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The Vatican published an interesting document on AI [1], which attributes a number of quotes to Pope Francis: * As Pope Francis noted, the machine “makes a tec
by jimmcslim 1y ago
The Vatican published an interesting document on AI [1], which attributes a number of quotes to Pope Francis:
* As Pope Francis noted, the machine “makes a technical choice among several possibilities based either on well-defined criteria or on statistical inferences. Human beings, however, not only choose, but in their hearts are capable of deciding."
* In light of this, the use of AI, as Pope Francis said, must be “accompanied by an ethic inspired by a vision of the common good, an ethic of freedom, responsibility, and fraternity, capable of fostering the full development of people in relation to others and to the whole of creation.”
* As Pope Francis observes, “in this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity.”
* As Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading”
[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_ddf_doc_20250128_antiqua-et-nova_en.html https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
- timeon 1y ago> * As Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading” Yes, LLMs are more about knowledge than intelligence. AK rather than AI.
- diggan 1y agoIllustrating perfectly how wide this conversation really is, as we don't even have consensus about what "knowledge" means :)
- moralestapia 1y agoWe do! https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/knowledge https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/knowledg...
- diggan 1y agoThe Cambridge Dictionary has its own internal consensus, true, but there are so many more ways people understand that specific word :) Wikipedia even has it's own page with some of the various definitions people use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_knowledge Then we have implicit/explicit knowledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_and_explicit_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_and_explicit_knowledg...) where some people assume one of them when they say "knowledge", others refer to the other. In fact, there is an entire scientific field to understanding what "knowledge" actually is/means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology So yeah, it isn't as simple as looking it up in a dictionary, unfortunately.
- moralestapia 1y ago[flagged]
- fwip 1y agoYes, but blue doesn't have a "Definitions of Blue" Wikipedia page. There are nuances to definitions of common words "what is blue, what is a bicycle, what is a dollar, really?", but the magnitude of variance in definition is not shared with something like "knowledge" or "intelligence." With these high-level concepts, most people are operating only on a "I know it when I see it" test (to reference the Supreme Court case on obscenity).
- moralestapia 1y ago>Yes, but blue doesn't have a "Definitions of Blue" Wikipedia page. Oh, I understand, so the criteria is to have a Wikipedia page like that? You know what's interesting, I couldn't find neither of these: * تعريفات المعرفة * 知識嘅定義 * Définitions de la connaissance * Definiciones de conocimiento Should we add "and it has to be written in English" as a requirement? I know this is arguing ad absurdum, but the point is, again, that if you choose to be that strict, you wouldn't even be able to communicate with other people, because your desired perfect 1:1 map of concepts among them doesn't even exist.
- throwup238 1y agoBecause everyone knows that millennia of epistemology can be summarized in a single incomplete sentence.
- abruzzi 1y agoI was always taught that knowledge was "justified true belief."
- glutamate 1y agoThe Gettier examples disagree!
- prometheus76 1y agoNow you get into the tricky waters of defining "justified" and "true". It's a circular definition that does not settle anything.
- ForOldHack 1y agoEinstien said it was what was left over when you forgot everything you leaned in school.
- slowmovintarget 1y agoKnowledge is well described (not necessarily explained, but described) in information theory. Intelligence, sentience, consciousness, even whether something is alive, are fuzzy concepts. Biology has a working definitions of "living organism" that includes a way to calculate likelihood that something is a living organism, but it still is probabilistic. Understanding is another concept that depends on philosophy of the mind as opposed to concrete physical processes.
- mock-possum 1y agoKnowledge, data, information, it’s all just awareness.
- shiandow 1y agoInteresting, I would consider knowledge to be something innately human in a way that solving problems isn't. Though intelligence is possibly even less well defined than knowledge, so it's hard to tell.
- lobsterthief 1y agoI believe knowledge is what you know based on facts and experience; wind sensors could gather data and store it in a database without a human touching it beyond initial setup. With enough data, and basic information about where the sensors are located, the computer becomes very knowledgeable about wind in a region without human intervention. I believe intelligence goes beyond that: knowing that such a system is a solution to an observed problem, architecting said system, using the output to solve a problem, analyzing the results, and deciding where to deploy additional systems. I think both examples above can be done by AI (if not now, then soon)—but only after being prompted carefully by a human. However, a generalized AI that can do all of the above for any problem in the known universe is likely very far off.
- cmrx64 1y agoif knowledge is a justified true belief, i’m down for saying LLMs have beliefs. to the extent that they are incorrigible, their faith may actually be superhuman.
- carabiner 1y agoNoam Chomsky just called it "plagiarism software."
- chpatrick 1y agoPretty disappointing from someone who spent his career modelling language and the cognition behind it.
- f30e3dfed1c9 1y agoIt is probably exactly because he spent a career considering the cognition behind language that he is not as impressed by LLMs as many others are. I'll readily admit to being expert in neither language and linguistics nor AI, but I am skeptical that anything going on inside an LLM is properly described as "cognition."
- drdaeman 1y agoI suspect the disappointment wasn't about whenever LLMs exhibit cognitive-like properties or not, but rather about the negative connotations tied to the word "plagiarism". Yea, they replicate patterns from their training data. So do we (ok, to be fair I have no idea about others but I believe I know that I do), and that's normal.
- permo-w 1y agodoes it really matter if it can be described as cognition or not? to me these models are useful for how effective they are, and that's literally it. the processes going on within them are extremely complex and at times very impressive, and whether some arbitrarily undefined word applies or not does not really matter. I think sometimes people forget that words are not maths or logic. when words come into language, no one sits down and makes sure that they're 100% logically and philosophically sound, they just start to be used, usually based on a feeling, and slowly gather and lose meaning over time. perhaps when dictionaries were first written there was some effort to do this, but for lots of words its probably impossible or incredibly difficult even now, never mind 200 years ago, if they could even be bothered in the first place. to give an example, a quite boring "philosophy question" that's bandied around, usually by children, is "if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?". the answer is that "sound" is a word without a commonly-accepted, logically-derived meaning, for the reasons given above. so if to you the word sound is something human, then the answer is no, but if to you a sound is not something human, then the answer is yes. there's nothing particularly interesting or complex about the thought experiment, it's just a poorly defined word
- lupusreal 1y agoI think this is wrong. For nearly a hundred years, popular media has been priming the public to understand that artificial intelligence is superficially intelligent but is very prone to malfunction in inhuman ways. All that media in which AIs go haywire used to make nerds roll their eyes, but resonated with the general public then and has proved prescient now.
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoNot even knowledge. Knowledge requires intentionality and belief as well as justification. LLMs don’t have any of these. We ought to avoid anthropomorphizing LLMs. It is muddle headed.
- bmicraft 1y agoI'd add that knowledge usually implies a claim to truth, while llms can only offer information with varying likelihood of being true.
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoThis is what intentionality is about. No intentionality, no truth. An LLM doesn't deal with propositions, and it is propositions that are the subjects of truth claims. LLMs produce strings of characters that, when interpreted by a human reader, can look like propositions and result in propositions in the human mind, and it is those propositions that have intentionality and truth value. But what the LLMs produce are not the direct expression of propositional content, only the recombination of a large number of expressions of propositional content authored by many human authors. People are projecting subjective convention onto the objective. The objective truth about LLMs is far poorer in substance than the conventional readings we give to what LLMs generate. There is a good deal of superstition and magical thinking that surrounds LLMs.
- exe34 1y ago> but in their hearts are capable of deciding I question both the organ and the action.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- slowmovintarget 1y agoQuestion, but perhaps, open your heart to recent research... There is neural tissue in and around the heart. There are studies showing personality changes and memory inculcation as a result of heart transplants. Recipients end up with memory and sometimes traits of the donor. Are we sure? No. But neither should you be. Question but be open to answers you may not expect.
- exe34 1y agoI'm not sure, but I'd bet £200 that within 10 years it'll still not be something that 99.9% of medical schools will teach. just because I'm not sure, it doesn't make both cases remotely equally likely.
- slowmovintarget 1y agohttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoHe’s speaking to a popular audience in a poetic fashion. No one believes a pump in your chest is the seat of intellgence, even if it may be involved in some extended and removed manner with the expression of intelligence. If Francis held Thomistic views on the subject, then even the brain, while needed for human intelligence, does not suffice for its operation, as functions like abstraction require the intellect, which cannot be entirely physical in operation since form cannot exist in matter without also instantiating the form, something by definition opposed to abstraction.
- chaorace 1y agoI rarely feel this way about someone of Pope Francis' age and social position, but I've genuinely admired Francis as a thinker. He was a bona fide Jesuit, through and through. The next pope has big shoes to fill.
- neves 1y agoNote that Antiqua et Nova was authored by the Church. With its profound philosophical tradition, the Church offers insights in this text that surpass anything ever written by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoIndeed. I’ll also add that many of his admirers as well as his detractors exaggerated his virtues, his merits, and his flaws. He was both the victim of a media and film industry all too eager to spin him into the “progressive pope” — never shying away from quoting him out of context to push an agenda — and the issuer of problematic and ambiguous documents and off-the-cuff remarks that only served to generate confusion. Intellectually, Benedict XVI and John Paul II were in a different league. As far as the Jesuits are concerned, I know that in the popular imagination, the Jesuits are imagined to be some kind of “progressive”, intellectually superior order, but historically, they were sort of the shock troops of the Church. They certainly have merits to their name. While they did become involved in education, they drew from the traditions of education in the Church. Education and scholarship, however, are not their charism. Compare that with the Dominicans, for example, who have teaching and education as their mission (Thomas Aquinas is probably their most famous member).
- andrepd 1y agoBut jesuits are historically linked to education and the sciences, this is a fact. I agree with the "ambiguous statements" though.
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
- moffkalast 1y ago* As Pope Francis observes, the wave function collapses.
- rpigab 1y agoRelated: Vatican hosts quantum science workshop to spread benefits of technology https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2023-12/vatican-conference-quantum-mechanics-antia-lamas-linares-amazon.html https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2023-12/vati...