country forward in the international technological competition, like we've see post-war, forcing the national elites to cater to their needs, invest in their populations and broadly share the economic output and the political power? Or is it more likely one where the key competitive factor is the size of your datacenters and automated defense factories, where the bulk of people are irrelevant for the architecture of power?
Because if it's the latter, the entire idea that democracy will somehow manage to survive and influence who gets what becomes problematic. In the new technological-historical space, democracy becomes structurally unfavorable and thus, unlikely to persist long term.
Yes. But modern technology, especially software doesn't have the high barrier to entry like being a feudal lord, but successful software can be just as impactful, tie in economies of scale and network effects and it can be even more powerful, which has allowed the producers of such software to wield significant power and as a result bypass democracy. And this ties in with your point:
> The present struggle around AI is therefore to be expected; what's more interesting is the type of political possibility space it opens up: is it one where having the bulk of society educated and productive, capable of running the machines is the key factor pushing the country forward in the international technological competition, like we've see post-war, forcing the national elites to cater to their needs, invest in their populations and broadly share the economic output and the political power? Or is it more likely one where the key competitive factor is the size of your datacenters and automated defense factories, where the bulk of people are irrelevant for the architecture of power?
It remains to be seen if this era of LLMs and datacenters raises or reduces the barrier to entry for software production and in general technological innovation. The marketplace is always hungry for innovation and those that can deliver and control it will be in a position of power.
But it's a perennial question, really, and it won't go away any time soon.
Mitigating seemingly has devolved to trade wars and protectionism.
The genie is out the bottle with AI though. So perhaps decentralisation of it puts us all on a new level playing field.
A better solution would be to just not have AI at all, outside of the few research roles where LLMs actually make sense.
More to the point it's trained on copyrighted material, so why entertain any use at all on that front if anything.
If it's trained on the world's information, give the world the model.
It doesn't need a tech company to pilfer everything and charge X if we're going to ignore the IP.
The models free to download aren't the models used by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. You aren't going to get all of OpenAI downloaded to your desktop and running fully on just your hardware.
And in each case (search and AI) the potential to decentralize and maintain "usable quality" is limited by these technologies requiring physical infrastructure at a scale that isn't available to the home consumer.
They aren't as good as the full fat models but they're plenty useful for many real world tasks. Show me the open source web search engine that I can run locally and that's plenty useful for many real world tasks!
> Thiel: [...] There’s a risk of nuclear war, there’s a risk of environmental disaster. Maybe something specific, like climate change, although there are lots of other ones we’ve come up with. There’s a risk of bioweapons. You have all the different sci-fi scenarios. Obviously, there are certain types of risks with A.I.
> But I always think that if we’re going to have this frame of talking about existential risks, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type of a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one-world totalitarian state. Because I would say the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance.
> [...]
> The atheist philosophical framing is “One World or None.” That was a short film that was put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late ’40s. It starts with the nuclear bomb blowing up the world, and obviously, you need a one-world government to stop it — one world or none. And the Christian framing, which in some ways is the same question, is: Antichrist or Armageddon? You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we’re sleepwalking toward Armageddon. “One world or none,” “Antichrist or Armageddon,” on one level, are the same question.
> [...]
> Thiel: [...] The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. It’s the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that.
> In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is: We need to stop science, we need to just say “stop” to this. And this is where, in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.
> [...]
> Douthat: [...] You’re an investor in A.I. You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building. Like, wouldn’t the Antichrist be like: Great, we’re not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far. Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?
> Thiel: Look, there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing.
---
We live in crazy times. The Pope is pleading for multilateralism and responsible regulation of technology. On the other side, Thiel says fear of technological progress could lead us to a one-world totalitarian government (which he relates to the antichrist, and to me seems like a straw man of multilateralism), while at the same time (arguably) building the technological infrastructure such a totalitarian government would need.
I don't know, I think I'm siding with the Pope on all future antichrist related issues.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic...
Sincerely,
Guy Who Talks About Armageddon Nonstop
According to the Economist at least, he doesn't seem to know what he wants. The encyclical sounds like a grabbag of every progressive meme and worry out there, whether they contradict each other or not.
You can't have both multilateralism and AI regulation (however that's defined). If you have genuine multilateralism then there will always be some jurisdictions that say they don't want to regulate and gain a competitive advantage by doing so. Because AI is symbolic and accessed over networks, in a truly multilateral world there is no such thing as AI regulation, really. Model development and serving will slowly migrate to jurisdictions that don't pin it down too much.
The only way to stop this is for every jurisdiction in the world to agree on the same set of rules. Which is the One World Government solution, normally in the 21st century approximated with economic pressure e.g. threatening to sanction or blacklist your country if you don't comply with some new rules. The anti-money laundering system is an example of that. And if you become familiar with the stories of its abuse, then AML can sound pretty darn Antichristy. So Thiel isn't far off.
For those of you playing at home, you can definitely have multi-lateral agreements without creating a one world government. We’ve had a chemical weapons ban for decades over which many of the multi-lateral parties were in hot and cold wars with each other. The nations are not going to magically combine over the presence of a treaty. Not how power works.
As far as the church is concerned, AI as an issue will come and go, but the ordering and prioritization of human relationships is timeless, and is the important issue. The subtext of the whole thing is that if you get the principles right, the tech policy will fall into place.
You can argue with those principles, but at that point you really are just arguing with Catholicism itself, which is fine, but is besides the point.
(I'm not engaging with or disputing your takes on policy, only with your comment as a critique of the encyclical itself.)
This whole section is clearly about AI and social policy. It makes occasional Biblical references but if you strip those out it sounds like any Democrat podcast. If random people were given these quotes stripped of context, how many would guess it was the Pope?
For example: > What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating
That's a demand for AI regulation.
Then take the paragraph that starts with:
> In many cases within the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power does not rest with States, but with major economic and technological actors [snip]
The whole paragraph has nothing to do with Catholicism. It could have been written by the EU Commission and you'd never know. In it he appears to argue for the nationalization of AI labs, using standard progressivist claims.
Later the Pope argues once again for the nationalization of not just AI labs but all intellectual property held by the computing industry, using an argument I'm not afraid to condemn as theologically specious. In "The principle of the universal destination of goods" he says first that things like earth and water are given by God and thus everyone has a "right" to use them as they wish. From a theological perspective this is reasonable, albeit not from an economic perspective. But then he argues that patents, algorithms, datacenters and digital platforms are exactly the same as soil and water, and thus everyone should have them for free. That's nonsense. The religious justification for the first is that God made planet Earth, but He obviously didn't invent the transformer algorithm so why would the same logic apply?
All this is just standard left wing politics. The only theological justification I could find in the first part of this chapter is that some other recent Pope agrees with him.
I don't have any problem with Catholics or Catholicism. In fact I've written a whole essay arguing that AI raises issues only religion can deal with:
https://blog.plan99.net/the-looming-ai-consciousness-train-w...
Religion has something to contribute when it comes to pondering questions like, what is AI? Does it deserve compassion and feelings, does it have consciousness and free will, or is it just a machine? Does the creation of it make us challengers to God or would He have approved of us making creatures in our own image? But the Pope doesn't engage with those topics. Instead we get advocacy for government power. The world has enough of such politics already.
The fact that the bloody Pope sounds like what appears to be a left-wing party in the US' Overton window should be a big kick in the arse. In most of the rest of the west, these are classical conservative values, and indeed more aligned with the gospel than anything coming from the Republican Party these days. As a leftist, I find Magnifica Humanitas to be interesting, because it's a view point that is rooted in a rich history and profound thinking. But that's not a socialist doctrine at all. Its situation is very close to Rerum Novarum: it was more social than what the capitalist magnates wanted, but it was really far from things like communism or revolutionary socialism. Leo XIV does not hide his admiration for Leo XIII, and he sees many similarities with the state of the society they live in. On that, I think I agree with him.
Also, just to get this out of the way: I said "Chapter 5" was the section full of policy prescriptions, but that was from memory, and, as you've noted, it's "Chapter 3". I agree there's a run in this where he gets pretty prescriptive! But I still think "policy document" is the wrong way to ready this.
Leo goes way out of his way, in the tradition of all Catholic popes over the last century, to ground what he's saying in a long through-line of doctrine. So in both your quotes, about the need for regulation: it's not really about policy.
I think Leo is first espousing a normie view (neither especially "left" nor especially libertarian) about regulation and risk, and then using it as an object lesson about the Catholic principle of Participation. Catholicism is big on ordering and prioritizing relationships between humans. We are supposed to be making decisions together for the Common Good, and we are supposed to recognize that decision-making happens (must happen) at different levels, from the state to local communities to families (this is Subsidiarity).
I flinched at the intellectual property bit too. But the point he's making in context is clear; it's Catholic and Christian doctrine going all the way back to Genesis. The literal named principle "Universal destination of goods" goes back to Vatican 2. The "codification" of these principles happened under Benedict XVI, not my favorite pope (I'm much more to the left than you are) and obviously no squish.
I think you're reading too much American politics into this, for what it's worth. Leo XIV took his name from Leo XIII, who in the late 19th century wrote Rerum Novarum, which was was in part a reaction to Marxist/Socialist thought and totalizing class conflict, recognizes the importance of worker welfare and the dignity of labor, but very specifically does not reject private property (private property is a necessary precondition for the agency of the family unit, which is central to Catholic doctrine). If we dig in I think we'll quickly find a lot of ideas that a doctrinaire leftist would recoil from!
But my big point is that people are all excited to read the Vatican's AI policy document, and the Vatican is uninterested in publishing AI policy; what it wants to do is continue to indoctrinate Catholics on the core tenets of Catholic social doctrine: Subsidiarity, Solidarity, The Common Good, Human Dignity.
Unless your vision for AI regulation involves drone striking offices where AI researchers work, then there's no way to enforce it globally.
Of course you can have multilateralism and regulations. And no, AML is not an antichrist.
And Thiel with his plan yo create totalitatian fascist word is one of the greater danger to most of us. Way greater then AML regulations.
Now consider the unlucky German-Turkish journalist Hüseyin Dogru, who was recently placed under trade sanctions by the EU Commission due to his reporting. But they did it while he was living in Europe. The sanctions force everyone - including his neighbours and supermarkets - to refuse to sell him anything.
Then they realized, what if his wife buys him food? So they sanctioned his wife too.
Then they realized, what if his parents buy him food? So they sanctioned his parents as well.
Literally the entire family has been put to economic death. The state will imprison anyone who helps them and confiscate the entire net worth of anyone who conceivably might help them. All appeals have been denied.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru#EU-San...
They are now completely screwed and reduced to living on a subsidence budget of ~500 EUR/month from the government, calculated to be just enough that his family don't literally die of starvation.
https://x.com/hussedogru/status/2037859218326180064
https://diariosocialista.net/2026/05/28/alemania-recrudece-l...
This is possible because of the systems-level implementation of the AML/sanctions system and its existence outside any kind of justice system. It's the kind of thing that Thiel meant by a totalitarian antichrist. The Bible warned of the "mark of the beast" on people's hands that would prevent people buying and selling if the antichrist doesn't approve of him. Well, a revoked EMV contactless credit card is basically that. If Jesus were alive today he would presumably have harsh criticisms of this kind of thing.
The world is barreling toward conditions that haven't existed for a century. God help us.
I'll take it, but I really wish we didn't need it.
One world government was achieved with the petrodollar and english becoming lingua franca of earth. International agreements and trade further centralize this one world government we’ve created. Just squint and you can see it plainly already. The public aren’t told about it because they will feel disenfranchised. But it already exists.
A studied person once admonished me "avoid the word IS when comparing systems in the abstract"
And baby sisters’ walkin’ on her knees
Now did the Lord say that machines ought to take place of livin’?
And what’s a substitute for bread and beans? I ain’t seen it!
Do engines get rewarded for their steam?”
- “John Henry” sung by Johnny Cash
AI will never be alive or have a soul. No machine could have a human rational eternal soul. This is Catholicism 101. No amount of work on matrix multiplication will change that.
rich coming from a belief system that thinks everyone who had the opportunity to go through their water-dunking ritual and culpably didn't is automatically going to be tortured in the underworld for eternity.
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (with Ann Druyan)
My personal view is that biological intelligence is fundamentally an unstable state. We should enjoy every moment of it, like you enjoy the brief flowering of a desert cactus. It's basically the same thing.
- "United States is a service and information economy": Finance, real estate, insurance, SaaS.
- "Nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away": here's a video from Smarter everyday on how atrophied manufacturing has become in the US: [I Tried to Make Something in America](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY)
- "Technological power in the hands of very few": AWS, Google Cloud, Azure.
- "People have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority [...] unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true": Fun house mirror of Twitter/X. Attention economy. Algorithm that maximizes engagement. AI Slop. Deepfakes. War in Iran.
- "our critical faculties in decline": NYT Article [Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a Generation-Long Decline](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/upshot/test-scores-school...)
- "the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less": TikTok, Instagram reels
- "credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition": RFK Jr, Tate, Fuentes, conspiracies, Qanon, Vaccine hesitancy.
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
(downloaded the full PDF and looking forward to read it on my eReader)
(No, I have not read it, nor do I intend to read 42,000 words, thank you)
Enjoy Argentina bros.
Catholic social teaching, which this encyclical is grounded on, has it's roots in Rerum novarum (1891) by Leo XIII (the Pope's namesake) and it dealt with the changing conditions of people due to the industrial revolution. We are potentially in the midst of another revolution (I suspect it will be less significant the the IR), so it is prudent of the church to develop a house view.
The analogy would be like if, since the world cup of soccer is going on, FIFA had a meeting and decided every goal was worth 3 points instead of 1 point. Some people might accept that this is "true soccer" and some "legitimate change to the game". Others would denounce the organization and set up their own leagues to preserve "traditional soccer", and declare the FIFA leadership has no "true authority", and that the meeting deciding on 3 goals has no "binding authority" on "true soccer fans". Something like that has happened.
Section 20 of the new "encyclical" reads:
> The Second Vatican Council expressed this principle with particular precision in the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, whose sixtieth anniversary we remembered and celebrated with gratitude on 7 December 2025: “If by the autonomy of earthly affairs is meant that created things and societies themselves enjoy their own laws and values… then the demand for autonomy is perfectly in order.” [10]
I don't believe this is the former Catholic teaching on "autonomy"; man is not "autonomous" but subject to God's laws. Autonomy would be a "license to sin": you could set your own "law" that it is ok to do this or that thing contrary to Catholic teaching. This is therefore the wrong understanding of "autonomy", and they are ambiguous about what they mean by "true autonomy" (which would be a "freedom within limits"; much like in Genesis, Adam and Eve had total liberty to eat from whatever tree, except for that of the tree which yielded "forbidden fruit").
I believe the document contains more errors like this, continuing this heretical movement of modernism.
"enjoy their own laws and values" is affirming that the natural world has an objective structure that can be studied on its own terms. Denying that autonomy is occasionalism, which is a heretical view that created things have no real power or nature of their own.
Genisis supports the statement about autonomy. Adam is given the task to subdue the earth, name the animals. To name them means to understand their specific natures. God did not dictate the names, he left that to Adam's human intellect. That's exactly what Gaudium et Spec refers to. Humans utilize their reason to discover the laws of creation and organize human society. We have genuine liberty within the overreaching metaphysical boundries.
However, the documents themselves do not speak clearly in a traditional way, but must be evaluated as "objectively ambiguous".
Consider some teaching could be of three options: clearly Catholic, ambiguous, or clearly non-Catholic; what category are we to put ambiguous statements in, if we collapse this to either "clearly Catholic" or "clearly not Catholic"?
It seems they must be considered as "clearly non-Catholic" then, since they cannot be in the category of "clearly Catholic". Or else ambiguous teachings would have to be considered to be equivalent to clearly Catholic teachings, which makes no sense.
It's kind of like "pass / fail" in school: do we "pass" the ambiguous teachings, or "fail" them? They seem to "fail" when considered rigorously: if we ask - Catholic or not? They are judged as "Not Catholic".
Can even someone claiming to be a pope make something ambiguous into a Catholic statement? It doesn't seem that's possible. Hence, the Vatican 2 statements, being "objectively ambiguous", are judged as "clearly Not Catholic", logically implying a pope could not have taught them.
(This is something of the reasoning process I propose when trying to evaluate these ambiguous statements which defy simple binary categorization; it is an ongoing effort of "research and dialogue")
The alternative would be to declare him a False Pope and to select an alternative divine representative. Of course, that would make you a heretic. If you ditch the pope as soon as he says something you don't like, you're not much of a Catholic. The Church is not a democracy.
cf. Hyperpapalism
Thankfully, Hyperpapalism is a misunderstanding of the role of the teaching-governing authority of the Bishop of Rome, and Catholics can be and remain good Catholics while disagreeing with the Pope on a variety of matters.
You have a right to your opinion. You don't have a right to apply your interpretation of doctrine in place of the Holy See's. That's heresy.
No, that’s Hyperpapalism, which is an error.
The Pope does not have the authority-power to transform error into truth, nor can he make “new truths” (of the Faith), whatever that might mean. He does have the solemn duty to faithfully hand on and explain the Apostolic Tradition. In an extra-ordinary act of his office, the Pope can, without error, define the proper understanding of Catholic teaching on a matter of faith or morals.
In the case of John XXII he proposed something false as pertains to Catholic doctrine, repeatedly, in public sermons. He was rebuked for it and recanted before he died. What he taught was not somehow “intermittently true”, it was an error through and through, and it was completely right that his subjects called him out on the matter.
> The Pope does not have the authority-power to transform error into truth,
The problem with your argument is that it is "left as an exercise for the reader" to determine what is actually true. If that were the case, then the Pope, as the representative of God on Earth, serves no purpose: everyone can individually determine what is true and what is an error. That does not agree historically with the role of the papacy.
If everyone has a right to their own interpretation of doctrine, what does the Pope do, and why should anyone listen to him?
Your position that absolute faith in the word of the pope is a fallacy is itself a self-supporting fallacy, which you hold only because you don't believe in the correctness of the pope.
> he taught was not somehow “intermittently true”
Yes, it was. God would not allow a Pope who spoke in error.
The problem here is, we're saying the person who claims to be pope has contradicted past teachings that popes infallibly taught already. So the only way out then would be to consider they were never popes in the first place or else you have the contradiction of a pope taught error or that the pope is not infallible.
For example in Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Liberty) in the Vatican 2 documents it states: "This Vatican synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. Such freedom consists in this, that all should have such immunity from coercion by individuals, or by groups, or by any human power, that no one should be forced to act against his conscience in religious matters, nor prevented from acting according to his conscience, whether in private or in public, within due limits."
This is obviously contrary to the Catholic understanding of conscience and coercion - the "due limits" and "religious freedom" are never defined, when they were already somewhat clearly defined.
Hence being ambiguous, we would understand these in themselves to not be Catholic teachings. Consider if someone asked a person if they are a Catholic and they answered "I am a Christian". In itself, their answer does not explain if they are Catholic or not: some Catholics might argue that "only Catholics are Christians" and that the statement could mean "I am a Catholic"; some protestants might argue that "only non-Catholics can be Christians" so that the statement means "I am not a Catholic". Hence, in itself the statement is "objectively ambiguous" - the Vatican 2 statements are of this character, and if you had to categorize them as either "Catholic or not", it seems they would resolve to being considered as "clearly not Catholic". In any event, it seems we would be forced to reject the language as it stands and new documents that are clearer would have to be drawn up and agreed to.
For example, a person does not have the right to declare they have the "religious freedom" to be a "Pirate" and that they are free to steal from other people "conscientiously"; they are allowed to be "coerced" to not steal, if they try to steal.
Regarding John XXII from the other comment, I believe St. Robert Bellarmine in De Romano Pontifice examined all cases of alleged papal heresy and explained why no popes had been heretics. John XXII simply speculated as a private theologian about an issue that had not been defined by the Church yet, hence did not enter in to error in doing so.
Except it doesn't seem to have happened like that and seems to be more in character in my view like the Western Schism, where there was confusion about who the pope was or if there was a pope for 40 years (except this time it's longer and there is added confusion with a false council and false teachings that appear to come straight from the "pope")
Hence I argue since a lot of people seem to think these teachings came "from the Church", there is "legitimate confusion" and more of something where the Vatican will have to be straightened out as reverting to previous norms in order for things to move forward.
It's possible it could resolve in this direction though of just separation (but, from "our" view, all the Catholic churches are practically possessed by a false movement; not unlike the East-West Schism though where half the churches went in a non-Catholic direction)
ecumenical councils where a pope presides with bishops are infallible (something of what you are saying);
Vatican 2 appears to be such a council but also taught error contrary to teachings of infallibility (seemingly impossible);
The only proposition we can think of as to how Catholicism can be consistent without falling in to contraction with the above facts then, would be to conclude that such a "pope" that taught error could not have been a pope in the first place, but was an heretic who then taught those heresies in a false council
(There are some other arguments about popes who can fall in to error or heresy but they are more speculative)
Thus the OP document about AI we wouldn't expect to be reliable from a Catholic standpoint and it goes out of its way to make all kinds of statements not related to AI which we are also critiquing here in this comment chain
The pope is against tech companies getting power but is happy for the Catholic Church to gather power and abuse it when it’s for his causes. No thanks. Tech companies are far less evil than Catholicism.
I'm atheist, been in tech for almost 30 years now, and even I don't think that is true.
What religion and/or belief system do you follow?
I wouldn't even bother reading whatever they wrote.
Because of the nuance involved in explaining theological concepts there's a long, long history of reviewing and approving books that explain doctrine. LLM outputs can be reviewed by a competent authority and approved for publication but releasing an AI to explain the theology to the general public in any sort of official way is impossible.