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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 dev

by 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.
  - alabastervlog 1y ago
    Martin Gardner wrote introductions for editions of several of Chesterton’s books, which is a nice bonus if you’re the kind of dork who likes a good introduction (guilty). They’re on some of the Dover thrift editions, I think, and probably some others.
  - 90s_dev 1y ago
    A lot of my friends have said so, and to be fair I haven't read more than a few paragraphs that they quoted or linked me to, but honestly, he's just... not for me I guess.
- Cyphase 1y ago
  I was literally scrolling down this sub-thread thinking of posting "Chesterton of fence fame". The hive mind..
- asciimov 1y ago
  …and Father Brown.
- keybored 1y ago
  Yeah, of “I want to be conservative on this point, here’s a one-liner I can use” fame^W utility.
asveikau 1y ago
He really didn't say a lot there, so I am wondering if it merits an HN thread. Maybe over time it will be clearer what he means, or what he thinks on the topic. I don't feel like I can read a lot into that one piece. Edit: why the downvotes? It's true he said very little, and it will take more time for him to elaborate on a position. I guess you guys hallucinate more than a bad AI. As an example, I saw a commentary that the prior Pope Leo's Rerum novarum was not really that influential until a few decades after it was written. This stuff happens on long timescales.
bloaf 1y ago
So I think there are a few subtle things packed into the Pope's statement. First: A lot of Catholic morality derives from the postulate that man was specially made by God and "in God's image" which gives man an inherent, unique-among-all-creation dignity. Because of this, the church is very sensitive to anything which diminishes the "specialness" of man, as they fear it will undermine people's reasons for treating each other with respect. Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism (man wasn't at the center of the universe) and anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created) before coming around due to overwhelming evidence. The pope is concerned that AI falls into this category of "challenge to human dignity" because it gives the sense that man's cognitive abilities are not unique. Second: A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning. Indeed, if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding, its painfully clear that his conception of the "soul" is just his attempt at understanding metabolism without any solid physics or chemistry. Obviously no one today says that the soul is in charge of the "locomotion" of living things, but up until very recently the one last bastion of unexplained behavior where the religious could justify their belief in the soul was the intellect. AI is a direct assault on this final motte, as it is concrete evidence that many of the "intellectual" outputs of the soul could, at least in principle, have a naturalistic explanation. (There was plenty of evidence of the intellect being fully naturalistic prior to AI, but it wasn't the kind of irrefutable "here's a fully natural thing that does the thing you said natural things couldn't do" evidence). Aquinas: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm
- deadbabe 1y ago
  The idea of humans having no soul is terrifying, essentially we would all just be p-zombies, functioning entirely as an organic machine does, but with no real truly conscious experience.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Do you believe anything different? You touch the stove and yell in pain. Your boss stresses you out and you have a panic attack. You get a raise and feel happy. You get taxed and feel angry. These are all very much responses people have modeled in flies in lab setting.
90s_dev 1y ago
Well, the very recent Papal document that talked about this [1], did compare it to Revelation 13:15 [2] very explicitly [3]. I can't help but think he's piggybacking off that notion. [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... [2] "and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast so that the image of the beast should even speak, and to cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain." (Rev 13:15) [3] `Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work`
- 90s_dev 1y ago
  Re: the "beast" of Revelation For context, within Catholic understanding of St. John, any time he talks about the "beast" or "those who dwell upon the face of the earth", he's referring to people who's hearts and minds are centered on this illusory paradise, or as St. Paul calls it, "the flesh", and as St. John says, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, which all pass away". This is in sharp contrast to "those who dwell in heaven" or "an angel, that is, a man" which represents anyone who's heart and mind are of the "the spirit" in St. Paul's words, or rather, who shun "all that will pass away as the flower fades and the grass withers" as St. Peter puts it. So the "beast" here does not mean some mythical creature, but simply Adam and those who follow his principles and are made of "the dust of the earth", as opposed to Jesus, the New Adam, who is made of "stardust" as St. Paul compares.
drewcoo 1y ago
"New challenges?" "Like any tool?" Impedance mismatch! Also, what is an American pope doing using a word like "defence," which is spelled with an 's' here?
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  Its the official Vatican translation into English of an address in Italian to the College of Cardinals. For such translations, the Vatican favors British English. It's not an article written by the Pope in English.
90s_dev 1y ago
> it can be abused by those with wealth and power in a way that violates human dignity What does power have to do with violating dignity? Justice and labor I could understand, but a sense of dignity can be destroyed without absolutely any typical power or coersion. Unless of course by power in this case you don't mean political, but influential, for example by making sure through media that several generations of certain demographics grow up being taught that they're incompetent at best and intrinstically evil at worst. Then sure, I can see that, and have.
beloch 1y ago
Comparing it to the industrial revolution is pretty direct. The industrial revolution resulted in a huge leap forward in the quality of the average human life... eventually. It took a while to distribute the gains equally. Initially, it was a big step down and a huge increase in suffering for a lot of people. It took social advances to make technological advances work for (nearly) everybody. Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life. Getting ahead of the problem, from the social side, could reduce the short-term suffering.
- zpeti 1y ago
  > Initially, it was a big step down Is this really true though? Being an agricultural feudal society is much much worse than the dreamy view we have of farming these days, and almost everyone even today chooses to work in a factory rather than a farm if they have that choice, in china, Africa, everywhere. We have this image of gloomy coal powered cities being the worst place possible but in fact it was still better than the alternatives
  - zmgsabst 1y ago
    It was worse for people like the Luddites, who had artisanal jobs replaced by machinery. They were so angry about their fall in circumstance they revolted (and have been slandered by capitalists since).
  - achierius 1y ago
    They were not. In brief, we know this because of both individual accounts -- people were quite verbal about preferring the life of an independent peasant to that of the 'servant-like' factory worker -- and aggregate demographic trends, which show that peasants primarily moved into the cities during hard times, when famine and economic woes made their previous lifestyle impossible. Cities at the time were charnel houses -- even worse, I think, than the popular imagining of them today. The rate of death in London, as well as in other cities during the revolution, was so high that it needed a constant inward flow of immigrants to even maintain its population. Without the safer, more livable countryside to provide a continuous supply of fresh meat for the mills, those cities would have depopulated through a combination of plague, malnutrition, violence, and workplace injury.
petre 1y ago
Yup, he talks about stuff like DOGE's AI mass firing tool. https://newrepublic.com/post/191981/essential-jobs-will-doges-ai-mass-firing-tool-accidentally-cut https://newrepublic.com/post/191981/essential-jobs-will-doge...
Thorrez 1y ago
The 2 sentences before that are just as interesting. Basically Leo XIV said that this is the reason he chose the name. So it sounds like he sees this as potentially being the focus of his papacy.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

by jawns 1y ago

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.
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  Martin Gardner wrote introductions for editions of several of Chesterton’s books, which is a nice bonus if you’re the kind of dork who likes a good introduction (guilty). They’re on some of the Dover thrift editions, I think, and probably some others.
- 90s_dev 1y ago
  A lot of my friends have said so, and to be fair I haven't read more than a few paragraphs that they quoted or linked me to, but honestly, he's just... not for me I guess.
Cyphase 1y ago
I was literally scrolling down this sub-thread thinking of posting "Chesterton of fence fame". The hive mind..
asciimov 1y ago
…and Father Brown.
keybored 1y ago
Yeah, of “I want to be conservative on this point, here’s a one-liner I can use” fame^W utility.

asveikau 1y ago

He really didn't say a lot there, so I am wondering if it merits an HN thread. Maybe over time it will be clearer what he means, or what he thinks on the topic. I don't feel like I can read a lot into that one piece. Edit: why the downvotes? It's true he said very little, and it will take more time for him to elaborate on a position. I guess you guys hallucinate more than a bad AI. As an example, I saw a commentary that the prior Pope Leo's Rerum novarum was not really that influential until a few decades after it was written. This stuff happens on long timescales.

bloaf 1y ago

So I think there are a few subtle things packed into the Pope's statement. First: A lot of Catholic morality derives from the postulate that man was specially made by God and "in God's image" which gives man an inherent, unique-among-all-creation dignity. Because of this, the church is very sensitive to anything which diminishes the "specialness" of man, as they fear it will undermine people's reasons for treating each other with respect. Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism (man wasn't at the center of the universe) and anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created) before coming around due to overwhelming evidence. The pope is concerned that AI falls into this category of "challenge to human dignity" because it gives the sense that man's cognitive abilities are not unique. Second: A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning. Indeed, if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding, its painfully clear that his conception of the "soul" is just his attempt at understanding metabolism without any solid physics or chemistry. Obviously no one today says that the soul is in charge of the "locomotion" of living things, but up until very recently the one last bastion of unexplained behavior where the religious could justify their belief in the soul was the intellect. AI is a direct assault on this final motte, as it is concrete evidence that many of the "intellectual" outputs of the soul could, at least in principle, have a naturalistic explanation. (There was plenty of evidence of the intellect being fully naturalistic prior to AI, but it wasn't the kind of irrefutable "here's a fully natural thing that does the thing you said natural things couldn't do" evidence). Aquinas: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm

deadbabe 1y ago
The idea of humans having no soul is terrifying, essentially we would all just be p-zombies, functioning entirely as an organic machine does, but with no real truly conscious experience.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Do you believe anything different? You touch the stove and yell in pain. Your boss stresses you out and you have a panic attack. You get a raise and feel happy. You get taxed and feel angry. These are all very much responses people have modeled in flies in lab setting.

90s_dev 1y ago

Well, the very recent Papal document that talked about this [1], did compare it to Revelation 13:15 [2] very explicitly [3]. I can't help but think he's piggybacking off that notion. [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... [2] "and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast so that the image of the beast should even speak, and to cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain." (Rev 13:15) [3] `Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work`

90s_dev 1y ago
Re: the "beast" of Revelation For context, within Catholic understanding of St. John, any time he talks about the "beast" or "those who dwell upon the face of the earth", he's referring to people who's hearts and minds are centered on this illusory paradise, or as St. Paul calls it, "the flesh", and as St. John says, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, which all pass away". This is in sharp contrast to "those who dwell in heaven" or "an angel, that is, a man" which represents anyone who's heart and mind are of the "the spirit" in St. Paul's words, or rather, who shun "all that will pass away as the flower fades and the grass withers" as St. Peter puts it. So the "beast" here does not mean some mythical creature, but simply Adam and those who follow his principles and are made of "the dust of the earth", as opposed to Jesus, the New Adam, who is made of "stardust" as St. Paul compares.

drewcoo 1y ago

"New challenges?" "Like any tool?" Impedance mismatch! Also, what is an American pope doing using a word like "defence," which is spelled with an 's' here?

dragonwriter 1y ago
Its the official Vatican translation into English of an address in Italian to the College of Cardinals. For such translations, the Vatican favors British English. It's not an article written by the Pope in English.

90s_dev 1y ago

> it can be abused by those with wealth and power in a way that violates human dignity What does power have to do with violating dignity? Justice and labor I could understand, but a sense of dignity can be destroyed without absolutely any typical power or coersion. Unless of course by power in this case you don't mean political, but influential, for example by making sure through media that several generations of certain demographics grow up being taught that they're incompetent at best and intrinstically evil at worst. Then sure, I can see that, and have.

beloch 1y ago

Comparing it to the industrial revolution is pretty direct. The industrial revolution resulted in a huge leap forward in the quality of the average human life... eventually. It took a while to distribute the gains equally. Initially, it was a big step down and a huge increase in suffering for a lot of people. It took social advances to make technological advances work for (nearly) everybody. Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life. Getting ahead of the problem, from the social side, could reduce the short-term suffering.

zpeti 1y ago
> Initially, it was a big step down Is this really true though? Being an agricultural feudal society is much much worse than the dreamy view we have of farming these days, and almost everyone even today chooses to work in a factory rather than a farm if they have that choice, in china, Africa, everywhere. We have this image of gloomy coal powered cities being the worst place possible but in fact it was still better than the alternatives
- zmgsabst 1y ago
  It was worse for people like the Luddites, who had artisanal jobs replaced by machinery. They were so angry about their fall in circumstance they revolted (and have been slandered by capitalists since).
- achierius 1y ago
  They were not. In brief, we know this because of both individual accounts -- people were quite verbal about preferring the life of an independent peasant to that of the 'servant-like' factory worker -- and aggregate demographic trends, which show that peasants primarily moved into the cities during hard times, when famine and economic woes made their previous lifestyle impossible. Cities at the time were charnel houses -- even worse, I think, than the popular imagining of them today. The rate of death in London, as well as in other cities during the revolution, was so high that it needed a constant inward flow of immigrants to even maintain its population. Without the safer, more livable countryside to provide a continuous supply of fresh meat for the mills, those cities would have depopulated through a combination of plague, malnutrition, violence, and workplace injury.

petre 1y ago

Yup, he talks about stuff like DOGE's AI mass firing tool. https://newrepublic.com/post/191981/essential-jobs-will-doges-ai-mass-firing-tool-accidentally-cut https://newrepublic.com/post/191981/essential-jobs-will-doge...

Thorrez 1y ago

The 2 sentences before that are just as interesting. Basically Leo XIV said that this is the reason he chose the name. So it sounds like he sees this as potentially being the focus of his papacy.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]