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I'm an atheist, but most of what I have heard from popes in recent years seems like sound and possibly needed advice. Also, even though I feel AI and robotics

by ilaksh 5mo ago

I'm an atheist, but most of what I have heard from popes in recent years seems like sound and possibly needed advice. Also, even though I feel AI and robotics are very important for progressing humanity, I think that much of the world has long since lost a proper sense of intrinsic human value. It's really gone from overt exploitation to slightly more mild exploitation where we pretend the system is really merit based. And as AI and robotics remove the need for human labor, I hope that someone like the pope can convince people that we should value human beings inherently and more fairly. Inexpensive labor and intelligence should make this feasible. I hope the speech isn't something dumb like "remember only humans have souls" because I think that's really premature and pretty obvious that AIs are not people at this point. The really convincing and somewhat deeper simulations of humans are probably only a few years down the line though. Which comes back to the Rovelli dualism article that was on the front page before. I think we should not be in a hurry to try to duplicate humans in depth (such as imitating emotions, pain, stream of consciousness, self-preservation, etc). It's just completely unnecessary to go that far to get useful AI, and obviously unethical to subject a real human emulation to slavery.

orochimaaru 5mo ago
Human value has rarely existed. Pre-industrial world didn't have much human value. Your were a lord or a serf. There was not much in between. A lord's life had value, a serf's value was nothing. Post-industrial world needed human capital. Hence, the need for human value. If you notice most of this "need" has arisen out of then need for industrial expansion. Post-AI will be interesting. Will we go back to pre-industrial or get something better.
- mrcwinn 5mo ago
  I also wonder if it’s just harder to rule a much larger population in the modern world than in those times. Any jackass can show up and say that he was chosen to lead by some higher power. But you must still convince enough people that that is the case or at least have a military large enough that you can control.
- atq2119 5mo ago
  I don't think this is factually accurate. What it really boils down is a question of scale of societies. Most of us humans inherently value each other. There are exceptions, and small communities can get nasty. But for the most part, small human communities tend to be supportive and valuing each other. This really only stops being the case when you get large-scale societies that allow humans to view others through an overly abstract lens. Combine that with an unchecked accumulation of power, and you have the potential for those in power to view the rest as without value.
  - HDBaseT 5mo ago
    I agree with you. I recently watched a bunch of videos from a YouTuber 'Mike Okay' and he visits some random, obscure and non-standard countries to travel. Most of the people he encounters are super friendly, welcoming and willing to bend over backwards to help him out. It's genuine human connection and willingness. He will speak to people from every possible background, including people in the Taliban and honestly at the end of the day, we're all humans and most people respect that. Things have become blurred with social media, digital life, closed and private nature of the modern world but if you take a step back, you can realize humans are typically, very helpful, friendly and unique characters.
- GalaxyNova 5mo ago
  Serfs were of value to the lord, and they were usually not treated that badly compared to many workplaces today.
  - bombcar 5mo ago
    Arguably from very early on the Church has been at the forefront of "Serfs are of value to the Lord" if you will (St Lawrence, et al). So far none of the AI stuff I've seen has really been about "the computer has no soul" and more around the danger that dehumanization can bring (which has been a refrain since the previous Leo, mind you).
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- swatcoder 5mo ago
  It's telling how blithely you're missing the point of what the pope(s) mean by human value. Their intended meaning is that far gone from modern consciousness, even among people who meant to champion some kind of human value themselves. They're not talking about the economic value of humans or even the psychological value of humans as subjects with experiences and a right to liberty or care or something. The idea they're trying to recall and reinvigorate is a sense of human value that transcends that temporal, material noise altogether and that is truly universal. It's the human value that welcomed slaves, prostitutes, wretches, merchants and kings as peers in something grander than economy or state or lineage or tribe or creed. Now, you can make a well-developed case that that's hogwash and that the human value that matters is the one that alleviates suffering or grants liberty or even the one that grants material reward for some virtue or bloodline or whatever, but that's not what these guys are talking about. They mean a human nature that is always there and always worthy, just as much when it's experiencing temporal poverty/suffering/abuse as when it's basking in temporal wealth/success/freedom. The idea is that Christian or not, Catholic or not, it does good for everyone to think of human value that way and the critique -- for a long time now -- is that for all the flash and glimmer of technology and its material benefits, it sometimes makes it very very easy to forget.
  - orochimaaru 5mo ago
    What rot. Tell that to native Americans who were forcibly converted and enslaved. Tell that to people in the inquisition. Tell that to peoples in India and the east that were forcibly converted so that the pope could fill his coffers. Tell that to all the children murdered in Christian and catholic schools. Christianity and Catholicism doesn’t fool me. If you’ve ever wanted to see the mythical devil - look to those preaching and they legacy of hate that they carry.
    - swatcoder 5mo ago
      There's really no argument against the institutional and historical hypocisy. There's no shortage of people and groups that have done or currently do horrible violence against others, sometimes even in the name of these ideas. But I don't know if that takes away from the idea itself and what fruitful counterpoint it might play in modern discourse.
- pryce 5mo ago
  If my definition of 'value' was something that was totally contingent on both post-industrial society and an ultracapitalist approach to production, and it made me deduce that human being's lives over thousands of years or in other societies were worth "nothing", I think I would interpret this as a 'reductio-ad-absurdum'. That is, by deducing an absurd conclusion from the premise, that makes a strong argument that my definition of 'value' must be so narrow as to be effectively broken. I would respond by looking for a different, more wide definition of value, among the various ones that have been proposed.
  - westmeal 5mo ago
    Then you wouldn't like Ayn Rands novels.
- wahern 5mo ago
  The concept of fundamental human rights is certainly new, but our notion of intrinsic human value (and intrinsic value of other life and things) arises from our empathy, which at least in its degree is perhaps our most important defining trait as a species. (Our empathy may have been a prerequisite for the emergence of our intelligence.) Conflating the two is why some people have trouble understanding why religions like Buddhism and Christianity seemed to tolerate so much inequality and violence; or more generally just assumed people writ large were historically more callous and uncaring than today. Arguably one of the downsides, though, to a focus on rights vs intrinsic value is that rights are typically couched in materialist terms. Most of the time that's probably for the better, but sometimes maybe not.
  - IAmBroom 5mo ago
    Dogs show empathy towards not only dogs and humans, but even baby birds and rabbits - animals which one would expect to be viewed as pure caloric units, sans empathy. Whales show empathy towards their young, and towards humans. Male "loner" lions have been known to show empathic protection toward human and antelope young in the bush. It's increasingly hard to define a clear difference between Humans and "mere Animals"; empathy is emphatically not a clear difference. To date, fear of vacuum cleaners may well be the only known difference.
    - wahern 5mo ago
      Sure, just like many other animals exhibit analytical intelligence and complex communication. The seeds are there. The distinction is by degree, but the gap is pretty wide in all three cases. No other species has been shown to systematically display non-kin, non-mating-system altruism (for which empathy is probably an integral component). It seems likely you need systematic non-kin altruism to achieve the ubiquitous, complex cooperation humans exhibit. And that complex cooperation is probably a prerequisite to make our degree of intelligence evolutionarily profitable. Otherwise human-level intelligence should be more common than our immediate lineage. (Some cousin species may very well have been smarter or more cooperative than us; relatively speaking it could be homo sapiens found a more effective equilibrium. Nonetheless our immediate lineage seems to be the only one to break through the selfish gene bottleneck that restricts other species along these axes.)
- watwut 5mo ago
  People really should stop making up history from childrens books. People were valuing people to various degrees and tool seriously the human value question in every single period we have records from. And varrying degrees apply to post-industrial too - your human value did not meant much in very much industrial third reich fans hands.
  - psychoslave 5mo ago
    >And varrying degrees apply to post-industrial too - your human value did not meant much in very much industrial third reich fans hands. Ho, certainly they did. The scope of the ethics is then windowed on who’s deemed human, and who can be slaughtered like an animal for the glory of the great civilization one is part of. Nothing specific to nazis, look at Rwandan genocide. Hutu extremists systematically referred to Tutsis as "cockroaches" and "snakes" in propaganda. Or even closer on a timeline perspective, Israeli leaders and media have used terms like "human animals" and described Gaza as a "city of evil" or a "nation of barbarians," while some Palestinian factions have used similar language against Israelis. Dehumanizing "others" is the classic first step to get rid of any morale/ethical concern when interacting with them.
    - watwut 5mo ago
      Nazi seen cruelty, violence and lack of empathy as manliness and virtue. Openly and specifically. You as a young man wanting to prove yourself would be beating and killing people, knowing they are humans and that violence toward humans is what made you manly in your peer group. They were not saying "it does not count". They were saying "I am great for doing it". > The scope of the ethics is then windowed on who’s deemed human, and who can be slaughtered like an animal for the glory of the great civilization one is part of. It was not a disagreement about who is human. Nazi did not killed just Jews and foreigners. They killed and tortured plenty of fellow Aryans, because those were their political opponents or to create fear in others. When a nazi tortured Aryan German to get names out of him, he knew full well he is torturing a human. It was not about whether they are human or not, it was simply that human life had less value. Using animals and insects as insults does not mean there was any confusion about whether those being mistreated are humans. > Dehumanizing "others" is the classic first step to get rid of any morale/ethical concern when interacting with them. Actually believing they are not human is super rare and found only in some cults. Insults and degradations are how you work others to a rage, but they are not meant to be factual statements. And they are not interpreted as factual statements. Happily, nazi left enough writing behind them, we know what they thought about human value.
- pasquinelli 5mo ago
  what do you know about the pre-industrial world, really?
- psychoslave 5mo ago
  [dead]
- graemep 5mo ago
  > Pre-industrial world didn't have much human value. Your were a lord or a serf. There was not much in between. A lord's life had value, a serf's value was nothing. Not true. Serfs had rights that varied a lot between societies and over time. Religions mostly teach a value of human life, and Christianity teaches equal value: "when Adam devlved and Eve span who was then the gentleman", or "the first shall be last and the last shall be first" or "it is easier for a rich map to pass through the eye of the needle". There were all sorts of people in between. Free people who were not serfs. Skilled people who were members of guilds.
  - IAmBroom 5mo ago
    In fact, the value of those lives - in terms of their souls - was quite explicitly equal. Numerous pieces of Momento Mori and Apocalyptic artwork reinforced the notion that beggars, nobles, and even popes would appear equally before Jesus for a moral judgment, with the same chance to be found worthy or damnable. And "the Conqueror Worm" would make sure all of them faced the same afterlife treatment, whether they were buried in silks or naked in a pauper's grave.
grebc 5mo ago
When it’s necessary for the pope to tell the orange one to calm down about wiping out a civilisation, you know things are bad.
- b00ty4breakfast 5mo ago
  This would be more of an indictment if we were closer to the 19th century rather than 5 popes deep into public denouncements of American militarism.
- _DeadFred_ 5mo ago
  Are you talking about the 40 years of 'death to America, death to Israel' calls from the Islamic Republican of Iran? The same regime that bragged 'we defeated/destroyed Persian culture/civilization' when they took over Iran?
  - bigyabai 5mo ago
    Iran's prior government was a US-supported monarchy and torture regime, with Israel also credibly accused of state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing, rape and torture. Arab resentment of American and Israeli occupation is justified much in the same way as the occupied Raj demanding death to Britain. Today, the Likud regime recycles this same language specifically to foment racial violence in occupied territory, which should be sanctioned by America but isn't: https://www.jta.org/2026/05/14/israel/death-to-arabs-chanted-at-jerusalem-march-after-ben-gvir-displays-israeli-flag-on-temple-mount https://www.jta.org/2026/05/14/israel/death-to-arabs-chanted...
    - _DeadFred_ 5mo ago
      What does that have to do with the Islamic Republic's bragging of conquering/ending Persian civilization in the name of Islam? A group should not celebrate conquering/ending a civilization. Especially so called religious leaders. Iran is not Arab and is not occupied by Israel. In your second statement you seem to callout the behavior, yet you defend it in the first? Calling for the death of random societal/structural groups, be that entire countries/societies, ethnic group, etc, is unacceptable behavior. It is especially unacceptable when it is done by powerful political leaders. It is outright evil when it is done by religious leaders.
jdkoeck 5mo ago
A cursory look at the fall of extreme poverty across the world, over the last few decades, is enough to refute the idea that the world is largely based on exploitation.
- hamandcheese 5mo ago
  Has wealth been distributed from exploiter to exploited? Doesn't seem like it. It just seems like the 99% are being exploited a little more evenhandedly.
- sheepolog 5mo ago
  I agree that things are getting better, but your sentiment feels a bit premature; exploitation is still alive and well in many supply chains. The people who manufacture the products you buy often live much harder lives than you. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-of-goods/supply-chains https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-o...
- taosx 5mo ago
  You assume that exploitation and material improvement can not coexist. You can be exploited just as well, by that I mean you're not getting a fair share for what you contribute to the system.
- b00ty4breakfast 5mo ago
  "UM ACTUALLY THOSE SWEATSHOP WORKERS ARE LUCKY TO BE WORKING FOR PENNIES AN HOUR TO MAKE MY OVERPRICED CONSUMER ELECTRONICS AND THESE FLY-ASS Js"
  - jdkoeck 5mo ago
    I suggest a look at the recent economic development of Bangladesh, if you want something less abstract to illustrate the point that the reduction in poverty is very noticeable. You would think that a great reduction in extreme poverty would give people pause, but it is almost always barely acknowledged. The strange conclusion is that people who tell you they care the most about poverty do not actually care about it in the slightest. It is just a vehicle for their resentment.
senectus1 5mo ago
yeah I'm not impressed. Its not like the worlds religions have consistently held the moral high ground. That catholic church has a long and sordid history of protecting its own.
andai 5mo ago
Unfortunately some approximation of a human emulation (a slice of it) comes out of emulating Common Crawl. They do have neurons for emotions because those are necessary to predict next token. Whether that implies anything about subjective experience... I think that question is unknowable by definition. Either substrate matters (in which case things have to be made of carbon for some reason?), or it doesn't (in which case... God only knows what that implies. Windows XP might have subjective experience).
- throwaway27448 5mo ago
  Emotions exist outside of immediate reaction. This is necessary for stuff like motivation.
  - andai 5mo ago
    Yeah, and we're making them extremely motivated the past year.
xdennis 5mo ago
[flagged]
- bonzini 5mo ago
  For better or worse, the Catholic church has shaped most of western philosophy for at least 1500 years, including topics not necessarily related to existence of a deity or belief in that existence. It's not surprising that some of their thoughts seem sound and consistent with your ethics.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- krige 5mo ago
  It's been over 12 years since gamergate. 10 years since it was co-opted by parasites. You've got to let it go.
- overfeed 5mo ago
  > I don't think religions should appeal to outsiders You'd have made strange bedfellows with cranky Catholics who thought so too, 60 years ago after Vatican II's modernization reforms. > You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing). Hold on a sec, you ought to clarify what you mean by "gain more members" - the Amish have a very high birthrate, averaging 6.1 kids per woman. While Unitarians are below the replacement rate. > Games which chase inclusivity often fail, because the very people they appeal to don't actually want to play video games. How is this old culture-wars canard still being rolled out? A glance at the character rosters on the Game of the Year winners for the past 10 years proves you wrong.
  - joe_mamba 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - andrepd 5mo ago
vasco 5mo ago
> I hope the speech isn't something dumb like "remember only humans have souls" because I think that's really premature and pretty obvious that AIs are not people at this point. It really is en vogue to have this attitude that everyone in church is stupid for believing but it's a huge disservice to yourself to not understand the Vatican is full of the equivalent of the best PhDs sourced from all over the world centered around their specific topic of interest, theology. Also for the time being you can see that the Vatican understands AI much better than you already, just have a read here: 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... [0] > ANTIQUA ET NOVA > Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence
- rounce 5mo ago
  “I hope X isn’t Y” is far from the same thing as “X is Y”. Seems like you’ve put words in their mouth so you can argue against some anti-religious straw man.
  - vasco 5mo ago
    If I meet someone and I tell them "I hope you're not dumb", would they assume I think they are dumb or should they take it as purely whimsical? It's also funny you got stuck on that vs on the document I shared, while dissing me for pointing it out.
    - rounce 5mo ago
      More like, if you say “I hope this movie doesn’t suck” are you preemptively implying the movie is rubbish, or are you expressing your hope that it is worth witnessing? Taken out of context you can make a case for either. Luckily we have the rest of the post for that context so surely it’d be reasonable to base one’s interpretation on that.
- psychoslave 5mo ago
  Intelligence is orthogonal to the tendency to blind obedience to some dogma, or its practical indistinguishable behavioral equivalence no matter what one actually think inwardly. It doesn’t take a high academia credential to develop a critical mindset about established institutions, and quite the opposite seems more likely.
pelasaco 5mo ago
Martin Heidegger discussed it already. Technology isn't just a tool, but the way we shape the World. The question with technology and AI should not be only "what should we do with it", but beside it, "what does technology do with us"
bananaflag 5mo ago
> I hope the speech isn't something dumb like "remember only humans have souls" This is the position of the Catholic Church, so don't expect anything different. My hope is that, within those boundaries, he may find something interesting and meaningful to say.
- CoastalCoder 5mo ago
  I've recently started listening to a podcast from a retired Anglican Bishop, "Ask N.T. Wright Anything". IIUC, he claims that the concept of "soul" is something that the wasn't really present in the Jewish worldview of Jesus' time. Rather, it's something that later theologians (Aquinas?) picked up from Greek philosophy (Platonism?). I wonder if that means Wright would have a different take on the whole "only humans have souls" idea. (Beyond just differing on the choice of terminology, I mean.)
  - AlanYx 5mo ago
    >he claims that the concept of "soul" is something that the wasn't really present in the Jewish worldview of Jesus' time That's a broadly accepted take among religious historians, although it's off by a half century, roughly, if you include the Jewish diaspora. Philo of Alexandria did begin to integrate Jewish scripture with Greek philosophy on the soul during his lifetime.
    - CoastalCoder 5mo ago
      Interesting. Thanks! > although it's off by a half century, roughly, if you include the Jewish diaspora. Mind expanding on this part?
      - AlanYx 5mo ago
        Most of the soul ideas that eventually made their way into Judaism (and many years later becoming heavily influential in sects like the one founded by Baal Shem Tov) originally came from diaspora Hellenic Jews who were familiar with Platonism. There was about a half century+ lag before these ideas diffused. That is, they existed but were not yet mainstream.
KoolKat23 5mo ago
This is a great point, further to your point on AI. Another perhaps worse offender is our focus on "the economy", at times the focus is always on "what about the economy?!" Forgetting "the economy" is merely a tool intended to improve the human condition. Sometimes I feel people lose sight of this original intention, be it unintentional or otherwise.
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  When Media Talking Heads say “the economy,” what they are really talking about is just rich people’s investments and old people’s retirement. Basically, for reporters, the economy = only stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
  - acdha 5mo ago
    I think you’re being unfairly down-voted. While a lot of people here seek out more news, what I see normal people exposed to on TV is basically that – stocks, and if gas prices are high, that and quarterly jobs reports discussed in relation to stocks. To a first approximation, “did your retirement find gain or lose?” really sums it up for all but my father-in-law and the two of us. This is why it’s such a common trope not to think politicians talk about the real economy because your lived experience really varies based on how much stocks affect your life.
  - tharmas 5mo ago
    Precisely.
  - erikerikson 5mo ago
    You might consider whether this is a little too reductive. After all the values of the stock, bonds, and mutual funds are directly related to the profits and capital flows through and health of the economy. The economy is complicated and those high-level indexes are gross simplifications of a mass of complexity, but they're not entirely unrelated to whether people have money to spend and whether our liberalized economy is functioning. In fact, I'd suggest that our economy is increasingly suffering from the population's inability to participate and drive the maximal capital flows and prosperity that are possible. There is an additional distributive and concentration problem which we have been solving even more poorly lately.
latexr 5mo ago
> I feel AI and robotics are very important for progressing humanity Why? And what does “progressing” mean, exactly? I’m not trying to be combative or flippant, I’m genuinely asking because the rest of your comment is a great argument for the opposite view. I’d argue humanity will “progress” when we collectively learn to treat each other and our environment with respect and care. When we have a sense of community with our fellow people instead of placing undue value on individuals and personal gain. Technological advance could be a boon for humanity if those were our shared values, but as it stands it seems pretty obvious that what it does instead is consolidate power in the hands of those who should never have it. We already have the technology and resources to improve the lives of everyone, they’re just not fairly distributed.
- lo_zamoyski 5mo ago
  > And what does “progressing” mean, exactly? Indeed. This is characteristic of a reflexive and unthinking Progressivism that presumes the reality of some kind of nebulous, arbitrary, and ill-defined "progress", but very often denies the very basis that makes progress of any kind possible, which is teleology. In other words, Progressivism is one of the modernist idols in Nietzsche. The modern haughtily throws off the "old metaphysics" and the "old religion", but fails to notice how it has sawed off the branch it is sitting on. Its peculiar form of worship, its peculiar focus, is hollow because it has been gutted of the concepts that it draws a residual parasitic strength from. Hence, the twilight of the idols... Postmodernism is to a large degree a reaction to the emptiness of modernism. Postmodernism is also self-refuting, but to its credit, it does respond to something very true about modernism. We are witnessing postmodernism bury the last vestiges of modernism along with itself. It is an ideological kamikaze.
- pcooper 5mo ago
  “Progress” can be of the Steven Pinker kind, where the long term trend of things like infant mortality, deaths from violence, etc. are going in a direction that most people would agree is good. > Technological advance could be a boon for humanity if those were our shared values, but as it stands it seems pretty obvious that what it does instead is consolidate power in the hands of those who should never have it. Why can’t it be both? I’m optimistic that AI and robotics will produce innovations that will benefit all of humanity, even if the financial gains are concentrated among the few.
snaking0776 5mo ago
I’m pretty skeptical that we’ll have actual convincing simulations of human brains any time soon. We’re still in the phase of trying to figure out how mice decide to turn left or right in a maze. Not to mention that the ethical/allowed ways of collecting human neural data are incredibly coarse especially the most common forms like fMRI or EEG (maybe some BCI will improve this but it’s still pretty rough technology). Most of our data as well is collected in incredibly controlled conditions (even “naturalistic” stimuli) so the data we operate on is still not particularly indicative of how people act in the real world. Maybe you mean simulations of a “mind” which behaves like people even if it’s not particularly accurate to the brain? What did you mean by this?
toasty228 5mo ago
We could do that without waiting for """AI""", actually I see absolutely no reason why """AI""" would move this topic in a good direction. Factories were supposed to deliver us from work, automation was supposed to deliver us from work, computers were supposed to deliver us from work, now it's """AI""", tomorrow it'll be "quantum computers", the next time it'll be "cold fusion". It does not work and will never work, because it's not a bug in the system, it is the system
manoDev 5mo ago
> I hope the speech isn't something dumb like "remember only humans have souls" because I think that's really premature and pretty obvious that AIs are not people at this point. I hope it is, because we already have the likes of Dawkins spilling opinions like “machines are conscious”. So here we have a figure of authority saying humans are soulless but machines are conscious, furthering the argument that it’s okay to exploit humans, there’s nothing special about them if we can replace them with a machine.

by ilaksh 5mo ago

orochimaaru 5mo ago

Human value has rarely existed. Pre-industrial world didn't have much human value. Your were a lord or a serf. There was not much in between. A lord's life had value, a serf's value was nothing. Post-industrial world needed human capital. Hence, the need for human value. If you notice most of this "need" has arisen out of then need for industrial expansion. Post-AI will be interesting. Will we go back to pre-industrial or get something better.

mrcwinn 5mo ago
I also wonder if it’s just harder to rule a much larger population in the modern world than in those times. Any jackass can show up and say that he was chosen to lead by some higher power. But you must still convince enough people that that is the case or at least have a military large enough that you can control.
atq2119 5mo ago
I don't think this is factually accurate. What it really boils down is a question of scale of societies. Most of us humans inherently value each other. There are exceptions, and small communities can get nasty. But for the most part, small human communities tend to be supportive and valuing each other. This really only stops being the case when you get large-scale societies that allow humans to view others through an overly abstract lens. Combine that with an unchecked accumulation of power, and you have the potential for those in power to view the rest as without value.
- HDBaseT 5mo ago
  I agree with you. I recently watched a bunch of videos from a YouTuber 'Mike Okay' and he visits some random, obscure and non-standard countries to travel. Most of the people he encounters are super friendly, welcoming and willing to bend over backwards to help him out. It's genuine human connection and willingness. He will speak to people from every possible background, including people in the Taliban and honestly at the end of the day, we're all humans and most people respect that. Things have become blurred with social media, digital life, closed and private nature of the modern world but if you take a step back, you can realize humans are typically, very helpful, friendly and unique characters.
GalaxyNova 5mo ago
Serfs were of value to the lord, and they were usually not treated that badly compared to many workplaces today.
- bombcar 5mo ago
  Arguably from very early on the Church has been at the forefront of "Serfs are of value to the Lord" if you will (St Lawrence, et al). So far none of the AI stuff I've seen has really been about "the computer has no soul" and more around the danger that dehumanization can bring (which has been a refrain since the previous Leo, mind you).
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
swatcoder 5mo ago
It's telling how blithely you're missing the point of what the pope(s) mean by human value. Their intended meaning is that far gone from modern consciousness, even among people who meant to champion some kind of human value themselves. They're not talking about the economic value of humans or even the psychological value of humans as subjects with experiences and a right to liberty or care or something. The idea they're trying to recall and reinvigorate is a sense of human value that transcends that temporal, material noise altogether and that is truly universal. It's the human value that welcomed slaves, prostitutes, wretches, merchants and kings as peers in something grander than economy or state or lineage or tribe or creed. Now, you can make a well-developed case that that's hogwash and that the human value that matters is the one that alleviates suffering or grants liberty or even the one that grants material reward for some virtue or bloodline or whatever, but that's not what these guys are talking about. They mean a human nature that is always there and always worthy, just as much when it's experiencing temporal poverty/suffering/abuse as when it's basking in temporal wealth/success/freedom. The idea is that Christian or not, Catholic or not, it does good for everyone to think of human value that way and the critique -- for a long time now -- is that for all the flash and glimmer of technology and its material benefits, it sometimes makes it very very easy to forget.
- orochimaaru 5mo ago
  What rot. Tell that to native Americans who were forcibly converted and enslaved. Tell that to people in the inquisition. Tell that to peoples in India and the east that were forcibly converted so that the pope could fill his coffers. Tell that to all the children murdered in Christian and catholic schools. Christianity and Catholicism doesn’t fool me. If you’ve ever wanted to see the mythical devil - look to those preaching and they legacy of hate that they carry.
  - swatcoder 5mo ago
    There's really no argument against the institutional and historical hypocisy. There's no shortage of people and groups that have done or currently do horrible violence against others, sometimes even in the name of these ideas. But I don't know if that takes away from the idea itself and what fruitful counterpoint it might play in modern discourse.
pryce 5mo ago
If my definition of 'value' was something that was totally contingent on both post-industrial society and an ultracapitalist approach to production, and it made me deduce that human being's lives over thousands of years or in other societies were worth "nothing", I think I would interpret this as a 'reductio-ad-absurdum'. That is, by deducing an absurd conclusion from the premise, that makes a strong argument that my definition of 'value' must be so narrow as to be effectively broken. I would respond by looking for a different, more wide definition of value, among the various ones that have been proposed.
- westmeal 5mo ago
  Then you wouldn't like Ayn Rands novels.
wahern 5mo ago
The concept of fundamental human rights is certainly new, but our notion of intrinsic human value (and intrinsic value of other life and things) arises from our empathy, which at least in its degree is perhaps our most important defining trait as a species. (Our empathy may have been a prerequisite for the emergence of our intelligence.) Conflating the two is why some people have trouble understanding why religions like Buddhism and Christianity seemed to tolerate so much inequality and violence; or more generally just assumed people writ large were historically more callous and uncaring than today. Arguably one of the downsides, though, to a focus on rights vs intrinsic value is that rights are typically couched in materialist terms. Most of the time that's probably for the better, but sometimes maybe not.
- IAmBroom 5mo ago
  Dogs show empathy towards not only dogs and humans, but even baby birds and rabbits - animals which one would expect to be viewed as pure caloric units, sans empathy. Whales show empathy towards their young, and towards humans. Male "loner" lions have been known to show empathic protection toward human and antelope young in the bush. It's increasingly hard to define a clear difference between Humans and "mere Animals"; empathy is emphatically not a clear difference. To date, fear of vacuum cleaners may well be the only known difference.
  - wahern 5mo ago
    Sure, just like many other animals exhibit analytical intelligence and complex communication. The seeds are there. The distinction is by degree, but the gap is pretty wide in all three cases. No other species has been shown to systematically display non-kin, non-mating-system altruism (for which empathy is probably an integral component). It seems likely you need systematic non-kin altruism to achieve the ubiquitous, complex cooperation humans exhibit. And that complex cooperation is probably a prerequisite to make our degree of intelligence evolutionarily profitable. Otherwise human-level intelligence should be more common than our immediate lineage. (Some cousin species may very well have been smarter or more cooperative than us; relatively speaking it could be homo sapiens found a more effective equilibrium. Nonetheless our immediate lineage seems to be the only one to break through the selfish gene bottleneck that restricts other species along these axes.)
watwut 5mo ago
People really should stop making up history from childrens books. People were valuing people to various degrees and tool seriously the human value question in every single period we have records from. And varrying degrees apply to post-industrial too - your human value did not meant much in very much industrial third reich fans hands.
- psychoslave 5mo ago
  >And varrying degrees apply to post-industrial too - your human value did not meant much in very much industrial third reich fans hands. Ho, certainly they did. The scope of the ethics is then windowed on who’s deemed human, and who can be slaughtered like an animal for the glory of the great civilization one is part of. Nothing specific to nazis, look at Rwandan genocide. Hutu extremists systematically referred to Tutsis as "cockroaches" and "snakes" in propaganda. Or even closer on a timeline perspective, Israeli leaders and media have used terms like "human animals" and described Gaza as a "city of evil" or a "nation of barbarians," while some Palestinian factions have used similar language against Israelis. Dehumanizing "others" is the classic first step to get rid of any morale/ethical concern when interacting with them.
  - watwut 5mo ago
    Nazi seen cruelty, violence and lack of empathy as manliness and virtue. Openly and specifically. You as a young man wanting to prove yourself would be beating and killing people, knowing they are humans and that violence toward humans is what made you manly in your peer group. They were not saying "it does not count". They were saying "I am great for doing it". > The scope of the ethics is then windowed on who’s deemed human, and who can be slaughtered like an animal for the glory of the great civilization one is part of. It was not a disagreement about who is human. Nazi did not killed just Jews and foreigners. They killed and tortured plenty of fellow Aryans, because those were their political opponents or to create fear in others. When a nazi tortured Aryan German to get names out of him, he knew full well he is torturing a human. It was not about whether they are human or not, it was simply that human life had less value. Using animals and insects as insults does not mean there was any confusion about whether those being mistreated are humans. > Dehumanizing "others" is the classic first step to get rid of any morale/ethical concern when interacting with them. Actually believing they are not human is super rare and found only in some cults. Insults and degradations are how you work others to a rage, but they are not meant to be factual statements. And they are not interpreted as factual statements. Happily, nazi left enough writing behind them, we know what they thought about human value.
pasquinelli 5mo ago
what do you know about the pre-industrial world, really?
psychoslave 5mo ago
[dead]
graemep 5mo ago
> Pre-industrial world didn't have much human value. Your were a lord or a serf. There was not much in between. A lord's life had value, a serf's value was nothing. Not true. Serfs had rights that varied a lot between societies and over time. Religions mostly teach a value of human life, and Christianity teaches equal value: "when Adam devlved and Eve span who was then the gentleman", or "the first shall be last and the last shall be first" or "it is easier for a rich map to pass through the eye of the needle". There were all sorts of people in between. Free people who were not serfs. Skilled people who were members of guilds.
- IAmBroom 5mo ago
  In fact, the value of those lives - in terms of their souls - was quite explicitly equal. Numerous pieces of Momento Mori and Apocalyptic artwork reinforced the notion that beggars, nobles, and even popes would appear equally before Jesus for a moral judgment, with the same chance to be found worthy or damnable. And "the Conqueror Worm" would make sure all of them faced the same afterlife treatment, whether they were buried in silks or naked in a pauper's grave.

grebc 5mo ago

When it’s necessary for the pope to tell the orange one to calm down about wiping out a civilisation, you know things are bad.

b00ty4breakfast 5mo ago
This would be more of an indictment if we were closer to the 19th century rather than 5 popes deep into public denouncements of American militarism.
_DeadFred_ 5mo ago
Are you talking about the 40 years of 'death to America, death to Israel' calls from the Islamic Republican of Iran? The same regime that bragged 'we defeated/destroyed Persian culture/civilization' when they took over Iran?
- bigyabai 5mo ago
  Iran's prior government was a US-supported monarchy and torture regime, with Israel also credibly accused of state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing, rape and torture. Arab resentment of American and Israeli occupation is justified much in the same way as the occupied Raj demanding death to Britain. Today, the Likud regime recycles this same language specifically to foment racial violence in occupied territory, which should be sanctioned by America but isn't: https://www.jta.org/2026/05/14/israel/death-to-arabs-chanted-at-jerusalem-march-after-ben-gvir-displays-israeli-flag-on-temple-mount https://www.jta.org/2026/05/14/israel/death-to-arabs-chanted...
  - _DeadFred_ 5mo ago
    What does that have to do with the Islamic Republic's bragging of conquering/ending Persian civilization in the name of Islam? A group should not celebrate conquering/ending a civilization. Especially so called religious leaders. Iran is not Arab and is not occupied by Israel. In your second statement you seem to callout the behavior, yet you defend it in the first? Calling for the death of random societal/structural groups, be that entire countries/societies, ethnic group, etc, is unacceptable behavior. It is especially unacceptable when it is done by powerful political leaders. It is outright evil when it is done by religious leaders.

jdkoeck 5mo ago

A cursory look at the fall of extreme poverty across the world, over the last few decades, is enough to refute the idea that the world is largely based on exploitation.

hamandcheese 5mo ago
Has wealth been distributed from exploiter to exploited? Doesn't seem like it. It just seems like the 99% are being exploited a little more evenhandedly.
sheepolog 5mo ago
I agree that things are getting better, but your sentiment feels a bit premature; exploitation is still alive and well in many supply chains. The people who manufacture the products you buy often live much harder lives than you. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-of-goods/supply-chains https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/reports/child-labor/list-o...
taosx 5mo ago
You assume that exploitation and material improvement can not coexist. You can be exploited just as well, by that I mean you're not getting a fair share for what you contribute to the system.
b00ty4breakfast 5mo ago
"UM ACTUALLY THOSE SWEATSHOP WORKERS ARE LUCKY TO BE WORKING FOR PENNIES AN HOUR TO MAKE MY OVERPRICED CONSUMER ELECTRONICS AND THESE FLY-ASS Js"
- jdkoeck 5mo ago
  I suggest a look at the recent economic development of Bangladesh, if you want something less abstract to illustrate the point that the reduction in poverty is very noticeable. You would think that a great reduction in extreme poverty would give people pause, but it is almost always barely acknowledged. The strange conclusion is that people who tell you they care the most about poverty do not actually care about it in the slightest. It is just a vehicle for their resentment.

senectus1 5mo ago

yeah I'm not impressed. Its not like the worlds religions have consistently held the moral high ground. That catholic church has a long and sordid history of protecting its own.

andai 5mo ago

Unfortunately some approximation of a human emulation (a slice of it) comes out of emulating Common Crawl. They do have neurons for emotions because those are necessary to predict next token. Whether that implies anything about subjective experience... I think that question is unknowable by definition. Either substrate matters (in which case things have to be made of carbon for some reason?), or it doesn't (in which case... God only knows what that implies. Windows XP might have subjective experience).

throwaway27448 5mo ago
Emotions exist outside of immediate reaction. This is necessary for stuff like motivation.
- andai 5mo ago
  Yeah, and we're making them extremely motivated the past year.

xdennis 5mo ago

[flagged]

bonzini 5mo ago
For better or worse, the Catholic church has shaped most of western philosophy for at least 1500 years, including topics not necessarily related to existence of a deity or belief in that existence. It's not surprising that some of their thoughts seem sound and consistent with your ethics.
- deleted 5mo ago
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krige 5mo ago
It's been over 12 years since gamergate. 10 years since it was co-opted by parasites. You've got to let it go.
overfeed 5mo ago
> I don't think religions should appeal to outsiders You'd have made strange bedfellows with cranky Catholics who thought so too, 60 years ago after Vatican II's modernization reforms. > You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing). Hold on a sec, you ought to clarify what you mean by "gain more members" - the Amish have a very high birthrate, averaging 6.1 kids per woman. While Unitarians are below the replacement rate. > Games which chase inclusivity often fail, because the very people they appeal to don't actually want to play video games. How is this old culture-wars canard still being rolled out? A glance at the character rosters on the Game of the Year winners for the past 10 years proves you wrong.
- joe_mamba 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - andrepd 5mo ago

vasco 5mo ago

> I hope the speech isn't something dumb like "remember only humans have souls" because I think that's really premature and pretty obvious that AIs are not people at this point. It really is en vogue to have this attitude that everyone in church is stupid for believing but it's a huge disservice to yourself to not understand the Vatican is full of the equivalent of the best PhDs sourced from all over the world centered around their specific topic of interest, theology. Also for the time being you can see that the Vatican understands AI much better than you already, just have a read here: 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... [0] > ANTIQUA ET NOVA > Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence

rounce 5mo ago
“I hope X isn’t Y” is far from the same thing as “X is Y”. Seems like you’ve put words in their mouth so you can argue against some anti-religious straw man.
- vasco 5mo ago
  If I meet someone and I tell them "I hope you're not dumb", would they assume I think they are dumb or should they take it as purely whimsical? It's also funny you got stuck on that vs on the document I shared, while dissing me for pointing it out.
  - rounce 5mo ago
    More like, if you say “I hope this movie doesn’t suck” are you preemptively implying the movie is rubbish, or are you expressing your hope that it is worth witnessing? Taken out of context you can make a case for either. Luckily we have the rest of the post for that context so surely it’d be reasonable to base one’s interpretation on that.
psychoslave 5mo ago
Intelligence is orthogonal to the tendency to blind obedience to some dogma, or its practical indistinguishable behavioral equivalence no matter what one actually think inwardly. It doesn’t take a high academia credential to develop a critical mindset about established institutions, and quite the opposite seems more likely.

pelasaco 5mo ago

Martin Heidegger discussed it already. Technology isn't just a tool, but the way we shape the World. The question with technology and AI should not be only "what should we do with it", but beside it, "what does technology do with us"

bananaflag 5mo ago

> I hope the speech isn't something dumb like "remember only humans have souls" This is the position of the Catholic Church, so don't expect anything different. My hope is that, within those boundaries, he may find something interesting and meaningful to say.

CoastalCoder 5mo ago
I've recently started listening to a podcast from a retired Anglican Bishop, "Ask N.T. Wright Anything". IIUC, he claims that the concept of "soul" is something that the wasn't really present in the Jewish worldview of Jesus' time. Rather, it's something that later theologians (Aquinas?) picked up from Greek philosophy (Platonism?). I wonder if that means Wright would have a different take on the whole "only humans have souls" idea. (Beyond just differing on the choice of terminology, I mean.)
- AlanYx 5mo ago
  >he claims that the concept of "soul" is something that the wasn't really present in the Jewish worldview of Jesus' time That's a broadly accepted take among religious historians, although it's off by a half century, roughly, if you include the Jewish diaspora. Philo of Alexandria did begin to integrate Jewish scripture with Greek philosophy on the soul during his lifetime.
  - CoastalCoder 5mo ago
    Interesting. Thanks! > although it's off by a half century, roughly, if you include the Jewish diaspora. Mind expanding on this part?
    - AlanYx 5mo ago
      Most of the soul ideas that eventually made their way into Judaism (and many years later becoming heavily influential in sects like the one founded by Baal Shem Tov) originally came from diaspora Hellenic Jews who were familiar with Platonism. There was about a half century+ lag before these ideas diffused. That is, they existed but were not yet mainstream.

KoolKat23 5mo ago

This is a great point, further to your point on AI. Another perhaps worse offender is our focus on "the economy", at times the focus is always on "what about the economy?!" Forgetting "the economy" is merely a tool intended to improve the human condition. Sometimes I feel people lose sight of this original intention, be it unintentional or otherwise.

ryandrake 5mo ago
When Media Talking Heads say “the economy,” what they are really talking about is just rich people’s investments and old people’s retirement. Basically, for reporters, the economy = only stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
- acdha 5mo ago
  I think you’re being unfairly down-voted. While a lot of people here seek out more news, what I see normal people exposed to on TV is basically that – stocks, and if gas prices are high, that and quarterly jobs reports discussed in relation to stocks. To a first approximation, “did your retirement find gain or lose?” really sums it up for all but my father-in-law and the two of us. This is why it’s such a common trope not to think politicians talk about the real economy because your lived experience really varies based on how much stocks affect your life.
- tharmas 5mo ago
  Precisely.
- erikerikson 5mo ago
  You might consider whether this is a little too reductive. After all the values of the stock, bonds, and mutual funds are directly related to the profits and capital flows through and health of the economy. The economy is complicated and those high-level indexes are gross simplifications of a mass of complexity, but they're not entirely unrelated to whether people have money to spend and whether our liberalized economy is functioning. In fact, I'd suggest that our economy is increasingly suffering from the population's inability to participate and drive the maximal capital flows and prosperity that are possible. There is an additional distributive and concentration problem which we have been solving even more poorly lately.

latexr 5mo ago

> I feel AI and robotics are very important for progressing humanity Why? And what does “progressing” mean, exactly? I’m not trying to be combative or flippant, I’m genuinely asking because the rest of your comment is a great argument for the opposite view. I’d argue humanity will “progress” when we collectively learn to treat each other and our environment with respect and care. When we have a sense of community with our fellow people instead of placing undue value on individuals and personal gain. Technological advance could be a boon for humanity if those were our shared values, but as it stands it seems pretty obvious that what it does instead is consolidate power in the hands of those who should never have it. We already have the technology and resources to improve the lives of everyone, they’re just not fairly distributed.

lo_zamoyski 5mo ago
> And what does “progressing” mean, exactly? Indeed. This is characteristic of a reflexive and unthinking Progressivism that presumes the reality of some kind of nebulous, arbitrary, and ill-defined "progress", but very often denies the very basis that makes progress of any kind possible, which is teleology. In other words, Progressivism is one of the modernist idols in Nietzsche. The modern haughtily throws off the "old metaphysics" and the "old religion", but fails to notice how it has sawed off the branch it is sitting on. Its peculiar form of worship, its peculiar focus, is hollow because it has been gutted of the concepts that it draws a residual parasitic strength from. Hence, the twilight of the idols... Postmodernism is to a large degree a reaction to the emptiness of modernism. Postmodernism is also self-refuting, but to its credit, it does respond to something very true about modernism. We are witnessing postmodernism bury the last vestiges of modernism along with itself. It is an ideological kamikaze.
pcooper 5mo ago
“Progress” can be of the Steven Pinker kind, where the long term trend of things like infant mortality, deaths from violence, etc. are going in a direction that most people would agree is good. > Technological advance could be a boon for humanity if those were our shared values, but as it stands it seems pretty obvious that what it does instead is consolidate power in the hands of those who should never have it. Why can’t it be both? I’m optimistic that AI and robotics will produce innovations that will benefit all of humanity, even if the financial gains are concentrated among the few.

snaking0776 5mo ago

I’m pretty skeptical that we’ll have actual convincing simulations of human brains any time soon. We’re still in the phase of trying to figure out how mice decide to turn left or right in a maze. Not to mention that the ethical/allowed ways of collecting human neural data are incredibly coarse especially the most common forms like fMRI or EEG (maybe some BCI will improve this but it’s still pretty rough technology). Most of our data as well is collected in incredibly controlled conditions (even “naturalistic” stimuli) so the data we operate on is still not particularly indicative of how people act in the real world. Maybe you mean simulations of a “mind” which behaves like people even if it’s not particularly accurate to the brain? What did you mean by this?

toasty228 5mo ago

We could do that without waiting for """AI""", actually I see absolutely no reason why """AI""" would move this topic in a good direction. Factories were supposed to deliver us from work, automation was supposed to deliver us from work, computers were supposed to deliver us from work, now it's """AI""", tomorrow it'll be "quantum computers", the next time it'll be "cold fusion". It does not work and will never work, because it's not a bug in the system, it is the system

manoDev 5mo ago

> I hope the speech isn't something dumb like "remember only humans have souls" because I think that's really premature and pretty obvious that AIs are not people at this point. I hope it is, because we already have the likes of Dawkins spilling opinions like “machines are conscious”. So here we have a figure of authority saying humans are soulless but machines are conscious, furthering the argument that it’s okay to exploit humans, there’s nothing special about them if we can replace them with a machine.