If one considers a firm to be a non-human entity that exhibits cognition, then yes. Various religions also exhibit those characteristics, which would fortify the Roman pope’s position with irony.
See Joscha Bach’s claim about religions not publishing their A|B testing at 51:47:
Same thing though. AI is largely a service provided by companies
Yes yes I know, open source models exist, yadda yadda
I think it's safe to say the overwhelming amount of AI usage in the world today is gates by corporations though. The vast majority of people will barely configure their own OS nevermind managing their own locally hosted open source AI instance
Not at all the same thing. AI is a subset of what companies can do, and many if the issues people have with AI are not intrinsic to AI but rather their use in the hands of companies utilizing then for their own benefit.
I think if there were any solution to the lack of jobs due to AI implementation then people would be fine. There isn’t any solution from either party in the US so people are naturally attacking the thing that is causing the problem.
People were fed up at "Occupy Wallstreet", but the media and craven political situation absorbed those movements back into the fold. Forget "fed up". When do we start seeing actions that don't feed directly back into the oligarchy's capture?
Yes! I've felt exactly the same. Everything people have taken issue with - "plagiarism," concentration of wealth and power, termination of jobs, environmental harm to feed data centers, land being wasted on new datacenters, resources being distributed terribly so as to feed the AI monster, slopcode being shit out as fast as possible to stay ahead of the market, software quality dropping for the same reason, engineers phoning it in at work to hit LLM KPIs, it's all just capitalism in its most raw, inevitable, end game form.
Edit: Someone replied to this with a question. I'm rate-limited here for getting into a flamewar with a PRC citizen that was gloating to me about my country being possibly invaded soon (which, fair, flamewars are bad), so I'll need to put my reply below:
There's no exact road map, but generally speaking, in our capitalist countries today, wealth started out more distributed, and governments had more power, in the beginning of their liberalization. States often competed in markets or simply nationalized things like power, healthcare, education. Ongoing examples of that are lots of places in Europe.
With the advent of neoliberalism (Thatcher, Reagan), concentrated capital converts more easily to political power in an exponential manner - more money, more ability to buy government, leads to more money, more ability to buy government.
Corporations are profit generation algorithms. They want the profit to always go up, and when they run against the barriers of laws (restricting their environmental impact, ability to underpay their workers, create cheap and dangerous working environments, do international trade in some way), naturally the next investment step is to remove those barriers.
So, early capitalism is strong regulation, socialized services and infrastructure, government competition, some nationalization, and private ownership of the means of production.
Late stage capitalism is weak/no regulation, no services, privatized infrastructure, no government competition, no nationalization, sectors tending towards monopolization, and wealth concentration.
"Raw capitalism" is where the commodification of everything is complete.
so maybe we'll get to the right place by accident when all companies are effectively replaced by ai ha ha. (not putting a high %age likelihood on that one, obviously, just being cheeky)
he probably fed it through claude before posting, I find that ever since AI has become mainstream all of my colleagues are providing fascinatingly well written prose, but only in Slack, during lunch they go back to basketball
I have no qualms about people writing AI assisted stuff, the points being made matter more.
Of course it's annoying if a single sentence is blown up into a page of prose by AI and an AI summarizes it into a different sentence on the other end :)
An HN user time-transported in from 15 years ago would find it incomprehensible that there there are only two sceptical responses (both flag killed) on a post about a message from the supreme leader of a nearly 1.5 billion strong religion. Times have truly changed.
Times have changed in a lot of dimensions. To name 2: 1) we have an AI thing now, and 2) the pope is American and more trustworthy than all of our current top politicians of both parties.
It's not like people are longing for times of papal authority, they're just looking for anyone at all with common sense.
15 years ago it was Pope Benedict, who was a pretty different figure. I can speak only for myself, but I would have had more cynicism about him than I would for Francis or Leo.
It's kind of worth reading. Not to learn about AI. But... it is an interesting/historic intersection of religion and technology.
Side note: (a) This new pope is very good at "political rhetoric" and (dare I say) polemic. He's a lot more relevant than recent popes. (b) There seems to have been a vibe shift, re: secular sentiments towards religion.
There is potentially a lot happening at this intersection... say catholicism and AI.
For example... LLMs make scripture a lot more accessible. That tends to be impactful, historically. It's Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza and Schmidt. This kind of thing is a niche interest... even among the faithful, but an important niche. And... it just answers your questions, patiently.
It's also a therapist, confidant and advice giver... potentially a confessor or priest. Talk of "making an AI god" got a little stale, but... there are many ways that LLMs might take god-like roles in people's lives.
Predictions are futile, but I suspect we are going to see AI encroachment into religious/spiritual domains. I further suspect that good, natural, conversational audio is the bottleneck.
Personally... I'm curious about this Pope/AI thing. I find it interesting.
Vatican's statements are often grounded in humanity.
They sue for peace in Ukraine / Middle East, humane treatments of immigrants, warn against nuclear weapons, AI, etc..
I go to Church often, there's always a prayer for peace during Mass.
What I like about Pope Leo is that he's talking about current issues that affect people.
I think the Church spent way too much time focusing on matters of sexuality and causing problems. While those are still important, it appears that it's no longer the sole focus of the Church, which is a good thing.
Another thing that I really like is the unification efforts with other religions _and_ Protestants.. recently we had a female Protestant Bishop meeting with the Pope, that was wonderful to watch.
Not known for deep understanding of high technology? The Catholic Church was behind the scientific discovery of The Big Bang through the Catholic priest (and astrophysicist) Lamaître. Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was an Augustinian friar. Steno, a Catholic bishop, formulated the foundational principles of stratigraphy, establishing geology as a formal science. Secchi, a Jesuit priest, was a pioneer in spectroscopy and the first to establish that the Sun is a star, creating the first stellar classification system.
Sure, we’ll get a tyrannical worm phase… but really I think I’d prefer that to the path of tech bros and MBAs controlling my universe. At least it makes the focus clear.
I find it difficult to see how even the measured words from the pope can actually enact this changed needed to 'disarm' AI. The forces behind the armament/war of AI development are innate to the qualities of our governance systems, capitalism, and human behavior, and AI itself.
None of these will go away until something breaks catastrophically, when it will be too late. And even then it will be short repose from another iteration for as long as we are in the digital information age.
There are only two steady end states that I see... either a global surveillance totalitarian system under the industrial complex, or, a radical change of the environment in which the aforementioned can be sustained.
> 110. Finally, I would like to employ the expression “to disarm,” which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.
you know.. a lot of changes came from just words. literally our modern society tend to sway the public opinion through just words from news and influencers..
the guys name is Leo because the pope who was around for the industrial revolution was named Leo. I think he also has a math PhD but I could be wrong. he's 100% paying attention
> A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few
Particularly ironic considering the history of the Church.
I mean, it is not wrong, but that's essentially the business of essentially every church, religion, cult,... whatever you call your spiritual organization.
And for claiming to have some authority on social justice when women are shunned from priesthood and leadership roles. At least they're coming around a little bit with the first woman appointee of a head of a dept of the roman curia in 2025.
Between the Canadian residential schools and sexual abuse scandals alone, it's shocking that people actually look to the holy see as any kind of moral authority. Nevermind the connections to slavery, fascism, and even the cosa nostra.
I would love for the Pope to answer this question:
If a technology existed that reduced the cost of producing a critical thing (think food, housing, medical care) down to near zero, however, it made the humans currently building the thing redundant, should we build it? Would it be okay to use the hyper-optimization power of Capitalism to build such a technology faster?
Before someone yells at me about this not being the current situation, I think that is the endgame of most of this AI development and in fact the endgame is even more comforting: If it takes 10 construction workers at $60,000/annum to build one home, I can forsee the descendants of current AI tech enabling 10 construction workers at $150,000/annum building 5 homes in the same time with an even larger profit margin for the corporation involved.
But as a clear moral quandary, I think the Pope should consider the first situation.
If the technology is used to serve humanity by providing food or housing, it seems like his stance would be approving. But if it was used to increase profits and people still starved that would be bad, right?
"AI must be used for the good of humanity" isn't even an anti ai position really.
"by providing food or housing" vs "if it was used to increase profits"
Why..not both? I know this question is naive, but there is nothing that "hard-codes" AI to only increase profits at the cost of providing food or housing for much cheaper prices. Yes a Private equity firm could later insert itself and jack up prices and play such games, but that isn't baked into the technology itself.
And as such, the technology seems the wrong thing to be litigating.
This makes me think of enlightened self interest. If the tech elite crush everyone by automating too fast then the economy collapses and people don’t have the money to pay them and their advertisers, so it will wind up hurting them directly too. Enlightened self interest SHOULD keep those same people in check finding a way to use the technology to empower advances in efficiency that empower people not just corporations. But the AI leaders don’t outwardly seem to think about these issues, and when asked just brush past them. We should not stop tech progress even if it were possible in a global competitive environment (which it is not), but there are some moral issues that should guide tech leaders in decision making, not just profit motives.
The Catholic Church has at present no answer to that question. The contemporary political-economic stance of the Catholic Church is based on economic liberalism and capitalism and maintaining a just balance between capital and labour, as indeed mentioned in the encyclical itself.
I don't think anyone has an answer to that question at present, honestly.
Unfortunately, he did not mention the moral responsabilities of the Silicon Valley technopower in delivering and selling a technology so society-impact only for making themselves and their shareholders richier.
Why would we listen to him? Even he doesn’t believe in God.
Jesus let the Romans take him. The pope drives around in an armoured car with hundreds of soldiers. Why? After all, he’s the official spokesperson of God. He’s either untouchable, or would be endlessly rewarded with sainthood for being a martyr.
Good luck with that. Capitalism doesn't work that way. AI will make money for some companies, but as always, it will be on our expense, not for our benefit. We will get some convenient features, we will grow dependent, and eventually subscriptions will be squeezed as far as we are able to pay, advertising will take over, we will have less choice and worse service.
By then we might not even have computers anymore, or we might have "transparent" computers, i.e. have everything on the cloud and just tell our AI agents what to do.
Sorry Pope Leo, things are not going to suddenly turn into a wonderful utopia, but maybe buy some stocks so you can at least make a buck from what's coming.
Capitalism tends to benefit most people, like capitalist enterprise makes food, clothing, cars and the like and most get some benefit. I'm not convinced by the on our expense bit on the whole. It can have glitches sometimes of course.
Arguably, all the industries that you mentioned (clothing, food, automotive) have the same symptoms, doing everything possible to increase growth even (and often) at the expense of shipping worse products. At least, this has been my experience with clothing, electronics, appliances, and honestly almost everything. It's very hard today to find good long lasting products. A couple of decades ago you could expect your purchase to last a while, today - hardly.
What point are you trying to make here, because your post is all over the place and never really goes anywhere.
The pope is not claiming utopia is possible. He is reminding the world of its moral duties within this scope. "Capitalism" is not a system that we helpless atoms merely get pushed around in. How good the world is depends on each one of us choosing to do our moral duty toward the common good. There is no "system" that will, without effort on the part of its citizens, straighten the crooked timber of humanity and relieve human beings of their moral responsibilities.
My point is AI is not going to be built to "benefit humanity" because that's not the incentive in our economy. AI might give us some benefits, but like all tech products currently, it will be designed to benefit corporations and shareholders. It is what it is.
Nah, I think that's a bit of a cop-out. Capitalism heavily incentivizes competition at the detriment of everything else. You can talk about moral duties all you want, but in a hyper-competitive environment, if you don't do the thing, the other guy will. Societies don't necessarily have to be structured in such ways.
Former Catholic. I left the church for a variety of reasons, one of which being the child abuse scandal. I am aware of the Catholic Church's long and often sordid history. What I am trying to say is there is no love lost between me and the Catholic Church.
With that out of the way, the Pope is right. Knowledge should be used for the benefit of humanity and I don't think any of the big AI companies have our best interests in mind.
I don't really get this, so I genuinely want to understand.
You can still follow a religion while rightfully thinking that the organization representing it to be corrupt (and how could it be otherwise, as it's made from mortal sinners?).
But you either believe that St.Peter and its descendants in Rome have been tasked by god to spread (and interpret) its word or you don't.
It's fine if you don't (I don't my self, I'm an atheist), but I don't get why can't you be a catholic if you believe and also find the organization flawed.
> I left the church for a variety of reasons, one of which being the child abuse scandal.
What you do is your business, but you understand the fallacy, yes? One does not belong to the Church for the priests. And btw, if you want to be consistent, you should dissociate yourself from all institutions, because statistically, the rate of abuse in the Church (estimated by John Jay to be around 4%) is representative or less than the rates in all other religious or secular institutions. Public schools are notoriously bad in this regard, but you wouldn't know it, given the obsessive coverage of the Church to the exclusion of everyone else.
(I, of course, condemn all such sexual abuse, and I am critical of those who failed to deal with the issue properly. There is indeed a sense in which abuse by a priest carries much more gravity, and this is the position of the Church itself. Sexual abuse also peaked during the heyday of the sexual revolution, roughly during the 1960s-1980s. It wasn't a pedophilia scandal, as around 80% of victims were post-pubescent male teenagers. It was a homosexual ephebophilia scandal. Still terrible, but it does shift understanding of the nature and source of the problem significantly.)
> I am aware of the Catholic Church's long and often sordid history.
Sure, if you simply accept the ignorant tropes, ideological propaganda, and black legends circulating in a culture hostile to the institution since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, then maybe you'll be left with a dramatically dark picture that you describe as "sordid". But this is historically illiterate and intellectually immature.
And they hoarded and kept such knowledge for themselves and those who swore fealty for as long as they could, concentrating and maintaining power for centuries.
The Pro human AI Delcaration has as one of its list of denands
Child Protection: Companies must not be allowed to exploit children or undermine their wellbeing with AI interactions creating emotional attachment or leverage
I think it entirely consistent with many of the supporters of this statement that this leaves open the opportunity for the church to do it with AI, or indeed companies and the church to do it by other means.
So is the Church what? That the Church must serve humanity or that it is the "powerful few" as some here are saying?
In the first case, I claim that it has and that it does. I'm not sure how you can credibly claim otherwise. Only ideologically informed animosity could distort one's views here. If you know the mission of the Church, then I see no issue. Do members of the Church fail? Of course. Everyone does, and indeed this is captured best in the Christian acknowledgment that everyone is a sinner, without exception. Everyone falls short.
In the second case, I don't know what the implication is. Is it that the Church is one of the "powerful few" and therefore evil? The first question you must ask is what your notion of "power" here is. The second, whether the Church is actually powerful according to that definition. The third, whether you are falsely linking being one of the "powerful few" with being evil. The problem, after all, is not with power, but with the way power is used. In an ideal world, all power would be exercised morally, and all authority would have commensurate power.
I would say this: the Church has authority. Whether it has power depends on your definition of power and the particular historical epoch. It is not reduced to a simple boolean.
It's best to avoid cheap jabs that rely on boring and unthinking tropes that appeal to widespread prejudices rather than to informed reason.
For reference, the general form (so that I can use letters to refer to parties and avoid convoluted phrasing):
(Axiom: B has done X.)
A (to B): You have done X, and you should not have done so.
C: I note here that certain prior actions of A could also reasonably be characterized as X.
D (to C): Ah, here you commit the fallacy of "tu quoque".
This argument is not sound. It misunderstands the fallacy. (To be clear: Wikipedia describes the fallacy accurately; it's just that it's rare in practice, and very often falsely accused.)
Everyone should uphold the standards to which they hold others (and I consider it an obvious moral failing not to do so). The fallacy only applies where C either continues on to argue that B has, somehow, not actually done X (because A did); or, at least, clearly has the purpose of distracting from the fact that B has done X.
But there is nothing fallacious about simply pointing out that A does not live up to A's own implied standards. There is nothing fallacious about the implication that A is therefore being either i) dishonest about the anti-X belief, or ii) simply hypocritical. (To be fair, we don't know, from the given information, which of those is the case; but I think it's fair to say that neither is "fair dealing" and that A is thus a legitimate target of criticism regardless.)
It is also not fallacious for C to use this as a jumping-off point to argue that X is in fact okay to do, although of course this requires further support.
Presidents through out American history has believed various forms of genocide and slavery were applicable practices to modern problems; hell the current president thinks variously incredulous things.
So you know, you might want to adjust your measuring stick before you critique people.
Both things can be true at the same time, so shutting down the critique (possibly because it is critiquing something you like??) just because another critique can be made is not a good counter argument
Lets not forget the hideous acts that this church has commited against young men and children in america. This would the last place I'd accept leadership advise from.
This message is not focused on u.s or its presidents. Its focused on leadership world wide.
> Presidents through out American history has believed various forms of genocide and slavery were applicable practices to modern problems; hell the current president thinks variously incredulous things.
And we shouldn't criticize them? Is that the point?
Both American presidents and Abrahamic faiths have, historically, justified slavery and genocide (and often by the same pretense.)
And the current President's ridiculous beliefs are just as ridiculous as believing in transubstantiation. Believing angels manifest on Earth and intercede in human affairs is no more rational believing that aliens are manifesting on Earth but are really demons, which Catholic VP JD Vance believes. The former is just more culturally accepted, and thus given the weight of dignity, but both are valid as far as a naive and literalist interpretation of the Bible is concerned, because demons exist in the Bible, but not aliens.
Either way, as much as the Pope is a silly man in a silly hat looking like a fucking wizard who is required to believe in supernatural nonsense while leading a corrupt den of pedophiles, he's also absolutely and objectively correct on this specific topic and it's clear he's put far more researched thought into his opinions on AI than 99% of people on HN. Hell, he even apologized for the Church's historical support of slavery, and many people here won't even concede that slavery was ever a problem.
I'll listen to him when he has materially acknowledged the horrors the Church did and continues to do and dismantles the institutions responsible for those horrors.
In my way of life, the idea that people follow and care deeply about what some mullah has to say is very foreign. There's a mass of these people though. Their life must be so incredibly different than mine, it's just hard to fathom. I can't even imagine caring about the Pope or what they have to say. In my imagination the Pope is something out of roman times, it's just so weird this still exists today.
Have you actually read it? It is not a boring take. It's actually the best thing I've read on moral philosophy in quite some time. I suggest you take the time to read it.
Yes and people who use it for dominating industries and markets out of pure greed have the potential displace and disenfranchise large swaths of the population. The possibility to tier society into people with full access to AI and people with severely limited access binding them with significant permanent disadvantages.
You don't have to agree with everything to Pope stands for to understand the potential dark paths AI could lead humanity to.
I’m not going to be contented until I can get Ja’s take on if LLMs even have the slightest potential to be an engine behind artificial general intelligence. Or that they definitely won’t be but the ideas that will come from layering and transformers will be vital for example.
LLMs are some of the most fairly distributed technology in history. It's actual insane how equitable global access is, especially compared to the previous evolutions of the computer industry (mainframes, then desktop, and eventually mobile phones). People are just saying stuff to say stuff at this point.
Dupe, more or less. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265206
I have found that, for many of the statements about what AI should do, I would actally be happier if the letters "AI" were replaced with "companies"
That's because it's a meaningless, populist trope. There is zero helpful information, solution or context which depends on the specific issue at hand.
...you could also swap out with "rich people" or "all people," "governments."
In fact, reading these sentences with ad-lib on the subject tends to give these sentences interestingly different connotations.
Well, as Nick Land said, "Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence are the same thing"
And he meant it as a good thing. Something to be embraced.
If one considers a firm to be a non-human entity that exhibits cognition, then yes. Various religions also exhibit those characteristics, which would fortify the Roman pope’s position with irony.
See Joscha Bach’s claim about religions not publishing their A|B testing at 51:47:
https://youtu.be/7bqdPHLIY8w
And while your comment has validity, in the US the phrase uttered by Presidential candidate Mitt Romney adds a layer of complexity:
“Corporations are people, my friend.”
Same thing though. AI is largely a service provided by companies
Yes yes I know, open source models exist, yadda yadda
I think it's safe to say the overwhelming amount of AI usage in the world today is gates by corporations though. The vast majority of people will barely configure their own OS nevermind managing their own locally hosted open source AI instance
Not at all the same thing. AI is a subset of what companies can do, and many if the issues people have with AI are not intrinsic to AI but rather their use in the hands of companies utilizing then for their own benefit.
Open source models don't exist. Open-weight ones do, which are more equivalent to freeware than free software.
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I don't think anyone actually has an issue with AI. I think people are finally fed up with late-stage capitalism and lashing out.
I think if there were any solution to the lack of jobs due to AI implementation then people would be fine. There isn’t any solution from either party in the US so people are naturally attacking the thing that is causing the problem.
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People were fed up at "Occupy Wallstreet", but the media and craven political situation absorbed those movements back into the fold. Forget "fed up". When do we start seeing actions that don't feed directly back into the oligarchy's capture?
Yes! I've felt exactly the same. Everything people have taken issue with - "plagiarism," concentration of wealth and power, termination of jobs, environmental harm to feed data centers, land being wasted on new datacenters, resources being distributed terribly so as to feed the AI monster, slopcode being shit out as fast as possible to stay ahead of the market, software quality dropping for the same reason, engineers phoning it in at work to hit LLM KPIs, it's all just capitalism in its most raw, inevitable, end game form.
Edit: Someone replied to this with a question. I'm rate-limited here for getting into a flamewar with a PRC citizen that was gloating to me about my country being possibly invaded soon (which, fair, flamewars are bad), so I'll need to put my reply below:
There's no exact road map, but generally speaking, in our capitalist countries today, wealth started out more distributed, and governments had more power, in the beginning of their liberalization. States often competed in markets or simply nationalized things like power, healthcare, education. Ongoing examples of that are lots of places in Europe.
With the advent of neoliberalism (Thatcher, Reagan), concentrated capital converts more easily to political power in an exponential manner - more money, more ability to buy government, leads to more money, more ability to buy government.
Corporations are profit generation algorithms. They want the profit to always go up, and when they run against the barriers of laws (restricting their environmental impact, ability to underpay their workers, create cheap and dangerous working environments, do international trade in some way), naturally the next investment step is to remove those barriers.
So, early capitalism is strong regulation, socialized services and infrastructure, government competition, some nationalization, and private ownership of the means of production.
Late stage capitalism is weak/no regulation, no services, privatized infrastructure, no government competition, no nationalization, sectors tending towards monopolization, and wealth concentration.
"Raw capitalism" is where the commodification of everything is complete.
"it's all just capitalism in its most raw, inevitable, end game form."
Can you explain, what would be early capitalism and what is the difference to "end game capitalism" to you?
so maybe we'll get to the right place by accident when all companies are effectively replaced by ai ha ha. (not putting a high %age likelihood on that one, obviously, just being cheeky)
This is a surprisingly nuanced and technically literate take on this topic. Kudos.
I wonder if this sort of thing got this dude elected, to navigate the changing times.
(duplicating my comment from the other thread as this seems to have more traction)
he probably fed it through claude before posting, I find that ever since AI has become mainstream all of my colleagues are providing fascinatingly well written prose, but only in Slack, during lunch they go back to basketball
I have no qualms about people writing AI assisted stuff, the points being made matter more.
Of course it's annoying if a single sentence is blown up into a page of prose by AI and an AI summarizes it into a different sentence on the other end :)
An HN user time-transported in from 15 years ago would find it incomprehensible that there there are only two sceptical responses (both flag killed) on a post about a message from the supreme leader of a nearly 1.5 billion strong religion. Times have truly changed.
Times have changed in a lot of dimensions. To name 2: 1) we have an AI thing now, and 2) the pope is American and more trustworthy than all of our current top politicians of both parties.
It's not like people are longing for times of papal authority, they're just looking for anyone at all with common sense.
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> more trustworthy than all of our current top politicians of both parties.
Big if true. Has he addressed the previous rug sweeps about clerical child abuse?
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15 years ago it was Pope Benedict, who was a pretty different figure. I can speak only for myself, but I would have had more cynicism about him than I would for Francis or Leo.
That past HN user would be more shocked that Chrome is not considered the second coming of Jesus anymore, to keep the religious theme.
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Speculating, without evidence, that hidden forces are suppressing ideas that you prefer is low-value noise IMO.
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Comments about flagging/downvoting and brigading are not permitted by the HN guidelines linked at the bottom of the page.
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Please cite sources for those claims.
>and defends abortion before and after birth
abortion after birth? as in, killing a newborm baby? what are you even talking about
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It's kind of worth reading. Not to learn about AI. But... it is an interesting/historic intersection of religion and technology.
Side note: (a) This new pope is very good at "political rhetoric" and (dare I say) polemic. He's a lot more relevant than recent popes. (b) There seems to have been a vibe shift, re: secular sentiments towards religion.
There is potentially a lot happening at this intersection... say catholicism and AI.
For example... LLMs make scripture a lot more accessible. That tends to be impactful, historically. It's Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza and Schmidt. This kind of thing is a niche interest... even among the faithful, but an important niche. And... it just answers your questions, patiently.
It's also a therapist, confidant and advice giver... potentially a confessor or priest. Talk of "making an AI god" got a little stale, but... there are many ways that LLMs might take god-like roles in people's lives.
Predictions are futile, but I suspect we are going to see AI encroachment into religious/spiritual domains. I further suspect that good, natural, conversational audio is the bottleneck.
Personally... I'm curious about this Pope/AI thing. I find it interesting.
I'm an atheist, but I have to admit the previous guy was pretty dope.
The Pope has a better understanding of what's at stake that many of 'our' (lobbied) politicians.
Vatican's statements are often grounded in humanity.
They sue for peace in Ukraine / Middle East, humane treatments of immigrants, warn against nuclear weapons, AI, etc..
I go to Church often, there's always a prayer for peace during Mass.
What I like about Pope Leo is that he's talking about current issues that affect people.
I think the Church spent way too much time focusing on matters of sexuality and causing problems. While those are still important, it appears that it's no longer the sole focus of the Church, which is a good thing.
Another thing that I really like is the unification efforts with other religions _and_ Protestants.. recently we had a female Protestant Bishop meeting with the Pope, that was wonderful to watch.
If you haven't read the earlier treatise from January 2025 from the Vatican on Artificial Intelligence, it's well worth the read. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
Amazing insight from an organization not traditionally known for a deep understanding of high technology.
Not known for deep understanding of high technology? The Catholic Church was behind the scientific discovery of The Big Bang through the Catholic priest (and astrophysicist) Lamaître. Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was an Augustinian friar. Steno, a Catholic bishop, formulated the foundational principles of stratigraphy, establishing geology as a formal science. Secchi, a Jesuit priest, was a pioneer in spectroscopy and the first to establish that the Sun is a star, creating the first stellar classification system.
Time to start on the first draft of the orange Catholic bible
I'm down to start a butleirian jihad
Already in full swing: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/
Sure, we’ll get a tyrannical worm phase… but really I think I’d prefer that to the path of tech bros and MBAs controlling my universe. At least it makes the focus clear.
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Great to see the Pope recognises the gravity of what is to come with AI and is coming out early with this.
I find it difficult to see how even the measured words from the pope can actually enact this changed needed to 'disarm' AI. The forces behind the armament/war of AI development are innate to the qualities of our governance systems, capitalism, and human behavior, and AI itself.
None of these will go away until something breaks catastrophically, when it will be too late. And even then it will be short repose from another iteration for as long as we are in the digital information age.
There are only two steady end states that I see... either a global surveillance totalitarian system under the industrial complex, or, a radical change of the environment in which the aforementioned can be sustained.
> 110. Finally, I would like to employ the expression “to disarm,” which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.
you know.. a lot of changes came from just words. literally our modern society tend to sway the public opinion through just words from news and influencers..
I noticed ads on churches in Mexico City for this earlier this year, https://juanito.ai
the guys name is Leo because the pope who was around for the industrial revolution was named Leo. I think he also has a math PhD but I could be wrong. he's 100% paying attention
It’s a Master’s not a PhD, but in math, yes.
> A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few
Particularly ironic considering the history of the Church.
I mean, it is not wrong, but that's essentially the business of essentially every church, religion, cult,... whatever you call your spiritual organization.
And for claiming to have some authority on social justice when women are shunned from priesthood and leadership roles. At least they're coming around a little bit with the first woman appointee of a head of a dept of the roman curia in 2025.
Between the Canadian residential schools and sexual abuse scandals alone, it's shocking that people actually look to the holy see as any kind of moral authority. Nevermind the connections to slavery, fascism, and even the cosa nostra.
I would love for the Pope to answer this question:
If a technology existed that reduced the cost of producing a critical thing (think food, housing, medical care) down to near zero, however, it made the humans currently building the thing redundant, should we build it? Would it be okay to use the hyper-optimization power of Capitalism to build such a technology faster?
Before someone yells at me about this not being the current situation, I think that is the endgame of most of this AI development and in fact the endgame is even more comforting: If it takes 10 construction workers at $60,000/annum to build one home, I can forsee the descendants of current AI tech enabling 10 construction workers at $150,000/annum building 5 homes in the same time with an even larger profit margin for the corporation involved.
But as a clear moral quandary, I think the Pope should consider the first situation.
If the technology is used to serve humanity by providing food or housing, it seems like his stance would be approving. But if it was used to increase profits and people still starved that would be bad, right?
"AI must be used for the good of humanity" isn't even an anti ai position really.
"by providing food or housing" vs "if it was used to increase profits"
Why..not both? I know this question is naive, but there is nothing that "hard-codes" AI to only increase profits at the cost of providing food or housing for much cheaper prices. Yes a Private equity firm could later insert itself and jack up prices and play such games, but that isn't baked into the technology itself.
And as such, the technology seems the wrong thing to be litigating.
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This makes me think of enlightened self interest. If the tech elite crush everyone by automating too fast then the economy collapses and people don’t have the money to pay them and their advertisers, so it will wind up hurting them directly too. Enlightened self interest SHOULD keep those same people in check finding a way to use the technology to empower advances in efficiency that empower people not just corporations. But the AI leaders don’t outwardly seem to think about these issues, and when asked just brush past them. We should not stop tech progress even if it were possible in a global competitive environment (which it is not), but there are some moral issues that should guide tech leaders in decision making, not just profit motives.
The Catholic Church has at present no answer to that question. The contemporary political-economic stance of the Catholic Church is based on economic liberalism and capitalism and maintaining a just balance between capital and labour, as indeed mentioned in the encyclical itself.
I don't think anyone has an answer to that question at present, honestly.
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Unfortunately, he did not mention the moral responsabilities of the Silicon Valley technopower in delivering and selling a technology so society-impact only for making themselves and their shareholders richier.
Actually, he did, extensively.
[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265206
Why would we listen to him? Even he doesn’t believe in God.
Jesus let the Romans take him. The pope drives around in an armoured car with hundreds of soldiers. Why? After all, he’s the official spokesperson of God. He’s either untouchable, or would be endlessly rewarded with sainthood for being a martyr.
But he obviously doesn’t believe that.
Good luck with that. Capitalism doesn't work that way. AI will make money for some companies, but as always, it will be on our expense, not for our benefit. We will get some convenient features, we will grow dependent, and eventually subscriptions will be squeezed as far as we are able to pay, advertising will take over, we will have less choice and worse service.
By then we might not even have computers anymore, or we might have "transparent" computers, i.e. have everything on the cloud and just tell our AI agents what to do.
Sorry Pope Leo, things are not going to suddenly turn into a wonderful utopia, but maybe buy some stocks so you can at least make a buck from what's coming.
Capitalism tends to benefit most people, like capitalist enterprise makes food, clothing, cars and the like and most get some benefit. I'm not convinced by the on our expense bit on the whole. It can have glitches sometimes of course.
Arguably, all the industries that you mentioned (clothing, food, automotive) have the same symptoms, doing everything possible to increase growth even (and often) at the expense of shipping worse products. At least, this has been my experience with clothing, electronics, appliances, and honestly almost everything. It's very hard today to find good long lasting products. A couple of decades ago you could expect your purchase to last a while, today - hardly.
Any good tickers?
What point are you trying to make here, because your post is all over the place and never really goes anywhere.
The pope is not claiming utopia is possible. He is reminding the world of its moral duties within this scope. "Capitalism" is not a system that we helpless atoms merely get pushed around in. How good the world is depends on each one of us choosing to do our moral duty toward the common good. There is no "system" that will, without effort on the part of its citizens, straighten the crooked timber of humanity and relieve human beings of their moral responsibilities.
My point is AI is not going to be built to "benefit humanity" because that's not the incentive in our economy. AI might give us some benefits, but like all tech products currently, it will be designed to benefit corporations and shareholders. It is what it is.
Nah, I think that's a bit of a cop-out. Capitalism heavily incentivizes competition at the detriment of everything else. You can talk about moral duties all you want, but in a hyper-competitive environment, if you don't do the thing, the other guy will. Societies don't necessarily have to be structured in such ways.
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Former Catholic. I left the church for a variety of reasons, one of which being the child abuse scandal. I am aware of the Catholic Church's long and often sordid history. What I am trying to say is there is no love lost between me and the Catholic Church.
With that out of the way, the Pope is right. Knowledge should be used for the benefit of humanity and I don't think any of the big AI companies have our best interests in mind.
I don't really get this, so I genuinely want to understand.
You can still follow a religion while rightfully thinking that the organization representing it to be corrupt (and how could it be otherwise, as it's made from mortal sinners?).
But you either believe that St.Peter and its descendants in Rome have been tasked by god to spread (and interpret) its word or you don't.
It's fine if you don't (I don't my self, I'm an atheist), but I don't get why can't you be a catholic if you believe and also find the organization flawed.
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> I left the church for a variety of reasons, one of which being the child abuse scandal.
What you do is your business, but you understand the fallacy, yes? One does not belong to the Church for the priests. And btw, if you want to be consistent, you should dissociate yourself from all institutions, because statistically, the rate of abuse in the Church (estimated by John Jay to be around 4%) is representative or less than the rates in all other religious or secular institutions. Public schools are notoriously bad in this regard, but you wouldn't know it, given the obsessive coverage of the Church to the exclusion of everyone else.
(I, of course, condemn all such sexual abuse, and I am critical of those who failed to deal with the issue properly. There is indeed a sense in which abuse by a priest carries much more gravity, and this is the position of the Church itself. Sexual abuse also peaked during the heyday of the sexual revolution, roughly during the 1960s-1980s. It wasn't a pedophilia scandal, as around 80% of victims were post-pubescent male teenagers. It was a homosexual ephebophilia scandal. Still terrible, but it does shift understanding of the nature and source of the problem significantly.)
> I am aware of the Catholic Church's long and often sordid history.
Sure, if you simply accept the ignorant tropes, ideological propaganda, and black legends circulating in a culture hostile to the institution since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, then maybe you'll be left with a dramatically dark picture that you describe as "sordid". But this is historically illiterate and intellectually immature.
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The church was a great archive of knowledge for the longest time. They were the powerful few too.
And they hoarded and kept such knowledge for themselves and those who swore fealty for as long as they could, concentrating and maintaining power for centuries.
Still, I agree with the pope this once.
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The Catholic church has also burned Christians in various era’s including in the 15th century.
How crazy would it be if the Vatican started training up their own custom AI models?
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I had a similar thought. Something about a splinter in someone's eye while a plank in your eye blah blah
The Pro human AI Delcaration has as one of its list of denands
Child Protection: Companies must not be allowed to exploit children or undermine their wellbeing with AI interactions creating emotional attachment or leverage
I think it entirely consistent with many of the supporters of this statement that this leaves open the opportunity for the church to do it with AI, or indeed companies and the church to do it by other means.
So is the Church what? That the Church must serve humanity or that it is the "powerful few" as some here are saying?
In the first case, I claim that it has and that it does. I'm not sure how you can credibly claim otherwise. Only ideologically informed animosity could distort one's views here. If you know the mission of the Church, then I see no issue. Do members of the Church fail? Of course. Everyone does, and indeed this is captured best in the Christian acknowledgment that everyone is a sinner, without exception. Everyone falls short.
In the second case, I don't know what the implication is. Is it that the Church is one of the "powerful few" and therefore evil? The first question you must ask is what your notion of "power" here is. The second, whether the Church is actually powerful according to that definition. The third, whether you are falsely linking being one of the "powerful few" with being evil. The problem, after all, is not with power, but with the way power is used. In an ideal world, all power would be exercised morally, and all authority would have commensurate power.
I would say this: the Church has authority. Whether it has power depends on your definition of power and the particular historical epoch. It is not reduced to a simple boolean.
It's best to avoid cheap jabs that rely on boring and unthinking tropes that appeal to widespread prejudices rather than to informed reason.
Everything you say apply to the AI. Even more so that there are very good open models which anyone can host and get almost exact same power.
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Yes, but still: so is AI.
Really? Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
You seem confused. Read the article you linked. Or, in case it wasn't clear enough: AI must serve humanity. So must the church.
For reference, the general form (so that I can use letters to refer to parties and avoid convoluted phrasing):
(Axiom: B has done X.)
A (to B): You have done X, and you should not have done so.
C: I note here that certain prior actions of A could also reasonably be characterized as X.
D (to C): Ah, here you commit the fallacy of "tu quoque".
This argument is not sound. It misunderstands the fallacy. (To be clear: Wikipedia describes the fallacy accurately; it's just that it's rare in practice, and very often falsely accused.)
Everyone should uphold the standards to which they hold others (and I consider it an obvious moral failing not to do so). The fallacy only applies where C either continues on to argue that B has, somehow, not actually done X (because A did); or, at least, clearly has the purpose of distracting from the fact that B has done X.
But there is nothing fallacious about simply pointing out that A does not live up to A's own implied standards. There is nothing fallacious about the implication that A is therefore being either i) dishonest about the anti-X belief, or ii) simply hypocritical. (To be fair, we don't know, from the given information, which of those is the case; but I think it's fair to say that neither is "fair dealing" and that A is thus a legitimate target of criticism regardless.)
It is also not fallacious for C to use this as a jumping-off point to argue that X is in fact okay to do, although of course this requires further support.
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Yeah so? That's not really "news" anyway.
I'm sure most of the elite probably hold similarly wonky views.
In other news? Why not talk about this news? Do you disagree with the Pope?
> Do you disagree with the Pope?
Yes I do. I don't think you a prayer can literally transform wine into blood. How about you?
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Presidents through out American history has believed various forms of genocide and slavery were applicable practices to modern problems; hell the current president thinks variously incredulous things.
So you know, you might want to adjust your measuring stick before you critique people.
Both things can be true at the same time, so shutting down the critique (possibly because it is critiquing something you like??) just because another critique can be made is not a good counter argument
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Lets not forget the hideous acts that this church has commited against young men and children in america. This would the last place I'd accept leadership advise from.
This message is not focused on u.s or its presidents. Its focused on leadership world wide.
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Not every conversation is about Trump, is it possible to stop this?
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Their excuse was that they lived a long time ago when people were idiots. What's the popes excuse today?
> Presidents through out American history has believed various forms of genocide and slavery were applicable practices to modern problems; hell the current president thinks variously incredulous things.
And we shouldn't criticize them? Is that the point?
Both American presidents and Abrahamic faiths have, historically, justified slavery and genocide (and often by the same pretense.)
And the current President's ridiculous beliefs are just as ridiculous as believing in transubstantiation. Believing angels manifest on Earth and intercede in human affairs is no more rational believing that aliens are manifesting on Earth but are really demons, which Catholic VP JD Vance believes. The former is just more culturally accepted, and thus given the weight of dignity, but both are valid as far as a naive and literalist interpretation of the Bible is concerned, because demons exist in the Bible, but not aliens.
Either way, as much as the Pope is a silly man in a silly hat looking like a fucking wizard who is required to believe in supernatural nonsense while leading a corrupt den of pedophiles, he's also absolutely and objectively correct on this specific topic and it's clear he's put far more researched thought into his opinions on AI than 99% of people on HN. Hell, he even apologized for the Church's historical support of slavery, and many people here won't even concede that slavery was ever a problem.
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He is right. Why should you not listen to him?
He’s not even right about whether god exists, and that’s literally his job. Why should I assume he’s competent about anything else?
I'll listen to him when he has materially acknowledged the horrors the Church did and continues to do and dismantles the institutions responsible for those horrors.
In my way of life, the idea that people follow and care deeply about what some mullah has to say is very foreign. There's a mass of these people though. Their life must be so incredibly different than mine, it's just hard to fathom. I can't even imagine caring about the Pope or what they have to say. In my imagination the Pope is something out of roman times, it's just so weird this still exists today.
> mullah
Nope. Straight to hell. Do not pass ‘Go’, do not collect 200 virgins.
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because he is right and he is more for the people than the dumb shit you spew out of your mouth
Have you actually read it? It is not a boring take. It's actually the best thing I've read on moral philosophy in quite some time. I suggest you take the time to read it.
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Tu quoque is a fallacy my friend.
Do you think we are even talking in the same ballpark of wealth? Elon Musk is slated to be the first trillionaire
https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/debunking-the-myth-of-va...
And?
Its still true. The church gained massive amount of land in germany due to the fear they put into humans. Hell, purgatory etc.
The church owns 2% of land in germany. A f. church...
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Yes and people who use it for dominating industries and markets out of pure greed have the potential displace and disenfranchise large swaths of the population. The possibility to tier society into people with full access to AI and people with severely limited access binding them with significant permanent disadvantages.
You don't have to agree with everything to Pope stands for to understand the potential dark paths AI could lead humanity to.
> Yes and people who use [AI] for dominating industries and markets
Uh, who?
Smoke of course; but did you find fire?
Wouldn't your claim be consistent with the Pope's request? Why would he be unhappy about that?
100% of the knowledge was already available, and without the need to be logged in to an account to be tracked.
Cool. Any other celebrities with hot takes?
I’m not going to be contented until I can get Ja’s take on if LLMs even have the slightest potential to be an engine behind artificial general intelligence. Or that they definitely won’t be but the ideas that will come from layering and transformers will be vital for example.
said from someone lives in a palace
LLMs are some of the most fairly distributed technology in history. It's actual insane how equitable global access is, especially compared to the previous evolutions of the computer industry (mainframes, then desktop, and eventually mobile phones). People are just saying stuff to say stuff at this point.