16 ms·

Address of Pope Leo XIV to the College of Cardinals

256 points by 90s_dev 1y ago

andrewmutz 1y ago
If you want to understand the likely effects of AI on human material welfare, don't look to religious leaders or computer scientists for answers. Look to the people who study this topic professionally: economists.
- baggy_trough 1y ago
  Leo XIV is not merely talking about human material welfare.
- tbct 1y ago
  David Autor was recently interviewed by Martin Wolf on the effect of AI on jobs. The question of if its fair to compare a possible economic shock on knowledge work to the China shock in manufacturing. He had two responses to the question: 1. The geographic dispersal of knowledge work should allow retraining of displaced workers, in opposition to the loss of manufacturing jobs which centre around single employer towns. 2. The china shock resulted in a sudden drop in prices, whereas AI would lead to efficiency gains. The second point, to me, feels more pertinent, and mixed with the first could allow for a freeing up of labour, ideally into higher value add work. I think the time horizon is also worth speaking about here, as most economists will be thinking in 5-10 years where we can expect substantial improvements in models, but barring new model architecutre, it seems doubtful that we'll see some sort of emergent intelligence from LLMs. Post-ASI, knowledge labour necessarily has zero value, at which point the challenge is to design an equitable society. The full interview is fairly interesting in itself: https://www.ft.com/content/4e260abd-2528-4d34-8fa4-a21eabfd6db9 https://www.ft.com/content/4e260abd-2528-4d34-8fa4-a21eabfd6...
- testfrequency 1y ago
  A bit reckless to put full faith in economists who will inherently have their own separate set of biases. I would like to also think that a religious figure like the Pope interacts with and understands humans on a more personal level than any economist could. I also just want to make clear that I am atheist.
- turing_complete 1y ago
  Economists don't study human dignity or justice which the Pope was talking about.
  - vFunct 1y ago
    They literally do.
    - kulahan 1y ago
      They explicitly don’t. Money and dignity are in no way related. They may, on occasion, study how people will deprive themselves of dignity for money, but of course this is not within a hundred miles of the primary interest of the field. It is essentially macro-psychology. It is trying to remove identification of the individual to find generic patterns.
      - vFunct 1y ago
        Economics isn’t just “money”. Economists study things like stripper names to abortion effects on crime. Go ahead and read the book Freakonomics.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        kulahan 1y ago
        Economics and money are not the same thing. This is why I specifically pointed out that they’re just mediocre psychologists.
        _m_p 1y ago
        Which elements of this book haven't been totally debunked?
        vFunct 1y ago
        Yah I heard about people trying to debunk it over the years, with zero effect.
- _m_p 1y ago
  If economists are so smart, why aren't they rich?
  - graevy 1y ago
    diminishing to negative marginal returns to wealth past ~80k salary (famous economic study)
vFunct 1y ago
Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's benefit. It's just what people do. They don't sit around doing nothing because AI took their job- they'll figure out something else, to fill a new hole in the economy. Moore's law applies to people's productivity as well, not just transistors on a chip.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's benefit. It's just what people do. It's not “just what people do” in some kind of simple, automatic, no-conscious-action-required sense, it’s a difficult process that often requires violent conflict between those empowered by the new development and those they exploit (that was certainly the case after the Industrial Revolution), a major part of which is people looking for and publicly calling out the problems.
  - delusional 1y ago
    It's like 80 years happen and people forget that we go to war in our own countries as well. Conflict is not just something that happens in the middle-east. The stability has to be cherished and nurtured.
  - vFunct 1y ago
    Yah the Industrial Revolution wasn't a direct cause of any war. There are zero wars that are a result of economic efficiency. And, no, colonialism isn't economic efficiency. Economic efficiency is a very specific thing. It doesn't mean "whatever unfair thing I don't like".
    - achierius 1y ago
      Really? None of the British invasions of the African interior would have been possible without industrialized. "We've got the Maxim gun and they've..." etc. People died, societies were conquered -- you might not consider those to qualify as wars, but the people conquered certainly did.
Jtsummers 1y ago
The submission title comes from one sentence near the end, here's the paragraph containing it: > Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour. The encyclical he references, Rerum Novarum, can be found here [0] and is much more interesting since it's more than just a single sentence. [0] https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docum...
- WillAdams 1y ago
  Another on it is: 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... which was discussed here at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877709
- cgio 1y ago
  I hope this Pope does not go with a similar approach. This encyclical, in the face of challenges of the Industrial Revolution, focuses almost explicitly on how socialism is unnatural (note that he does not even try to call it unchristian). The argumentation hinges on an appeal to emotion with the iconography of the poor father who worked years for a small parcel of land. The solution proposed is let the rich get richer, let’s just ask them to be fair, with some intervention from the church, which is ipse dixit just to protect a convenient and isolated principle of natural order.
  - TheFreim 1y ago
    > The solution proposed is let the rich get richer, let’s just ask them to be fair... This is not accurate. Leo XIII explicitly calls for state action to protect the rights and interests of the working man. Leo says that the public authority—i.e. the state—has a duty to "prevent [the violation of rights] and to punish injury" (Rerum novarum 37). He proceeds to make note that the poor—unlike the rich, who have means of shielding themselves due to their wealth—depend upon the state to a higher degree and therefore should be "specially cared for and protected by the government". Furthermore, Leo states that the working man has, "has interests in which he should be protected by the State," namely their spiritual and physical well-being (Rerum novarum 40). In the following sections he argues for restrictions to be put in place to ensure that workers have appropriate time for rest in accordance with their work. Suffice it to say, Pope Leo XIII absolutely does not envision a world where the wealthy are merely "just ask" for fairness. He certainly places limitations on proper government action in his refutation of socialism, but it is completely wrong to portray this as a rejection of state protection of workers in its entirety (this becomes much more obvious when reading his work in line with prior teachings pertaining to state action). Having re-read Rerum Novarum within the last week, what you are saying is reductive to the point of not accurately portraying the contents of the encyclical. I would encourage you and others to (re)read the encyclical with an eye towards getting a more full and accurate understanding.
jawns 1y ago
The relevant quote: > In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor. I don't think he's suggesting that AI is inherently bad, but that (like any tool) it can be abused by those with wealth and power in a way that violates human dignity. In fact, one of the problems the previous Pope Leo warned about in "Rerum Novarum" was not just the intentional abuse of power through technological advances but the unintentional negative consequences of treating industry as a good in itself, rather than a domain that is in service to human interests. For those who are interested in how this social teaching informed economic systems, check out the concept of distributism, popularized by Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton.
- lokar 1y ago
  > … Chesterton Of fence fame
  - turing_complete 1y ago
    For those who don't know Chesterton: He is one of the most insightful, most entertaining writers you will ever read.
    - drewcoo 1y ago
      Disagree. He was a smug, utterly conservative Catholic who wallowed in his biases, an authoritarian and an anti-semite.
      - Cyphase 1y ago
        Can you provide references for these claims?
      - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
        He could be all of those things and still be an entertaining writer. They aren't exclusive.
BaculumMeumEst 1y ago
[flagged]
- cwmoore 1y ago
  If Haile Salasie I did not exist, Murda Inc. would be forced to invent him.
OJFord 1y ago
Are any TLDs in use in their own right? I ask because .va is presumably for Vatican, so 'vatican.va' is kind of redundant, they could just use 'va' right? (You might need an 'http:// http://' or a fully-qualifying '.' suffix in a browser, which I suppose is an argument against doing it, but still.)
- delusional 1y ago
  At least for a while dk-hostmaster, the national registry in Denmark was using http://dk http://dk as (one of) their domains. Nowadays they're called "punktum dk" (literally "dot dk") and have dropped their TLD redirect. I think it's generally frowned upon by ICANN nowadays.
  - tux3 1y ago
    It's indeed forbidden by ICANN, so none of the myriad of vanity TLDs can do it.. ccTLDs could, if they wanted to go against the grain, but I'm not aware whether anyone still does.
    - jsheard 1y ago
      .uz (Uzbekistan) resolves by itself, but the server it points to has an invalid cert so you have to click past an error to see it. Still, it's technically a working naked TLD. https://uz./ https://uz./
      - sebmellen 1y ago
        Amazing that that’s possible.
- ronsor 1y ago
  You could always use `www.va` or `about.va`.
  - jen729w 1y ago
    `the.va`?
marc_abonce 1y ago
It's worth mentioning that earlier this year the Vatican published a far longer document about AI. It's a very long read, but it's actually very interesting and worth reading. Antiqua et Nova. Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence: 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... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877709
- ks2048 1y ago
  I see they publish this in five languages (de,en,es,fr,it). I'm slightly bummed they don't have a Latin version. (It looks like the homepage, https://www.vatican.va https://www.vatican.va, has a Latin option, but maybe the content there is limited).
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > I see they publish this in five languages (de,en,es,fr,it). I'm slightly bummed they don't have a Latin version The Vatican doesn't tend to translate current documents or speeches into Latin, though certain kinds of documents are, by tradition, issued originally and authoritatively in Latin and those are translated into other languages. This speech was given in Italian, so...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
markus_zhang 1y ago
"The church tries to be more relevant." "You meant, more relevant to God?" "No, in sociological terms." YPM is a gold mine.
pharos92 1y ago
I took a modern european history paper in college, and the biggest thing I took away was the catholic church's initial opposition to anything that changes in the social sphere. Within a fear years it always adapts it into its power structure and life continues.
lofaszvanitt 1y ago
Lots of unemployed and disillusioned people meaning lots of extra followers. This will be an interesting, long term fight against evil.
asasidh 1y ago
This is ironic at so many levels.
cratermoon 1y ago
See also ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, 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...
FilosofumRex 1y ago
"in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses". the wisdom of Pope Leo XIII Rerum Novarum appears as relevant today as it was in 1891: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum
greatgib 1y ago
Sadly, HN top becomes more and more occupied with general news instead of content relevant to the hacker mind. I guess that people give like to mainstream news when they support the background topic instead of liking what is worth a read on topic or what is an unusual curious gem. Here is probably the sad effect of not having a general news equivalent or that good news reader and aggregators have quite disappeared. Maybe also because Google news sucks more and more everyday relying on AI to "feed" us content.
- xrhobo 1y ago
  I think the issue is it is a like an old forum but without an "off topic" section. "off topic" with a group of like minded people around a central theme was always something I enjoyed about the old internet forum days. The current configuration might be best though.A purely hacker news off topic over time would just become a completely off topic discussion.
- bendigedig 1y ago
  We are entering a time of great uncertainty and change. To me it is natural that people wish to discuss it here.
- thinkingemote 1y ago
  We can flag it if we dont want to see it and I do for many general news items. Personally I don't mind this one as it's directed towards technology and AI.
graemep 1y ago
I think discussion on HN is far too focused on "AI". It gets a mention, but I think it is a mistake to think it is the entire concern of "another industrial revolution". There is a lot more technological change happening, or that has recently happened than just LLMs, and we have a lot of economic change on top of it. I think the most interesting thing is that he has specially mentioned Rerum Novarum as a reason for choosing the name Leo. A few interesting excerpts from Rerum Novarum in the context of current society. "3. In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself. " "42. If we turn not to things external and material, the first thing of all to secure is to save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making. " "If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice." " 45. Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. "
thinkingemote 1y ago
The Church views the person as primary, the most important, rather than the tools and applications of these tools. They see that technology and the use of technology forms people, it can literally change societies and people. One example would be asking your buddies for a lift to the airport. Now we use an app. And then afterwards a year or two even thinking about asking your friends for a lift, or offering your friends to drive them is inappropriate and wrong. That reduces the connections between people, it reduces love. A positive example would be the web2.0 social network, forums, message boards, communication increase. An explicit example is this submission, it's on the Vatican's website! A neutral example might be the medicine industry - new weight loss drugs improve the health of at risk people but at the cost of making them dependent on the industry and reducing personal agency in their change. There are 2 main factors that the Church thinks wrt tech 1. Tools and technologies are not amoral, they have a moral component; against the argument of "this tech is innocent, it's how you use it". and 2. What we do, what we pay attention to, forms us. Our tools shape ourselves and the societies that we make us. It's not anti tech, anti science or reactionary, it's pro person.
- mlrtime 1y ago
  For the Seinfeld fans, there is a whole episode on this. For a man to ask another man for a ride to the airport, it's like asking them out on a date.
  - dleary 1y ago
    You misremember… That episode is about helping someone move, not giving them a ride to the airport.
    - thinkingemote 1y ago
      I remember asking some school friends to help me move and I would buy them beers in the pub afterwards. Turns out I could have spent less hiring a semi-pro "man with a van" than buying a group of thirsty young men beer for the night. Not sure how that ties in with my original comment but I found the memory funny!
ygmelnikova 1y ago
[dead]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

256 points by 90s_dev 1y ago

If you want to understand the likely effects of AI on human material welfare, don't look to religious leaders or computer scientists for answers. Look to the people who study this topic professionally: economists.

baggy_trough 1y ago
Leo XIV is not merely talking about human material welfare.
tbct 1y ago
David Autor was recently interviewed by Martin Wolf on the effect of AI on jobs. The question of if its fair to compare a possible economic shock on knowledge work to the China shock in manufacturing. He had two responses to the question: 1. The geographic dispersal of knowledge work should allow retraining of displaced workers, in opposition to the loss of manufacturing jobs which centre around single employer towns. 2. The china shock resulted in a sudden drop in prices, whereas AI would lead to efficiency gains. The second point, to me, feels more pertinent, and mixed with the first could allow for a freeing up of labour, ideally into higher value add work. I think the time horizon is also worth speaking about here, as most economists will be thinking in 5-10 years where we can expect substantial improvements in models, but barring new model architecutre, it seems doubtful that we'll see some sort of emergent intelligence from LLMs. Post-ASI, knowledge labour necessarily has zero value, at which point the challenge is to design an equitable society. The full interview is fairly interesting in itself: https://www.ft.com/content/4e260abd-2528-4d34-8fa4-a21eabfd6db9 https://www.ft.com/content/4e260abd-2528-4d34-8fa4-a21eabfd6...
testfrequency 1y ago
A bit reckless to put full faith in economists who will inherently have their own separate set of biases. I would like to also think that a religious figure like the Pope interacts with and understands humans on a more personal level than any economist could. I also just want to make clear that I am atheist.
turing_complete 1y ago
Economists don't study human dignity or justice which the Pope was talking about.
- vFunct 1y ago
  They literally do.
  - kulahan 1y ago
    They explicitly don’t. Money and dignity are in no way related. They may, on occasion, study how people will deprive themselves of dignity for money, but of course this is not within a hundred miles of the primary interest of the field. It is essentially macro-psychology. It is trying to remove identification of the individual to find generic patterns.
    - vFunct 1y ago
      Economics isn’t just “money”. Economists study things like stripper names to abortion effects on crime. Go ahead and read the book Freakonomics.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - kulahan 1y ago
        Economics and money are not the same thing. This is why I specifically pointed out that they’re just mediocre psychologists.
      - _m_p 1y ago
        Which elements of this book haven't been totally debunked?
        vFunct 1y ago
        Yah I heard about people trying to debunk it over the years, with zero effect.
_m_p 1y ago
If economists are so smart, why aren't they rich?
- graevy 1y ago
  diminishing to negative marginal returns to wealth past ~80k salary (famous economic study)

vFunct 1y ago

Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's benefit. It's just what people do. They don't sit around doing nothing because AI took their job- they'll figure out something else, to fill a new hole in the economy. Moore's law applies to people's productivity as well, not just transistors on a chip.

dragonwriter 1y ago
> Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's benefit. It's just what people do. It's not “just what people do” in some kind of simple, automatic, no-conscious-action-required sense, it’s a difficult process that often requires violent conflict between those empowered by the new development and those they exploit (that was certainly the case after the Industrial Revolution), a major part of which is people looking for and publicly calling out the problems.
- delusional 1y ago
  It's like 80 years happen and people forget that we go to war in our own countries as well. Conflict is not just something that happens in the middle-east. The stability has to be cherished and nurtured.
- vFunct 1y ago
  Yah the Industrial Revolution wasn't a direct cause of any war. There are zero wars that are a result of economic efficiency. And, no, colonialism isn't economic efficiency. Economic efficiency is a very specific thing. It doesn't mean "whatever unfair thing I don't like".
  - achierius 1y ago
    Really? None of the British invasions of the African interior would have been possible without industrialized. "We've got the Maxim gun and they've..." etc. People died, societies were conquered -- you might not consider those to qualify as wars, but the people conquered certainly did.

Jtsummers 1y ago

The submission title comes from one sentence near the end, here's the paragraph containing it: > Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour. The encyclical he references, Rerum Novarum, can be found here [0] and is much more interesting since it's more than just a single sentence. [0] https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docum...

WillAdams 1y ago
Another on it is: 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... which was discussed here at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877709
cgio 1y ago
I hope this Pope does not go with a similar approach. This encyclical, in the face of challenges of the Industrial Revolution, focuses almost explicitly on how socialism is unnatural (note that he does not even try to call it unchristian). The argumentation hinges on an appeal to emotion with the iconography of the poor father who worked years for a small parcel of land. The solution proposed is let the rich get richer, let’s just ask them to be fair, with some intervention from the church, which is ipse dixit just to protect a convenient and isolated principle of natural order.
- TheFreim 1y ago
  > The solution proposed is let the rich get richer, let’s just ask them to be fair... This is not accurate. Leo XIII explicitly calls for state action to protect the rights and interests of the working man. Leo says that the public authority—i.e. the state—has a duty to "prevent [the violation of rights] and to punish injury" (Rerum novarum 37). He proceeds to make note that the poor—unlike the rich, who have means of shielding themselves due to their wealth—depend upon the state to a higher degree and therefore should be "specially cared for and protected by the government". Furthermore, Leo states that the working man has, "has interests in which he should be protected by the State," namely their spiritual and physical well-being (Rerum novarum 40). In the following sections he argues for restrictions to be put in place to ensure that workers have appropriate time for rest in accordance with their work. Suffice it to say, Pope Leo XIII absolutely does not envision a world where the wealthy are merely "just ask" for fairness. He certainly places limitations on proper government action in his refutation of socialism, but it is completely wrong to portray this as a rejection of state protection of workers in its entirety (this becomes much more obvious when reading his work in line with prior teachings pertaining to state action). Having re-read Rerum Novarum within the last week, what you are saying is reductive to the point of not accurately portraying the contents of the encyclical. I would encourage you and others to (re)read the encyclical with an eye towards getting a more full and accurate understanding.

jawns 1y ago

The relevant quote: > In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor. I don't think he's suggesting that AI is inherently bad, but that (like any tool) it can be abused by those with wealth and power in a way that violates human dignity. In fact, one of the problems the previous Pope Leo warned about in "Rerum Novarum" was not just the intentional abuse of power through technological advances but the unintentional negative consequences of treating industry as a good in itself, rather than a domain that is in service to human interests. For those who are interested in how this social teaching informed economic systems, check out the concept of distributism, popularized by Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton.

lokar 1y ago
> … Chesterton Of fence fame
- turing_complete 1y ago
  For those who don't know Chesterton: He is one of the most insightful, most entertaining writers you will ever read.
  - drewcoo 1y ago
    Disagree. He was a smug, utterly conservative Catholic who wallowed in his biases, an authoritarian and an anti-semite.
    - Cyphase 1y ago
      Can you provide references for these claims?
    - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
      He could be all of those things and still be an entertaining writer. They aren't exclusive.

BaculumMeumEst 1y ago

[flagged]

cwmoore 1y ago
If Haile Salasie I did not exist, Murda Inc. would be forced to invent him.

OJFord 1y ago

Are any TLDs in use in their own right? I ask because .va is presumably for Vatican, so 'vatican.va' is kind of redundant, they could just use 'va' right? (You might need an 'http:// http://' or a fully-qualifying '.' suffix in a browser, which I suppose is an argument against doing it, but still.)

delusional 1y ago
At least for a while dk-hostmaster, the national registry in Denmark was using http://dk http://dk as (one of) their domains. Nowadays they're called "punktum dk" (literally "dot dk") and have dropped their TLD redirect. I think it's generally frowned upon by ICANN nowadays.
- tux3 1y ago
  It's indeed forbidden by ICANN, so none of the myriad of vanity TLDs can do it.. ccTLDs could, if they wanted to go against the grain, but I'm not aware whether anyone still does.
  - jsheard 1y ago
    .uz (Uzbekistan) resolves by itself, but the server it points to has an invalid cert so you have to click past an error to see it. Still, it's technically a working naked TLD. https://uz./ https://uz./
    - sebmellen 1y ago
      Amazing that that’s possible.
ronsor 1y ago
You could always use `www.va` or `about.va`.
- jen729w 1y ago
  `the.va`?

marc_abonce 1y ago

It's worth mentioning that earlier this year the Vatican published a far longer document about AI. It's a very long read, but it's actually very interesting and worth reading. Antiqua et Nova. Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence: 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... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877709

ks2048 1y ago
I see they publish this in five languages (de,en,es,fr,it). I'm slightly bummed they don't have a Latin version. (It looks like the homepage, https://www.vatican.va https://www.vatican.va, has a Latin option, but maybe the content there is limited).
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > I see they publish this in five languages (de,en,es,fr,it). I'm slightly bummed they don't have a Latin version The Vatican doesn't tend to translate current documents or speeches into Latin, though certain kinds of documents are, by tradition, issued originally and authoritatively in Latin and those are translated into other languages. This speech was given in Italian, so...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

markus_zhang 1y ago

"The church tries to be more relevant." "You meant, more relevant to God?" "No, in sociological terms." YPM is a gold mine.

pharos92 1y ago

I took a modern european history paper in college, and the biggest thing I took away was the catholic church's initial opposition to anything that changes in the social sphere. Within a fear years it always adapts it into its power structure and life continues.

lofaszvanitt 1y ago

Lots of unemployed and disillusioned people meaning lots of extra followers. This will be an interesting, long term fight against evil.

asasidh 1y ago

This is ironic at so many levels.

cratermoon 1y ago

See also ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, 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...

FilosofumRex 1y ago

"in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses". the wisdom of Pope Leo XIII Rerum Novarum appears as relevant today as it was in 1891: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum

greatgib 1y ago

Sadly, HN top becomes more and more occupied with general news instead of content relevant to the hacker mind. I guess that people give like to mainstream news when they support the background topic instead of liking what is worth a read on topic or what is an unusual curious gem. Here is probably the sad effect of not having a general news equivalent or that good news reader and aggregators have quite disappeared. Maybe also because Google news sucks more and more everyday relying on AI to "feed" us content.

xrhobo 1y ago
I think the issue is it is a like an old forum but without an "off topic" section. "off topic" with a group of like minded people around a central theme was always something I enjoyed about the old internet forum days. The current configuration might be best though.A purely hacker news off topic over time would just become a completely off topic discussion.
bendigedig 1y ago
We are entering a time of great uncertainty and change. To me it is natural that people wish to discuss it here.
thinkingemote 1y ago
We can flag it if we dont want to see it and I do for many general news items. Personally I don't mind this one as it's directed towards technology and AI.

graemep 1y ago

I think discussion on HN is far too focused on "AI". It gets a mention, but I think it is a mistake to think it is the entire concern of "another industrial revolution". There is a lot more technological change happening, or that has recently happened than just LLMs, and we have a lot of economic change on top of it. I think the most interesting thing is that he has specially mentioned Rerum Novarum as a reason for choosing the name Leo. A few interesting excerpts from Rerum Novarum in the context of current society. "3. In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself. " "42. If we turn not to things external and material, the first thing of all to secure is to save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money-making. " "If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice." " 45. Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. "

thinkingemote 1y ago

The Church views the person as primary, the most important, rather than the tools and applications of these tools. They see that technology and the use of technology forms people, it can literally change societies and people. One example would be asking your buddies for a lift to the airport. Now we use an app. And then afterwards a year or two even thinking about asking your friends for a lift, or offering your friends to drive them is inappropriate and wrong. That reduces the connections between people, it reduces love. A positive example would be the web2.0 social network, forums, message boards, communication increase. An explicit example is this submission, it's on the Vatican's website! A neutral example might be the medicine industry - new weight loss drugs improve the health of at risk people but at the cost of making them dependent on the industry and reducing personal agency in their change. There are 2 main factors that the Church thinks wrt tech 1. Tools and technologies are not amoral, they have a moral component; against the argument of "this tech is innocent, it's how you use it". and 2. What we do, what we pay attention to, forms us. Our tools shape ourselves and the societies that we make us. It's not anti tech, anti science or reactionary, it's pro person.

mlrtime 1y ago
For the Seinfeld fans, there is a whole episode on this. For a man to ask another man for a ride to the airport, it's like asking them out on a date.
- dleary 1y ago
  You misremember… That episode is about helping someone move, not giving them a ride to the airport.
  - thinkingemote 1y ago
    I remember asking some school friends to help me move and I would buy them beers in the pub afterwards. Turns out I could have spent less hiring a semi-pro "man with a van" than buying a group of thirsty young men beer for the night. Not sure how that ties in with my original comment but I found the memory funny!

ygmelnikova 1y ago

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deleted 1y ago

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