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Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

• js4ever 5mo ago
  https://archive.is/70IOq https://archive.is/70IOq
• new_account_102 5mo ago
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• joshka 5mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265206
• RickJWagner 5mo ago
  John Henry said, “I feed four little brothers And baby sisters’ walkin’ on her knees Now did the Lord say that machines ought to take place of livin’? And what’s a substitute for bread and beans? I ain’t seen it! Do engines get rewarded for their steam?” - “John Henry” sung by Johnny Cash
• new_account_102 5mo ago
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• merelydev 5mo ago
  I believe the great problem of our age is deciding who controls technology. The technologists who create it believe they should control it, the people who use it are starting to believe they should control it and the governments who write the laws believe they should control it. And now the priests believe they should also play role. So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology?
  • lacunary 5mo ago
    yes it's called "actually having democratic elections"
    • merelydev 5mo ago
      What does "democratic elections" even mean in this new world where traditional politicians don't understand these dynamics?
      • rebolek 5mo ago
        Then vote for politicians who do.
        • xp84 5mo ago
          Few of those are ever running. Mostly we have just two brands of smooth-brains whose only policy aim is “preventing that other group of assholes from gaining any power, because they and their supporters are pure evil!”
          • Joker_vD 5mo ago
            Not a true democracy, then /s
          • steveBK123 5mo ago
            Each side gets the smooth brains they crave because for ~50% of the population it's become a team sport / religion situation. A majority of people have not thought through 1/10th of the policy positions they automatically support/reject based on the team hat color. There's a quote I will mangle and I forget the source of that's something like "If you agree with all the positions of your chosen political party, either you have thought through every option and came to the same conclusions on dozens of topics, or you haven't thought through anything".
            • xp84 5mo ago
              Comment is spot on, though I'd like to point out: > because for ~50% of the population it's become a team sport / religion situation It's kinda even worse. We can only have two parties because of FPTP, and turnout is about 60% of voting-eligible population on average. We know from recent popular vote that that 60% is split roughly 50-50. So 30% of the voting population is Team Blue Hat, and 30% is Team Red Hat. If you can get 15.1% of the population to vote for an unserious clown, they'll win their respective party's nomination. And in most states, one of the parties is a pretty sure lock in the general. 15% is a pretty low bar. Compare: Up to 30% of people think "chemtrails" are at least a "somewhat" real thing, and 5% of people believe vaccines contain microchips. So the bar for getting a guaranteed win is somewhere between those two wacky and easily disproven beliefs. https://www.cnn.com/us/chemtrails-conspiracy-theory-explained-cec#:~:text=10%25%20of%20Americans%20believed%20the%20conspiracy%20%E2%80%9Ccompletely%2C%E2%80%9D%20while%20upwards%20of%2030%25%20of%20Americans%20at%20least%20found%20it%20%E2%80%9Csomewhat%E2%80%9D%20true. https://www.cnn.com/us/chemtrails-conspiracy-theory-explaine... https://www.rutgers.edu/news/nearly-half-americans-still-unsure-about-popular-vaccine-misinformation#:~:text=5%20percent%20of%20respondents%20thought%20vaccines%20contained%20microchips%2C https://www.rutgers.edu/news/nearly-half-americans-still-uns...
  • ricardo81 5mo ago
    I think you're around the mark. Big tech has continuously eroded the idea of privacy and copyright and explains a lot of their market caps. Mitigating seemingly has devolved to trade wars and protectionism. The genie is out the bottle with AI though. So perhaps decentralisation of it puts us all on a new level playing field.
    • krapp 5mo ago
      What decentralization? AI is more extremely centralized than any other technology.
      • ricardo81 5mo ago
        The point being that's the solution. I didn't say it is decentralised.
        • krapp 5mo ago
          How is it possible to decentralize a technology that needs data centers the size of Manhattan? It doesn't seem like a reasonable solution. A better solution would be to just not have AI at all, outside of the few research roles where LLMs actually make sense.
          • ricardo81 5mo ago
            Because it has extremely plausible uses beyond the example you gave. More to the point it's trained on copyrighted material, so why entertain any use at all on that front if anything. If it's trained on the world's information, give the world the model. It doesn't need a tech company to pilfer everything and charge X if we're going to ignore the IP.
      • mike_hearn 5mo ago
        Not really. Search engines are a tech so centralized only two of them exist in the west, Google and Bing. There are zero open source search engines of any usable quality. Whereas there are lots of models out there, some free to download.
  • sealeck 5mo ago
    > The technologists who create it believe they should control it I think there's an interesting phenomenon where it is _not_ the people who control it, but instead a kind of international finance man cum-captain of industry (perhaps best embodied by Sam Altman) who does not create the technology and yet has ended up wielding the levers.
    • SilverElfin 5mo ago
      > a kind of international finance man cum-captain of industry (perhaps best embodied by Sam Altman) What the hell is a “cum-captain”? Search isn’t helping.
      • huhkerrf 5mo ago
        Probably this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cum https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cum I.e. finance man as well as captain of industry
        • whimsicalism 5mo ago
          the correct usage is dashes on both sides of the word, the usage above was extra confusing because it was incorrect
      • sealeck 5mo ago
        As in cum-"captain of industry"
        • froh 5mo ago
          non native speaker here - I don't get it.
          • HappMacDonald 5mo ago
            It's an old English word (predating the sexual connotation): cum - Used in indicating a thing or person which has two or more roles, functions, or natures, or which has changed from one to another. Basically nobody uses that language construct anymore until you run headlong into it in a Hackernews comment or something
  • Borg3 5mo ago
    Normally, its the one who understand technology, can control it. Unfortunately, its not the case anymore. Stuff got unnecessary complex and bloated, hard to grasp it alone. Also, now AI plays the new role too. Dark times ahead...
    • amelius 5mo ago
      The technologists can control it, the moment they can remove that stupid disclaimer saying that AI can make mistakes.
      • Chinjut 5mo ago
        What's stupid about the disclaimer?
        • amelius 5mo ago
          It basically says "we have no control over it", and "we don't know how it works".
          • miyoji 5mo ago
            Both of those things happen to be entirely true, though.
            • amelius 5mo ago
              Yes, that doesn't make it less embarrassing. My point remains: they can control it if they can control it. Because right now they can't even take responsibility for it.
            • steveBK123 5mo ago
              Sure but theres a level of uncertainty being expressed for a paid service that you don't see elsewhere. Imagine if every time you booked an uber it was like "your drive may crash the car". Or whenever you ate at a restaurant, the waiter said "there is a chance the chef will poison you". Or your bank statement said something like "these numbers may be wrong".
  • matusp 5mo ago
    This is the question that led to the communist movement in the 19th century.
    • wizzwizz4 5mo ago
      And the Luddite movement, also in the 19th century.
      • Joker_vD 5mo ago
        And the peasants' revolt of 1381, with John Ball's memorable "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" But it's a perennial question, really, and it won't go away any time soon.
    • marcosdumay 5mo ago
      And "the means of production belong to everyone" was the wrong answer. The problem was only solved by a different form of democratization.
  • fidotron 5mo ago
    It's legitimately surprising how off the pace HN is when it comes to discussions of this type. You won't get useful thoughts on this around here.
    • yonaguska 5mo ago
      be the change you wish to see- share your thoughts.
      • fidotron 5mo ago
        That's not really the point: the key question is why HN is so out to lunch on this and closely related areas. It's clearly somewhat structural. Look at the state of discussion just in this thread. I minimized my contribution for this reason.
    • booleandilemma 5mo ago
      Please tell us what we should be thinking.
    • sanderjd 5mo ago
      Where will you?
  • nicechianti 5mo ago
    [dead]
  • steveBK123 5mo ago
    > The technologists who create it believe they should control it I think it goes deeper than this when you listen to them talk. They truly think society will be re-ordered by this technology... and they should be in control of that re-ordering rather than democratically elected governments.
    • knollimar 5mo ago
      Democratically elected governments can't reorder a cookie right now. We even had one out tariffs on steel, thinkinf this would be good for jobs here. If there was 0.1 seconds of thought they'd realize any manufacturing job you make from a steel tariff cuts 2 more well paid trade jobs
      • dgellow 5mo ago
        > If there was 0.1 seconds of thought they'd realize any manufacturing job you make from a steel tariff cuts 2 more well paid trade jobs They knew that was the case. They don't care. The maga crowd isn't acting in good faith. Nobody other than the cult members and people who aren't paying attention thought that would actually bring manufacturing back to the US. The point of the tariffs is to devalue USD (something Trump wants to do since circa the 80s) and to strengthen Trump power/influence. He wants everybody in the world to be forced to come and negotiate directly with him so he can see them bend their knees. The whole thing is a power play
        • jfengel 5mo ago
          I do think they believed and believe it, though the reasoning is less economic than that. Manufacturing "belongs" in the US due to our inherent superiority, and has gone elsewhere only because of ill-conceived notions of niceness. By increasing tariffs they will have to pay their proper obeisance for their inferiority, and be inspired to actually work hard like us Americans.
          • idiotsecant 5mo ago
            You need to be specific with 'they' in this case. Who are the 'they' that you think believed that steel tarrifs would improve domestic manufacturing?
  • mentalgear 5mo ago
    'who controls technology' should be the result of 'what do [they] want to use it for', e.g the motivation. It should be put in the hands of the most trustworthy, transparent institution that can validate it works for all of us, not just the few. I don't think private companies or specific leaders want the best for the common good, so it would make the most sense to give control to a supra-nation entity like the UN - at least that would be the most democratic as we all have the chance to influence it (via voting from national to international level).
    • merelydev 5mo ago
      Would you agree that to some extend, the ability to control technology is an incentive for companies to develop/innovate, and the more control they have the more profitable it is?
      • HappMacDonald 5mo ago
        I would not. Especially not in the current climate when virtually every company is dropping all pretense of development and innovation (or creation of any kind) in favor of value extraction and rent-seeking. We are in this constant cycle of bubbles — the last ones I can recall bursting in 2000 and 2008 — where someone invents some new financial shell game that allows them to trade on some form of non-existent capital and then half the stock market follows along like rats after the piper until it all collapses as soon as enough people realize that everyone else also realizes the Emperor is wearing no clothes. And incidentally no, I have no idea how this particular trainwreck of fairy tail lessons all became pertinent simultaneously, but here we are. Control over things makes a lousy incentive anyway, since having said control always better empowers the appointed to just cheat the incentive instead. If the big bad wolf is at your door, "letting him in" isn't a bargaining chip you can trust to incentivize any sort of behavior other than "eating you".
    • xp84 5mo ago
      I do not feel that I have a voice at the U.N. But I also feel that it has been a particularly toothless organization. If a member state decides it is in their interest to flout some safeguard they were to mandate, that state will do so, and the U.N. won’t do anything about it unless there’s broad agreement between the US, China, and probably Russia. And the chances are that whoever is in need of enforcement is one of those, or a closely allied country of one.
  • NickNaraghi 5mo ago
    Worth checking out the heart of what people were doing with DAOs
  • anjel 5mo ago
    In England, ca. 1500s common law established the legal precedent that if your cattle broke loose of its pen, wandered into your neighbor's field and trampled their garden, you were liable for the damage your cattle caused. Meanwhile, 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem. Now AI (set loose in the wild at the AI industry's strategic choice so as to be irreversible) seems poised to disrupt and render a very significant part of the labor force disrupted on an unprecedented societal scale and it appears to be a foregone conclusion that collateral damages won't be the causal industry's expense. Nevermind that its also poised to easily afford those social costs, and don't even consider that maybe society should be considering this obvious cause and effect. For me at least the feudal suppression of this otherwise obvious and necessary discussion is perhaps more spectacular than the causal technological breakthrough itself. Now *that's* control.
    • solenoid0937 5mo ago
      > 500 years later Uber could disrupt the livery industry with VC cash that rendered a NY cab's owner/operator 6-figure financed medalion license worthless, and somehow that wasn't Uber's problem. Why is this Uber's problem? Do you realize how ridiculously dumb, inefficient, and corrupt a 6 figure taxi license is? It is not Uber's job to compensate for that ridiculousness. They provided a better and more cash efficient solution for passengers. That is enough. If you required every technological venture to cover the cost for every person it "disrupts," you would halt progress entirely.
      • andrepd 5mo ago
        > They provided a better and more cash efficient solution for passengers. That is enough. They burned half a billion dollars a month of VC money at their peak to undercut taxis across the world; in quainter times this used to be called "dumping", now it's just the standard way of doing business. All the while basically flaunting the law with their whole "we're just a platform connecting people who happen to drive a car with people who happen to want to go some place, it's totally not a taxi guys". No regulations, no expensive licenses or professional certifications, no need even for a minimum wage or basic social security or insurance or any kind of protection. Amazing! Essentially the same in spirit as Airbnb, only this latter had far more destructive consequences than screwing over taxi drivers.
  • bparsons 5mo ago
    So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology? Political power has always about who controls economic production, and the tools of economic production.
  • andrepd 5mo ago
    Yes, politics was always about controlling power, be it military, economic, or other.
  • cornholio 5mo ago
    > the great problem of our age is deciding who controls technology Isn't that just an instance of the political problem for all ages: who controls what, who gets to rule and who obeys, the fundamental power struggle apparent in all human history. Extend the definition of technology to the broadest sense, from the material that allow us control over the physical reality: steam, computing; to the organizational, that enable collective human action: states, factories and assembly lines; and the ideological, that legitimize certain power arrangements: religion, nationalism, democracy, human rights etc. A feudal lord's power rested on land (material), the manorial system (organizational), and the divine right of kings or religious sanction (ideological). Even if peasant revolts happen from time to time, the arrangement is stable because the peasantry accept it as legitimate and have no economic alternative; so even when revolting they cannot imagine a different political order. Technological (broad) leaps like the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution change the political possibility space so arrangements like feudalism are no longer stable, but others like capitalism, liberal democracy etc. become possible. Political actors observe these technological shifts and struggle for control, relevance and power. The old elites are contested by the new kids on the block, wielding the new technologies: the aristocrat by the bourgeois, pastoralist tribes by agricultural states, autocrats stuck with traditional propaganda by the kids with smartphones and social media. The present struggle around AI is therefore to be expected; what's more interesting is the type of political possibility space it opens up: is it one where having the bulk of society educated and productive, capable of running the machines is the key factor pushing the country forward in the international technological competition, like we've see post-war, forcing the national elites to cater to their needs, invest in their populations and broadly share the economic output and the political power? Or is it more likely one where the key competitive factor is the size of your datacenters and automated defense factories, where the bulk of people are irrelevant for the architecture of power? Because if it's the latter, the entire idea that democracy will somehow manage to survive and influence who gets what becomes problematic. In the new technological-historical space, democracy becomes structurally unfavorable and thus, unlikely to persist long term.
    • merelydev 5mo ago
      > Isn't that just an instance of the political problem for all ages: who controls what, who gets to rule and who obeys, the fundamental power struggle apparent in all human history. Yes. But modern technology, especially software doesn't have the high barrier to entry like being a feudal lord, but successful software can be just as impactful, tie in economies of scale and network effects and it can be even more powerful, which has allowed the producers of such software to wield significant power and as a result bypass democracy. And this ties in with your point: > The present struggle around AI is therefore to be expected; what's more interesting is the type of political possibility space it opens up: is it one where having the bulk of society educated and productive, capable of running the machines is the key factor pushing the country forward in the international technological competition, like we've see post-war, forcing the national elites to cater to their needs, invest in their populations and broadly share the economic output and the political power? Or is it more likely one where the key competitive factor is the size of your datacenters and automated defense factories, where the bulk of people are irrelevant for the architecture of power? It remains to be seen if this era of LLMs and datacenters raises or reduces the barrier to entry for software production and in general technological innovation. The marketplace is always hungry for innovation and those that can deliver and control it will be in a position of power.
  • skybrian 5mo ago
    The logic of an arms race is that nobody controls the technology. For a literal example, Ukraine and Russia are locked in a drone arms race. Ukraine needs improve drones as fast as they can. There’s no getting off that train until the war is over. This is starting to be true for AI and security bugs. Writing secure Internet-facing software will depend on AI security review. Anthropic can hold Mythos back for a while to buy some time, but the competition isn’t going to stop. It’s also not always true that technologists think they should control AI. Some companies support legislation. But there’s not a lot of progress, so they end up making their own decisions in the meantime.
    • HappMacDonald 5mo ago
      They could still form trade organizations to invent ground rules that members of the organization agree to follow, and then lobby for government to formalize those policies into broader laws that others also have to follow. This strategy would also have the advantage that experts with skin in the game of their field and cutting edge experience get to choose, hone, and debate the policies before testing them so that out-of-touch elected officials don't have to do that step which would be parsecs out of their competence. Unfortunately that would be a strategy that a real member of the real world might come up with to improve their product, their industry, their ability to create, and their relationship with the consumer. Instead we have nothing but parasites optimizing for gaming the quarterly numbers to pump and dump national institutions and building blackmail profiles against other powerful players to out-extort them while everyone involved tries to maximize how much blood they can suck.
  • wartywhoa23 5mo ago
    In reality it's only one entity, which would rather remain obscured, that owns all of the above while also directing the muppet show where seemingly separate parties try to gain control over technology while squeaking funny voices of dissent. In Russian, there's a saying: He who feeds a girl is the one to dance her. In this case, the food is the money printed out of thin air.
  • navane 5mo ago
    Hasn't big capital always owned technology? I don't understand what is the question here. Is this rethorical? Silicon valley owns the internet. The robber barons owned the railways. Big oil. Big pharma. The investment company owned the (slave) trading fleets. The lords owned the agriculture. The clergy owned the books. The Kings owned the armies. Technology accumulates capital, capital accumulates technology.
  • analog31 5mo ago
    >>> So is the next phase of "Democracy" electing who controls technology? I hope so. Recent turns of events notwithstanding, I remain optimistic about democracy in the long run. I think it's going to get harder to say with a straight face that the private sector can really manage vital institutions better than government. Recent reports about commencement speeches at college graduations suggest that within the span of a just a few years, computer programmers no believe that they are riding on the coattails of the technology oligarchs. Besides, nobody wears coats with tails any more. We we go there in one easy step? I'm not that optimistic.
  • idle_zealot 5mo ago
    There's nothing really special about technology here. It's just allocation of power, the same problem as ever.
  • sleight42 5mo ago
    Imagine that. People who are responsible for guiding the morals of much of the world's population see moral implications in AI. How dare these mere "religious leaders" guide their flock. FFS. Morals come from somewhere. For many, that's religion. Deal with it.
  • pluralmonad 5mo ago
    There is only one moral answer. And it is not any of the ones that boil down to strangers at a distance controlling the tech in your life.
  • themafia 5mo ago
    The people should. There cannot be any other correct answer. If the ownership class or the political class _can_ possibly compete for control of it, then they're both too large and too corrupt, and need to be revolted against. The purpose of our society is for people. It's not a lever for the powerful to centralize control. Those who attempt to do so always have evil as their motive.
    • cindyllm 5mo ago
      [dead]
  • lebuffon 5mo ago
    My observation after numerous decades is that people who invent technology don't control it because they seldom imagine how the rest of humanity will ultimately use it. I am thinking of printing press versus newspapers with advertising business model. Same for Radio and TV. The techs made it work. The business weenies made the profit. The original "www" followed a similar path. How that plays out with AI is in motion I think.
• mijailt 5mo ago
  Somewhat related: Peter Thiel and the Antichrist [1] > Thiel: [...] There’s a risk of nuclear war, there’s a risk of environmental disaster. Maybe something specific, like climate change, although there are lots of other ones we’ve come up with. There’s a risk of bioweapons. You have all the different sci-fi scenarios. Obviously, there are certain types of risks with A.I. > But I always think that if we’re going to have this frame of talking about existential risks, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of another type of a bad singularity, which I would describe as the one-world totalitarian state. Because I would say the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance. > [...] > The atheist philosophical framing is “One World or None.” That was a short film that was put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late ’40s. It starts with the nuclear bomb blowing up the world, and obviously, you need a one-world government to stop it — one world or none. And the Christian framing, which in some ways is the same question, is: Antichrist or Armageddon? You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we’re sleepwalking toward Armageddon. “One world or none,” “Antichrist or Armageddon,” on one level, are the same question. > [...] > Thiel: [...] The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. It’s the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that. > In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. The thing that has political resonance is: We need to stop science, we need to just say “stop” to this. And this is where, in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove, Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg. > [...] > Douthat: [...] You’re an investor in A.I. You’re deeply invested in Palantir, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance and technologies of warfare and so on. And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the Antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to impose order on the world, I feel like that Antichrist would maybe be using the tools that you are building. Like, wouldn’t the Antichrist be like: Great, we’re not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far. Isn’t that a concern? Wouldn’t that be the irony of history, that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival? > Thiel: Look, there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don’t think that that’s what I’m doing. --- We live in crazy times. The Pope is pleading for multilateralism and responsible regulation of technology. On the other side, Thiel says fear of technological progress could lead us to a one-world totalitarian government (which he relates to the antichrist, and to me seems like a straw man of multilateralism), while at the same time (arguably) building the technological infrastructure such a totalitarian government would need. I don't know, I think I'm siding with the Pope on all future antichrist related issues. 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antichrist-ross-douthat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic...
• deleted 5mo ago
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• clear-octopus 5mo ago
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• fschuett 5mo ago
  When it comes to the overarching ideology of the techbros, "In Pursuit of the Metaverse" by Dr. Douglas Mark Haugen is a much better read than this encyclical. On the other hand, if he doesn't condemn Gaudium et Spes to the trashbin of history where it belongs, then I don't really care what he has to say.
  • lebuffon 5mo ago
    Aside from the Jesus centered stuff what are the things in Gaudium et Spes that you find to be trash? (I only read a summary before asking)
  • jauntywundrkind 5mo ago
    Why? Can you pitch this piece some, give us some reason to go do the work of finding & reading it?
  • kergonath 5mo ago
    What do you think is wrong with it? I can see how both conservatives and progressives could have reasons to be unhappy with it, but dropping this in like that is not very productive. There are many, many texts in the Vatican archives that are much worse than this.
• greedo 5mo ago
  Frank Herbert was prophetic.
  • siddhartpai 5mo ago
    can you please elaborate on what you mean by this?
    • webnrrd2k 5mo ago
      I think it's a reference to the Butlerian Jihad https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
  • tedd4u 5mo ago
    Another "prophet," Carl Sagan in 1995 "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. And when the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less, lowest-common-denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (with Ann Druyan)
    • idiotsecant 5mo ago
      Sagan was prophetic in a much more realistic way, I think. Herbert is fundamentally constrained by the rule of cool. Actual failure modes of the human firmware are rarely cool. We're generally just not very clever at a species level. My personal view is that biological intelligence is fundamentally an unstable state. We should enjoy every moment of it, like you enjoy the brief flowering of a desert cactus. It's basically the same thing.
• steveBK123 5mo ago
  The interview with Thiel where Douthat asks him “You would prefer the human race to endure right?” And his response is 30 seconds of hemming&hawwing “well…” says it all about the VC bro class. Enjoy Argentina bros.
• mrbluecoat 5mo ago
  AI is eating the world and it's only a matter of time until Catholicism joins the wave: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofiachierchio/2026/05/29/this-startup-is-building-chatgpt-for-catholics/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofiachierchio/2026/05/29/this-...
  • b473a 5mo ago
    I am a Catholic who is heavily involved in adult faith education, and and I can very safely say everyone in the Church thinks this is a terrible idea except for the tech people that make these models. These things are all independent projects. Because of the nuance involved in explaining theological concepts there's a long, long history of reviewing and approving books that explain doctrine. LLM outputs can be reviewed by a competent authority and approved for publication but releasing an AI to explain the theology to the general public in any sort of official way is impossible.
  • 3683826312819 5mo ago
    [dead]
• mentalgear 5mo ago
  Never would have thought that I would defer to matters of Tech, let alone 'AI' policies, to the pope, but here we are: I have to say the 'Magnifica Humanitas' are a pristine work of meditation on AI's power, impact and most importantly the people that control it, while showing how we can make it decoupled from the predatory capitalism that it spawn from, to make it beneficial for humanity in general. (downloaded the full PDF and looking forward to read it on my eReader)
  • dotcoma 5mo ago
    “Downloaded” is a good start ;) (No, I have not read it, nor do I intend to read 42,000 words, thank you)
  • ktrnka 5mo ago
    I found it was a slow read in parts, but it was time well spent. There are deep themes that run through the whole letter and provide much better context for the quotes I've seen in the news. I'd also add that while the letter does offer feedback for the tech industry, the main focus felt like a more positive vision of what the future could be (if countless people work towards it).
• erelong 5mo ago
  ...as well as Catholic teaching...
  • portmanteur 5mo ago
    In which ways, specifically? Or, which ways would you like to promote a discussion about?
    • erelong 5mo ago
      The Second Vatican Council movement has had "popes" that seem to directly attack previous Catholic teaching; I expect this will resolve to the council being rejected as a false council like the "robber council" of Second Council of Ephesus, as well as the papal claimants being declared invalid or "not popes" since that time. The analogy would be like if, since the world cup of soccer is going on, FIFA had a meeting and decided every goal was worth 3 points instead of 1 point. Some people might accept that this is "true soccer" and some "legitimate change to the game". Others would denounce the organization and set up their own leagues to preserve "traditional soccer", and declare the FIFA leadership has no "true authority", and that the meeting deciding on 3 goals has no "binding authority" on "true soccer fans". Something like that has happened. Section 20 of the new "encyclical" reads: > The Second Vatican Council expressed this principle with particular precision in the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, whose sixtieth anniversary we remembered and celebrated with gratitude on 7 December 2025: “If by the autonomy of earthly affairs is meant that created things and societies themselves enjoy their own laws and values… then the demand for autonomy is perfectly in order.” [10] I don't believe this is the former Catholic teaching on "autonomy"; man is not "autonomous" but subject to God's laws. Autonomy would be a "license to sin": you could set your own "law" that it is ok to do this or that thing contrary to Catholic teaching. This is therefore the wrong understanding of "autonomy", and they are ambiguous about what they mean by "true autonomy" (which would be a "freedom within limits"; much like in Genesis, Adam and Eve had total liberty to eat from whatever tree, except for that of the tree which yielded "forbidden fruit"). I believe the document contains more errors like this, continuing this heretical movement of modernism.
      • 5mo ago
• frankest 5mo ago
  It always has to do with leverage. When the seas were much bigger than empires, too big for a country to conquer, but the tech caught up to venture them, Elizabeth I commissioned pirates to go and pillage on behalf of the crown. Labor was needed and pirates had leverage to get an equal share of the pillage. Once the gold and spoils dried out, Pirates became criminals again so they took their spoils and settled in the new world. Democracy is handy when you need people to conquer territory. But once you people saturating the land, the teeth come out and those with any leverage start carving whatever is valuable among themselves (land, real estate, rail lines, energy supply, compute). Even with AI, as the tech came out everyone is allowed to play in the sandbox to surface all the valuable use cases. When cornucopia era starts leveling off, you will see the AI firms with leverage grab the lucrative corners of the industry and shove everyone else off. Thus a government that wants to not be taken over by oligarchs needs to enforce antitrust to keep competition from being artificially reduced. Compute is already trying to play the Energy playbook and look like a utility to get government subsidies and become a monopoly that can then dictate everything.
• Lapsa 5mo ago
  [dead]
• SilverElfin 5mo ago
  Yes that’s because the pope is pushing actual messianism. Are people forgetting what he stands for and which organization he represents? It’s silly that people are suddenly putting him on a pedestal. The Catholic Church is an evil force that has destroyed many other countries’ cultures and religions, not to mention enabled the mass systematic abuse of children. The pope is against tech companies getting power but is happy for the Catholic Church to gather power and abuse it when it’s for his causes. No thanks. Tech companies are far less evil than Catholicism.
  • dudisubekti 5mo ago
    Even today, their ban of contraception alone is a cause of many misery in poor Catholic-majority countries. I wouldn't even bother reading whatever they wrote.
    • SilverElfin 5mo ago
      The various popes have made many statements in the past about converting many ethnicities and countries. With that comes contraception bans, reduced women’s rights, interference in the politics of those countries, corruption, and so many other problems. Like other extremely opinionated belief systems, the Catholic church’s goal is to replace all other beliefs and systems of government, and the power they get is meant to impose their beliefs on everyone in society.
  • lelanthran 5mo ago
    > No thanks. Tech companies are far less evil than Catholicism. I'm atheist, been in tech for almost 30 years now, and even I don't think that is true. What religion and/or belief system do you follow?
• kleton 5mo ago
  The real problem with Magnifica Humanitas is that it will be impossible to produce the first sentence of the canonical Latin version in which the first two words are "Magnifica humanitas" but carries the same meaning as the first sentence in the English version published.
  • martinky24 5mo ago
    I don’t follow how this is a “real problem”?
• jordanb 5mo ago
  Peter Thiel is going to have to update his list of potential antichrists.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • antonvs 5mo ago
    Or just buy a mirror.
    • adastra22 5mo ago
      Vampires don’t reflect in mirrors.
  • sometimelurker 5mo ago
    adding Leo XIV to that list would be pretty funny
• alecco 5mo ago
  They think a next token predictor model is alive or can become AGI/ASI. Altman talked about making a religion. Amodei talks about "building a God" and meets with religious leaders (including the Vatican). I'm convinced these CEOs have "AI psychosis" [1]. LLMs are extremely powerful pseudo-AI and will bring a pseudo-singularity, but they are not true AI [2] and a human at the wheel is still needed for the foreseeable future. The impact is still scary if a tiny fraction of humans are augmented 100x or 1000x. But it ain't no standalone Skynet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
  • CamperBob2 5mo ago
    but they are not true AI [2] Let's ask the operator of a Chinese room to give us a novel math proof. Go on, I'll wait.
    • kelnos 5mo ago
      A novel math proof does not make something AI.
      • crooked-v 5mo ago
        Or it makes it AI in the broad sense, but not AGI. Maybe it's time to borrow "Virtual Intelligence" terminology from Mass Effect - something that's 'smart' but that doesn't have its own true volition or ability to materially self-improve.
        • ipdashc 5mo ago
          Funny enough, it's already taken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_intelligence But it kind of fits?
        • anon291 5mo ago
          The goal posts keep changing. First it was, it's not intelligent if it can't come up with something new. Now it has to seek out self help literature
• anon291 5mo ago
  As a Catholic in AI, this has been my take since the day I started in Industry. Techies have a weird way of thinking themselves world saviors and having poor binary decision making ability. AI will never be alive or have a soul. No machine could have a human rational eternal soul. This is Catholicism 101. No amount of work on matrix multiplication will change that.
  • whimsicalism 5mo ago
    > Techies have a weird way of thinking themselves world saviors and having poor binary decision making ability. rich coming from a belief system that thinks everyone who had the opportunity to go through their water-dunking ritual and culpably didn't is automatically going to be tortured in the underworld for eternity.
    • anon291 5mo ago
      That's not what the church believes but okay whatever. At least I don't think a computer magically becomes a person.
    • Starman_Jones 5mo ago
      As a non-Catholic, this shows such a poor grasp on what makes Catholicism different from Protestantism that it’s comical. Some early Calvinists, for example, said that Catholics were wrong because they DIDN’T believe that. It would have taken you so little effort to uncover your lack of understanding before broadcasting it to the world.
      • whimsicalism 5mo ago
        What specifically is wrong?
        • Starman_Jones 5mo ago
          Catholicism introduced the whole concept of purgatory, which specifically avoids the idea of eternal suffering. Water baptism is not a requirement for grace (read: salvation), although it is a requirement to be recognized as belonging to the Church.
• whimsicalism 5mo ago
  It is interesting to see the progressive/left current in the US re-discover their close cousin in deontological christianity. It's obvious from an outside observer, as Nietzsche wrote on: these are both expressions of the slave revolt in morals.
• 7e 5mo ago
  Can’t have competing Messiahs, can we?
• 7e 5mo ago
  If Judaism were smart, they would label AI as their Messiah finally come. Then at least some prediction would finally come true in a major religion.
  • jewthrow467843 5mo ago
    The most common prophecy in the Old Testament, repeated in many places in many different ways is the return of Jews from all over the world to Zion.