> In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.
I don't think he's suggesting that AI is inherently bad, but that (like any tool) it can be abused by those with wealth and power in a way that violates human dignity.
In fact, one of the problems the previous Pope Leo warned about in "Rerum Novarum" was not just the intentional abuse of power through technological advances but the unintentional negative consequences of treating industry as a good in itself, rather than a domain that is in service to human interests.
For those who are interested in how this social teaching informed economic systems, check out the concept of distributism, popularized by Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton.
bloaf · 4h ago
So I think there are a few subtle things packed into the Pope's statement.
First: A lot of Catholic morality derives from the postulate that man was specially made by God and "in God's image" which gives man an inherent, unique-among-all-creation dignity. Because of this, the church is very sensitive to anything which diminishes the "specialness" of man, as they fear it will undermine people's reasons for treating each other with respect. Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism (man wasn't at the center of the universe) and anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created) before coming around due to overwhelming evidence. The pope is concerned that AI falls into this category of "challenge to human dignity" because it gives the sense that man's cognitive abilities are not unique.
Second: A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning. Indeed, if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding, its painfully clear that his conception of the "soul" is just his attempt at understanding metabolism without any solid physics or chemistry. Obviously no one today says that the soul is in charge of the "locomotion" of living things, but up until very recently the one last bastion of unexplained behavior where the religious could justify their belief in the soul was the intellect. AI is a direct assault on this final motte, as it is concrete evidence that many of the "intellectual" outputs of the soul could, at least in principle, have a naturalistic explanation. (There was plenty of evidence of the intellect being fully naturalistic prior to AI, but it wasn't the kind of irrefutable "here's a fully natural thing that does the thing you said natural things couldn't do" evidence).
> The pope is concerned that AI falls into this category of "challenge to human dignity" because it gives the sense that man's cognitive abilities are not unique.
While this concern certainly exists to some extent in the Church, and may be somewhere in the Pope's thoughts, his explicit comparison to the Industrial Revolution and Rerum Novarum's response to it, and to it as a threat not only to human dignity but also to justice and labor, indicates that a—arguably the—major concern is for it as a potential occasion of and force for material mistreatment.
lo_zamoyski · 1h ago
Yes, or to put it more precisely, the attack on human dignity for which concern is being shown is precisely the injustice that AI can become the handmaiden of.
bumby · 3h ago
>A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning.
Can you elaborate on how you arrived at this conclusion? There are multiple Popes that have rejected “god-of-the-gaps” explanations instead invoking the idea that science helps one learn more about God, not as a rationale for invoking God where we are ignorant.
bloaf · 2h ago
I did elaborate, in that very post.
I read Aquinas and realized that the whole ancient conception of a soul is tied together with the ancient concept of vitalism. Within vitalism you need something to explain why living matter is different than non-living matter, and that something is the presence of a soul! Hey presto, add a few layers of philosophy and divine revelation and you arrive at the Christian immortal soul.
(In this case "god of the gaps" does not refer to the Catholic God himself, but instead it refers specifically to the concept of the soul)
90s_dev · 2h ago
So your refutation of Aquinas's reasoning is that he starts on a foundation of Artistotle, and Aristotle (a pagan non-Christian) has shaky foundations? Why did you leave out the fact that Aquinas didn't cite Aristotle as infallible, nor rely on Aristotelian foundations as such, but rather took Catholicism as a starting point, which is inherently a-philosophical, and just tried to explain it using Aristotle as a starting point?
bloaf · 1h ago
It sounds to me like you're drawing distinctions without a difference.
Aquinas, in his Summa, makes a series of assertion-of-fact about souls. Specifically, he claims that the soul explains (or "is the principle of") certain otherwise-unexplained phenomenon.
It doesn't matter how he got there (i.e. whether he was arguing with someone online, or trying to explain catholicism in terms of Aristotle, or if he was just an LLM stochastically putting ink on parchment), the fact is that inventing a supernatural thing that explains a bunch of unexplained phenomenon is precisely what I meant by "god-of-the-gaps style reasoning."
90s_dev · 1h ago
> the fact is that inventing a supernatural thing
And therein lies my point: the purpose of Aquinas was purely to explain preexisting Catholic theology, using Aristotle as a starting point. He invented nothing.
You can say "the Catholic Church invented the soul to explain [etc]" and then I'd just push it back to Christianity itself, and if you'd concede on that, we'd have resolved my initial argument.
lo_zamoyski · 1h ago
FYI, the Summa is a pedagogical treatise. It should be read as one.
geye1234 · 2h ago
Vitalism is utterly foreign to anything found in Aquinas or Aristotle. Check out Edward Feser's Aquinas for a beginner-friendly discussion of what they say.
bloaf · 2h ago
> Vitalism is utterly foreign to anything found in Aquinas or Aristotle.
This is simply not true, and I've quoted the passages from Aquinas that explicitly assert metaphysical differences between living and non-living matter in this very thread.
lo_zamoyski · 1h ago
You gravely misunderstand what you are reading. If you wish to understand what Aquinas means, you ought to understand what Aristotle means by substance, form, and soul, what powers are in this context. You appear to be sneaking in a Cartesian dualism here.
If you want a tidy introduction to metaphysics of this sort, consider this one [0].
I was asking for more elaborating because the larger context goes beyond Aquinas. At the very least, it seems like cherry picking, especially considering other Popes explicitly use the “god-of-the-gaps” term when they refute the very idea.
thatcat · 1h ago
Wouldn't man creating ai be an even more impressive unique action that serves as evidence that man is in fact created in gods image, since like god, man seeks to create new forms of intelligence? It seems like the pope is concerned with social issues like the growing inequality and how ai may worsen the position of labor and undermine the motivation people have to become more intellectually capable.
EventH- · 3h ago
Modern physics and biology really do not conflict with the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul but only describe in further detail the operations of the body.
The immateriality of the intellect is included there. Aquinas would say it is only the intellect that can understand a universal concept, which is itself immaterial. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative difference from the capabilities of AI. It is really the reductionists who are guilty of 'woo' here.
bloaf · 3h ago
I won't deny that there are watered down versions of the Thomistic soul that are agnostic with respect to the physicality or super-naturality of things like digestion, but Aquinas himself is quite clear:
> The lowest of the operations of the soul is that which is performed by a corporeal organ, and by virtue of a corporeal quality. Yet this transcends the operation of the corporeal nature; because the movements of bodies are caused by an extrinsic principle, while these operations are from an intrinsic principle; for this is common to all the operations of the soul; since every animate thing, in some way, moves itself. Such is the operation of the "vegetative soul"; for digestion, and what follows, is caused instrumentally by the action of heat, as the Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 4).
That is to say: we cannot explain things like digestion "naturally" as we would require an "external principle" that does not exist for living things, instead because they "move themselves" they require a super-natural explanation, i.e. the soul.
Indeed, Aquinas puts the following as a potential object, which he rebuts
> Objection 1: It would seem that the parts of the vegetative soul are not fittingly described—namely, the nutritive, augmentative, and generative. For these are called "natural" forces. But the powers of the soul are above the natural forces. Therefore we should not class the above forces as powers of the soul.
> On the contrary, The Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 2,4) that the operations of this soul are "generation, the use of food," and (cf. De Anima iii, 9) "growth."
geye1234 · 2h ago
The word 'soul' is used by Aquinas and Aristotle in a very different way from how modern people (from Descartes onward) use it, and this is the cause of an enormous amount of confusion.
Edward Feser's book Aquinas is a good starting point for understanding it.
bloaf · 2h ago
I am quite familiar with Ed Feser, I refer to his writings often.
Indeed, Aquinas is using the soul the way that modern scientists use "dark matter". Except where the modern problem is unexpected rates of universal expansion, Aquinas' problem is vitalism-qua-"why are living things different than non-living things."
Once we abandoned vitalism, the conception of the soul must therefore also change. But in my reading of history, there is no clear break; no "before" and "after". Aquinas' definitions and concepts were never really abandoned, the church just retreated from the bailey of "the soul explains all the features of living matter including how it moves around" to the motte of "the soul explains intellect/reason/will since thats the only thing left thats not obviously physical."
Indeed, you will see that Aquinas' language suffuses most official Catholic teaching on the soul, even though the official teachings are usually a slightly generalized version of Aquinas's concrete assertions.
90s_dev · 1h ago
> you will see that Aquinas' language suffuses most official Catholic teaching on the soul
I wish I could find the document, but about 2 years ago, the Vatican released an official document explaining that Rome had been using certain philosophical traditions, including Thomism, in its official documents and councils for a few hundred years, because it was convenient, yet without making it official to any degree. I was so happy when it came out because it vindicated what I had been telling all my Thomist friends, that Thomism is not official Catholic doctrine.
EventH- · 1h ago
First, the 'On the contrary...' in the article is not a rebuttal to the specific objection but a quote from an authority (Aristotle) supporting his general position. His specific rebuttal distinguishing the senses of 'natural' is later in that article.
Second, the soul is not, on the Aristotelian-Thomistic thesis, a "supernatural" being, as an angel or God would be since (though not material themselves) they properly belong to the material order.
So these are natural, not supernatural explanations, which nevertheless go beyond the purely material (corporeal) and so are 'above' them. In the quoted article, he means that these characteristic activites of living things are not simply reducible to those of the material parts themselves, since the living thing possesses the principle of its own organization/growth/reproduction etc. that non-living material does not, so something beyond the non-living 'corporeal' order must be operating.
agensaequivocum · 47m ago
Aquinas is explaining the formal cause i.e, the soul. The physical particulars of how digestion work would be the agent and material causes. He wouldn't deny that they exist. Modern science erroneously disregards formal and final causality.
svieira · 2h ago
And yet vegetative life stops digesting when the plant dies. The mechanics are all still there, but we can not make them continue. To take an example dear to HN, we can't make the old American Chestnut trees "start" again once they have died.
90s_dev · 3h ago
Thomism is very overrated, people seem to lean on it because it sounds smart, and maybe it was for its time, but it relies entirely on Aristotelianism, and such systematic metaphysical philosophies are only as good as the physics they base themselves on, and Aristotle's physics were garbage (not entirely his fault).
90s_dev · 2h ago
> the church is very sensitive to anything which diminishes the "specialness" of man
No, it just claims that human souls are created differently than animal souls, and therefore have different properties. It defends this with the same kind of zeal that you defend a round earth with, and for the same reasons.
> as they fear it will undermine people's reasons for treating each other with respect
I didn't realize the members and minds of the Catholic Church were so united in motive!
> anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created)
Come on, you know the Catholic Church has never taught this.
> A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning Indeed, if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding--
He's one Catholic theologian, even if eminent, out of hundreds who are just as eminent. Why single him out? Where does the Bible say Aquinas is infallible? What a strange strawman.
bloaf · 2h ago
> No, it just claims that human souls are created differently than animal souls
That's... not much different than what I said (which was that humans are extra special)? I think it was in the early 1900s that the church Magisterium finally said that human souls belonged to different "orders" than plant and animal souls. And hey, wouldn't you know it, but the "orders" spelled out by the Magisterium broke exactly along the lines Aquinas laid out in the Summa. That's why I singled him out.
> I think it was in the early 1900s that the church Magisterium finally said that human souls belonged to different "orders" than plant and animal souls
Or you could go back to Genesis 2:7 and countless other Biblical passages. This isn't about the Church, it's just a core tenet of Christianity.
> The church excommunicated at least one scientist for early work on evolution
Because he followed Lamarck and Darwin, a vague deist and an agnostic. For a prominent scholar who claimed to be Catholic, excommunication was probably the correct course of action to avoid the scandal of confusing Catholics. This had nothing to do with theistic evolution, which neither of them believed in
But theistic evolution just says that maybe God used natural processes to create the physical bodies of the original humans, apart from their souls which are created individually and instantly for each person.
This was conceded even by St. Augustine as a possibility.
analog31 · 2h ago
I'm not an expert in this, but I think there's an encyclical to the effect that Thomism is the philosophical basis of Christianity. I also think that his books were recognized by earlier encyclicals, but I don't know if there has been a consistent system of "official" encyclicals throughout the centuries.
90s_dev · 2h ago
There's a papal document from about 2 years ago saying exactly the opposite, effectively that Thomism has been useful within Christendom to explain Catholic doctrines for hundreds of years, but now that Christendom is dead, new ways of explaining the same timeless, aphilosophical theologies must be invented, and Thomism essentially left in the past. I was particularly happy when it came out, especially with how it came from Rome, because I came to the same conclusion about 6 months prior.
analog31 · 1h ago
Fascinating. I certainly haven't kept up.
deadbabe · 4h ago
The idea of humans having no soul is terrifying, essentially we would all just be p-zombies, functioning entirely as an organic machine does, but with no real truly conscious experience.
CuriouslyC · 3h ago
I have the opposite take away from humans having no soul - that the entire universe is aware/alive. We experience consciousness and agency, if there's no magic fairy dust that gets sprinkled on us to make that happen, we shouldn't expect to be fundamentally different from the universe in that respect.
bumby · 3h ago
Panpsychism?
anon84873628 · 2h ago
Some say that pure physicalism necessitates panpsychism.
bloaf · 3h ago
This doesn't follow, at least not in my understanding. Consider the following:
Qualia are "what it 'feels like' to experience some sensory input."
Up until recently, most LLMs were "once through" meaning that the only "sensory inputs" they "experienced" would be the raw text. So we might argue that "experiencing sensory input" means "tokenizing raw text," and that therefore the tokens that the LLM processes internally are the qualia.
But that's un-satisfying. We don't say that the impulses sent from the eye to the brain are the qualia, and the tokenization process sounds more like "eye turning light into electrical signals" than what we actually mean by qualia.
So now we focus on the "feeling" word in our definition of qualia. A feeling isn't a token or an electrical impulse, its our internal reaction to that token or electical impulse.
So because once-through LLMs have no input that corresponds to "their internal reaction to a token", they can never be said to "experience" a "feeling" using our previous definition of experience as "processing some input".
But this directly suggests the solution to the qualia problem: if we were to build an LLM that did accept an input that represented "its internal reaction to the tokens it previously experienced" then we'd have invented qualia from scratch. The qualia would be precisely the log file that the LLM generated and "sent back around" as input for the next round.
Why? The idea of a soul is basically just a conceptual attractor that punts off the problem to another realm so you don't have to think about it and you can artificially terminate causality.
If what we are is a gyre in a multi dimensional fractal then the interactions and problem solving going on inside of our brains is still happening and making choices even if those choices are being made inside of and purely as a consequence of the whole.
galangalalgol · 3h ago
Agreed, and packed in there was the notion that the experience of consciousness is somehow related to the soul. I'm leaning towards Metzingers notion that that experience is a result of our model of self, being updated without our awareness, so that we think of that model as ourself instead of just a model of ourself. That doesn't diminish the utility of consciousness, or make it less amazing. But I don't think that gap is empty for God to fill so we don't need to tie consciousness in with the soul. Some of the Christian bible's teachings about dying to self sound an aweful lot like Buddhist meditation seeking Nirvana or ego death. So it might even be part of the plan to shed consciousness. Incidentally if you think about blinking or breathing, it becomes voluntary instead of involuntary. Mindful meditation and Vipassana both have you think about sensation and your responses to stimulus in a very voluntary way, so it makes sense the update process for the self model might become voluntary and disable consciousness.
jdietrich · 2h ago
Buddhist theology broadly rejects the existence of the soul, and has a much fuzzier concept of "self" than most religious or secular viewpoints - the Buddhist "self" is not transcendental, but emergent and ephemeral.
The conscious experience is certainly "real" - you can subjectively confirm that. It's just that the free will is an illusion :-)
kjkjadksj · 4h ago
Do you believe anything different? You touch the stove and yell in pain. Your boss stresses you out and you have a panic attack. You get a raise and feel happy. You get taxed and feel angry.
These are all very much responses people have modeled in flies in lab setting.
unyttigfjelltol · 3h ago
"While animals and plants certainly have a form of soul, it remains distinct from the human experience."[1]
> A lot of Catholic morality derives from the postulate that man was specially made by God and "in God's image" which gives man an inherent, unique-among-all-creation dignity
The Church's understanding of morality draws heavily from natural law theory. Natural law theory grounds morality in human nature: what is good for human beings is determined by what it means to be human. Morality enters the picture, because unlike other animals or beings, a central part of what it means to be human is rational and to be able to choose freely between apprehended alternatives. This forms the basis for rights and responsibilities.
Now, it would be a mistake to say that the Imago Dei does not inform this understanding. In fact, the image of God consists of Man's rationality and freedom which stands in analogous relation to God (God is obviously infinitely different from human beings, but nonetheless the analogia entis holds, because it is analogical, neither univocal nor equivocal). It is Man's nature as intellectual being that makes him created in the image of God. (Angels, too, are created in the image of God for the same reasons. They have angelic intellects which differ from human intellects; whereas human beings apprehend reality through the senses from which the intellect then abstracts forms imperfectly, angels can apprehend the forms of things directly.)
I would also say that "postulate" is not the right term, as the Church is not postulating. It accepts this as true.
> Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism (man wasn't at the center of the universe) and anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created) before coming around due to overwhelming evidence.
The Universe we inhabit is, in this greater cosmology, quite lowly in comparison. So even if human beings were to inhabit a spatial center (whatever significance you wish to attach to that), it would be a lowly center. W.r.t. evolution, the opposition the Church has is not to various biological explanations of change and adaptation, but evolutionism, which is a metaphysical position, not a biological one, one that many who advocate for evolution also hold without realizing it is the domain of metaphysics, not biology. The Church still holds that each soul is the result of a special act of creation. I won't get into the metaphysics here, but it is decidedly not Cartesian.
> A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning.
I have no idea what you mean here. The intellect and will are held to be immaterial faculties, making human souls intellectual [0]. Aristotle gives arguments for this position. Roughly, the intellect cannot be a purely physical faculty, because abstraction ultimately involves the separation of form from particulars. Because matter (understood as prime matter, etc) is the particularizing principle, the joining of matter with form is what is the cause of concrete instances of that form. Thus, if the intellect were material, the apprehension of form would mean the instantiation of the apprehended thing in the intellect as a particular, which is clearly not what happens! When you apprehend "triangularity" or "Horseness", you do not instantiate a concrete triangle or a concrete horse in your mind! And, in fact, if you did, you would by the very act fail to grasp the universal concept, because particulars by definition exclude all others particulars except themselves. You would possess this triangle or this horse, and not any other of the potentially infinite instances of them. You would not grasp what it means to be a triangle or a horse.
So, it is not a matter of the Church feeling threatened in some way. Concerns have nothing to do with some kind of conceptual threat to the "specialness" of human beings. AI, on this account, simply cannot reason; if it could, then it could, but it cannot. The computational formalism is, to put it in Searlian terms, all syntax and no semantics, which is to say no intentionality. And even here, the physical device isn't even objectively a computer and isn't objectively computing (both Searle and Kripke present arguments for this, for example). But whether computers can reason is actually besides the point.
> Obviously no one today says that the soul is in charge of the "locomotion" of living things
You seem to misunderstand what a soul is. The soul is the form of a living thing. Thus, the soul of horse is that principle which causes it to be the kind of thing it is, and thus is its organizing principle. This isn't Cartesian metaphysics here where you have one thing, the res cogitans, and a second thing, the res extensa, kind of glued to one another, but really two separate things. By analogy, if you have a sphere of bronze, then the "soul" of that ball is the "sphericity". The sphericity makes the ball of bronze what it is. The sphere ceases to be a sphere if you were to melt it or hammer it into a cube.
If this topic interests you, you will find Feser's "Immortal Souls" interesting [1]. He gives a thorough treatment of the subject.
> The Church's understanding of morality draws heavily from natural law theory.
This is true, although I do want to draw a bit of a distinction between the churches understanding-qua-official-teaching, and understanding-qua-what-actual-catholic-officials-believe. I often see very devout people look at something like CCC 1956:
> The natural law, present in the heart of each man and established by reason, is universal in its precepts and its authority extends to all men. It expresses the dignity of the person and determines the basis for his fundamental rights and duties
and come away with "Our moral rights and duties derive from our dignity via natural law" which isn't quite right, but nevertheless drives their behavior.
Its just like how the church finally, in 1822, explicitly allowed heliocentric books to be published. Technically, the church never officially asserted geocentrism as a doctrine and so heliocentric books should have been fine, but in practice, the chief censors were actually prohibiting them from being published because it was the common view among officials at the time that the church had in fact officially condemned heliocentrism in the Galileo case.
> I would also say that "postulate" is not the right term, as the Church is not postulating. It accepts this as true.
Yes, the better word for me to use would have been axiom; I was muddling my mathematical terms a bit.
> I have no idea what you mean here. The intellect and will are held to be immaterial faculties, making human souls intellectual
I am saying that because of the belief that "you can't explain that physically" where that = "abstraction", we've entered "God of the gaps" territory.
Now its true, I have read philosophical arguments that abstraction (or in the case of Ed Feser's argument, Incompossibility) is fundamentally impossible to do physically. And indeed, if those arguments succeeded we would be out of the woods. But I've universally found the philosophy to be very weak; to the point that even an amateur philosopher like myself can see that there are real-actual logical flaws, or that they rely on what appear to be extremely weak premises.
> Concerns have nothing to do with some kind of conceptual threat to the "specialness" of human beings. AI, on this account, simply cannot reason; if it could, then it could, but it cannot.
This is precisely the worry. This is a falsifiable prediction of Catholic theology: the instant there exists an AI which can actually reason, Catholic theology will have been falsified.
Now no doubt the Catholic philosophers will respond to such an eventuality by simultaneously claim that the machine isn't "doing it right" and that "our other accounts of Catholic theology are better anyway", but real credibility-damage will be done to Catholic theology.
90s_dev · 3h ago
Well, the very recent Papal document that talked about this [1], did compare it to Revelation 13:15 [2] very explicitly [3]. I can't help but think he's piggybacking off that notion.
[2] "and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast so that the image of the beast should even speak, and to cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain." (Rev 13:15)
[3] `Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work`
90s_dev · 3h ago
Re: the "beast" of Revelation
For context, within Catholic understanding of St. John, any time he talks about the "beast" or "those who dwell upon the face of the earth", he's referring to people who's hearts and minds are centered on this illusory paradise, or as St. Paul calls it, "the flesh", and as St. John says, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, which all pass away".
This is in sharp contrast to "those who dwell in heaven" or "an angel, that is, a man" which represents anyone who's heart and mind are of the "the spirit" in St. Paul's words, or rather, who shun "all that will pass away as the flower fades and the grass withers" as St. Peter puts it.
So the "beast" here does not mean some mythical creature, but simply Adam and those who follow his principles and are made of "the dust of the earth", as opposed to Jesus, the New Adam, who is made of "stardust" as St. Paul compares.
beloch · 2h ago
Comparing it to the industrial revolution is pretty direct. The industrial revolution resulted in a huge leap forward in the quality of the average human life... eventually. It took a while to distribute the gains equally. Initially, it was a big step down and a huge increase in suffering for a lot of people. It took social advances to make technological advances work for (nearly) everybody.
Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life. Getting ahead of the problem, from the social side, could reduce the short-term suffering.
sorcerer-mar · 2h ago
It didn't just "take a while." It took 150 years of intense reformation efforts that potentially never would've come to fruition if not for the hard-reset of two World Wars.
I realize you're kind of suggesting this later in your comment, but HN'ers really think prosperity is a default output of technological advancement.
TheGrognardling · 1h ago
This is absolutely a crucial and salient point; call me an optimist, but I'm encouraged by the fact that it seems as technological advancement has progressed throughout human history, the speed of responses has accelerated in conjunction with shortened timelines - steam and mechanization, electricity and mass production, telecommunications and media, digital information, and now artificial intelligence have respectively seen faster response times compared to each previous revolution.
I think short-term suffering, or at the very least disruption (as we're seeing) is essentially inevitable, but with all of these preemptive frameworks being implemented, or at the very least discussed (though just the latter isn't really good enough at all, of course) in turnaround times that are unprecedented, I really do not foresee a techno-dystopia; however, again, perhaps that's just wishful thinking.
Quite honestly, I think a pragmatic place to start, outside of theology and moral philosophy, is to make AI development necessarily adherent to some consortium of standards outlined by governments and implemented by boards within industries - like what we see with many engineering professions in the US and other countries.
zpeti · 2h ago
> Initially, it was a big step down
Is this really true though? Being an agricultural feudal society is much much worse than the dreamy view we have of farming these days, and almost everyone even today chooses to work in a factory rather than a farm if they have that choice, in china, Africa, everywhere.
We have this image of gloomy coal powered cities being the worst place possible but in fact it was still better than the alternatives
achierius · 2h ago
They were not. In brief, we know this because of both individual accounts -- people were quite verbal about preferring the life of an independent peasant to that of the 'servant-like' factory worker -- and aggregate demographic trends, which show that peasants primarily moved into the cities during hard times, when famine and economic woes made their previous lifestyle impossible.
Cities at the time were charnel houses -- even worse, I think, than the popular imagining of them today. The rate of death in London, as well as in other cities during the revolution, was so high that it needed a constant inward flow of immigrants to even maintain its population. Without the safer, more livable countryside to provide a continuous supply of fresh meat for the mills, those cities would have depopulated through a combination of plague, malnutrition, violence, and workplace injury.
beloch · 1h ago
Labour laws were a big problem. e.g. In the early stages of the revolution in England, it was illegal to leave your job and take another one. It was a choice between poor pay/unsafe working conditions and jail. Even once workers won the right to find jobs elsewhere, pay was still so poor that entire families, including children, had to work for families to stay afloat.
anigbrowl · 1h ago
Feudalism isn't necessarily that bad if your environment is stable. A lot of people moved into industry during the 18th and 19th centuries not because working the land was so awful to begin with, but because it became increasingly untenable as formerly public lands were privatized by legal fiat, and private landholdings were aggressively consolidated. Around the beginning of the Industrial revolution, the number of private landowners in the UK fell by over 80%, from about 1 person out of every 60 to 1 in 600 or so (the population grew about 25% over the same period).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act has an OK overview but is a bit thin and just a starting point. The political upheavals still echo in British politics today. I think it's fair to say that some of the changes were driven by the lure of profit (and associated national revenue) and some out of a desire to avert a domestic repeat of the American and French revolutions.
zmgsabst · 2h ago
It was worse for people like the Luddites, who had artisanal jobs replaced by machinery.
They were so angry about their fall in circumstance they revolted (and have been slandered by capitalists since).
90s_dev · 3h ago
> it can be abused by those with wealth and power in a way that violates human dignity
What does power have to do with violating dignity? Justice and labor I could understand, but a sense of dignity can be destroyed without absolutely any typical power or coersion.
Unless of course by power in this case you don't mean political, but influential, for example by making sure through media that several generations of certain demographics grow up being taught that they're incompetent at best and intrinstically evil at worst. Then sure, I can see that, and have.
lokar · 4h ago
> … Chesterton
Of fence fame
turing_complete · 4h ago
For those who don't know Chesterton: He is one of the most insightful, most entertaining writers you will ever read.
90s_dev · 1h ago
A lot of my friends have said so, and to be fair I haven't read more than a few paragraphs that they quoted or linked me to, but honestly, he's just... not for me I guess.
alabastervlog · 3h ago
Martin Gardner wrote introductions for editions of several of Chesterton’s books, which is a nice bonus if you’re the kind of dork who likes a good introduction (guilty). They’re on some of the Dover thrift editions, I think, and probably some others.
drewcoo · 3h ago
Disagree. He was a smug, utterly conservative Catholic who wallowed in his biases, an authoritarian and an anti-semite.
Cyphase · 2h ago
Can you provide references for these claims?
Cyphase · 3h ago
I was literally scrolling down this sub-thread thinking of posting "Chesterton of fence fame". The hive mind..
asciimov · 1h ago
…and Father Brown.
petre · 45m ago
Yup, he talks about stuff like DOGE's AI mass firing tool.
"New challenges?" "Like any tool?" Impedance mismatch!
Also, what is an American pope doing using a word like "defence," which is spelled with an 's' here?
dragonwriter · 3h ago
Its the official Vatican translation into English of an address in Italian to the College of Cardinals. For such translations, the Vatican favors British English.
It's not an article written by the Pope in English.
asveikau · 4h ago
He really didn't say a lot there, so I am wondering if it merits an HN thread. Maybe over time it will be clearer what he means, or what he thinks on the topic. I don't feel like I can read a lot into that one piece.
Edit: why the downvotes? It's true he said very little, and it will take more time for him to elaborate on a position. I guess you guys hallucinate more than a bad AI. As an example, I saw a commentary that the prior Pope Leo's Rerum novarum was not really that influential until a few decades after it was written. This stuff happens on long timescales.
Jtsummers · 6h ago
The submission title comes from one sentence near the end, here's the paragraph containing it:
> Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
The encyclical he references, Rerum Novarum, can be found here [0] and is much more interesting since it's more than just a single sentence.
I hope this Pope does not go with a similar approach. This encyclical, in the face of challenges of the Industrial Revolution, focuses almost explicitly on how socialism is unnatural (note that he does not even try to call it unchristian). The argumentation hinges on an appeal to emotion with the iconography of the poor father who worked years for a small parcel of land. The solution proposed is let the rich get richer, let’s just ask them to be fair, with some intervention from the church, which is ipse dixit just to protect a convenient and isolated principle of natural order.
dragonwriter · 2h ago
> This encyclical, in the face of challenges of the Industrial Revolution, focuses almost explicitly on how socialism is unnatural
It...does not. It follows the basic structure:
1. There's a problem with the present condition under industrial capitalism
2. Socialism is the wrong solution. (There are lots of problems with this part, including that it makes the very common error of misinterpreting the socialist opposition to private property—ownership of the non-financial means of production separated from the workers whose labor is applied to those means of production—as an opposition to individual human property generally; the latter may be a feature of some schools of socialism but is not a general feature of socialism.)
3. Laying out what Leo XIII saw as the Catholic solution.
The first part takes 3 paragraphs. (1-3)
The second part takes 17 paragraphs. (4-20)
The third part takes 43 paragraphs. (21-63)
It is simply wrong to take the second section is the main focus, and it is equally incorrect to describe the solution taking up the vast majority of the document as nothing more than "let the rich get richer, let's just ask them to be fair, with some intervention from the church."
cgio · 1h ago
I wanted to be more fair and less dismissive, even though from my perspective the problematic second part is the main focus. But I did spend more time on the third part, and has it made it even worse? First some generalities about how poor people should not care about money and some protection of rights (which was a previous achievement already). Then a call to action, with expedience at that to quoting
"it is expedient to bring under special notice certain matters of moment. First of all, there is the duty of safeguarding private property by legal enactment and protection. Most of all it is essential, where the passion of greed is so strong, to keep the populace within the line of duty; for, if all may justly strive to better their condition, neither justice nor the common good allows any individual to seize upon that which belongs to another, or, under the futile and shallow pretext of equality, to lay violent hands on other people's possessions."
And then even worse still
"When work people have recourse to a strike and become voluntarily idle, it is frequently because the hours of labor are too long, or the work too hard, or because they consider their wages insufficient. The grave inconvenience of this not uncommon occurrence should be obviated by public remedial measures; for such paralysing of labor not only affects the masters and their work people alike, but is extremely injurious to trade and to the general interests of the public; moreover, on such occasions, violence and disorder are generally not far distant, and thus it frequently happens that the public peace is imperiled. The laws should forestall and prevent such troubles from arising; they should lend their influence and authority to the removal in good time of the causes which lead to conflicts between employers and employed. "
So stop industrial action immediately and in the future try to remove the causes!
Thank you for convincing me to read it further, it gave more gravitas to a hastily formed opinion on my end, but did not change it. Back to my message, I hope this is not what we get from Leo XIV on the new challenges, even though the fact that he chose his name on the basis of Leo XIII is not very promising.
Actually, I respect more something as honest as: Ἀπόδοτε τὰ τοῦ Καίσαρος τῷ Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ τῷ Θεῷ.
This is indeed in line with the original document discussed and equally second class. In support of a quantum nuclear family, where the idea and concept of the working parents whose existence waves collapse nightly to kiss their kids goodnight and give them a loaf of bread, is somehow an ideal in danger from a universal income family, where the "lazy" parents spend time with their kids and their communities.
TheFreim · 3h ago
> The solution proposed is let the rich get richer, let’s just ask them to be fair...
This is not accurate.
Leo XIII explicitly calls for state action to protect the rights and interests of the working man. Leo says that the public authority—i.e. the state—has a duty to "prevent [the violation of rights] and to punish injury" (Rerum novarum 37). He proceeds to make note that the poor—unlike the rich, who have means of shielding themselves due to their wealth—depend upon the state to a higher degree and therefore should be "specially cared for and protected by the government".
Furthermore, Leo states that the working man has, "has interests in which he should be protected by the State," namely their spiritual and physical well-being (Rerum novarum 40). In the following sections he argues for restrictions to be put in place to ensure that workers have appropriate time for rest in accordance with their work.
Suffice it to say, Pope Leo XIII absolutely does not envision a world where the wealthy are merely "just ask" for fairness. He certainly places limitations on proper government action in his refutation of socialism, but it is completely wrong to portray this as a rejection of state protection of workers in its entirety (this becomes much more obvious when reading his work in line with prior teachings pertaining to state action).
Having re-read Rerum Novarum within the last week, what you are saying is reductive to the point of not accurately portraying the contents of the encyclical. I would encourage you and others to (re)read the encyclical with an eye towards getting a more full and accurate understanding.
cgio · 2h ago
It is at best reading a humanistic call, no spiritual content at all. I wonder how the reference to Nature works as an argument for the law of the strongest essentially but not e.g. for homosexuality. Why is the argument that we have to be better than our nature not applicable in the context of economics? These are the things that would give depth to a position. I am as reductionist as he himself when he argues with the straw man of “socialists are coming to take your houses”. We all see in the Western world who came for our houses after all. I would dedicate more time to a position that is substantial even if not agreeable. Full disclosure, I am a believer, one though who has also seen socialist economic structures applied in practice in monasteries. This is not a spiritual position I am reading, it is a second class political manifesto with Latin dressage for impressionability.
kulahan · 32m ago
> Why is the argument that we have to be better than our nature not applicable in the context of economics?
This is an extremely common theme across the Catholic Church, though?? It’s one of the primary reasons the church is against Socialism - it reduces people to their economic status and strips them of their inherent human dignity through that process. Agree with it or not, it’s absolutely ignorant to imply the Church doesn’t apply its moral teachings to economic scenarios.
cgio · 3m ago
This is because dignity is somehow naturally aligned with property, indirectly power? I give an example where it does apply moral teachings to economic scenarios myself, e.g. monastic life. If you mean that the natural property argument is to be considered a moral teaching then I don’t see how morals and not mere power dynamics are required for this model. Can you give an example so that I can assess if my implied ignorance refers to other scenarios?
marc_abonce · 4h ago
It's worth mentioning that earlier this year the Vatican published a far longer document about AI. It's a very long read, but it's actually very interesting and worth reading.
I see they publish this in five languages (de,en,es,fr,it). I'm slightly bummed they don't have a Latin version. (It looks like the homepage, https://www.vatican.va, has a Latin option, but maybe the content there is limited).
dragonwriter · 2h ago
> I see they publish this in five languages (de,en,es,fr,it). I'm slightly bummed they don't have a Latin version
The Vatican doesn't tend to translate current documents or speeches into Latin, though certain kinds of documents are, by tradition, issued originally and authoritatively in Latin and those are translated into other languages. This speech was given in Italian, so...
lofaszvanitt · 1h ago
Lots of unemployed and disillusioned people meaning lots of extra followers. This will be an interesting, long term fight against evil.
cratermoon · 1h ago
See also ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence,
I ask because .va is presumably for Vatican, so 'vatican.va' is kind of redundant, they could just use 'va' right? (You might need an 'http://' or a fully-qualifying '.' suffix in a browser, which I suppose is an argument against doing it, but still.)
dragonwriter · 3h ago
> I ask because .va is presumably for Vatican,
.va is the ccTLD for the State of Vatican City (equivalent to, say, .uk for the United Kingdom)
vatican.va is the domain used by the Holy See as such. Given the relation between the Holy See and the State of Vatican City, this is very loosely parallel to royal.uk ("The Vatican" is a common metonym for the Holy See)
vaticanstate.va is the domain used by the State of Vatican City (this is like gov.uk)
Several subordinate organizations of the Holy See or the State of Vatican City have their own second-level domains under the .va ccTLD.
josephcsible · 3h ago
There are a handful. https://lab.avl.la/dotless/ has a list of some. Its not allowed for gTLDs, but ccTLDs belong to the corresponding country so nobody has the authority to disallow it for them.
LadyCailin · 2h ago
This got me down a rabbit hole. ICANN has a form where you can report a name collision, and if it causes harm to life, they apparently will take action to remove an entry from DNS. I wonder if this has ever been exercised, and if so, I would be curious to hear the story.
> ICANN will initiate an emergency response for name collision reports only where there is a reasonable belief that the name collision presents a clear and present danger to human life.
pelagicAustral · 3h ago
If you want to talk about redundancy in domain naming conventions look no further. The Falkland Islands ran FIG.GOV.FK for government websites, in the shape of FIG.GOV.FK/CUSTOMS meaning "Customs service of the Falkland Islands Government (FIG), of the government (GOV) of the Falkland Islands (FK)". Even today they dont shake the FALKLANDS.GOV.FK which is again redundant...
philistine · 32m ago
You probably have the most convoluted. I've got an example in its simplest form for you: https://canada.ca
delusional · 5h ago
At least for a while dk-hostmaster, the national registry in Denmark was using http://dk as (one of) their domains. Nowadays they're called "punktum dk" (literally "dot dk") and have dropped their TLD redirect.
I think it's generally frowned upon by ICANN nowadays.
tux3 · 4h ago
It's indeed forbidden by ICANN, so none of the myriad of vanity TLDs can do it..
ccTLDs could, if they wanted to go against the grain, but I'm not aware whether anyone still does.
jsheard · 4h ago
.uz (Uzbekistan) resolves by itself, but the server it points to has an invalid cert so you have to click past an error to see it. Still, it's technically a working naked TLD.
I took a modern european history paper in college, and the biggest thing I took away was the catholic church's initial opposition to anything that changes in the social sphere. Within a fear years it always adapts it into its power structure and life continues.
andrewmutz · 6h ago
If you want to understand the likely effects of AI on human material welfare, don't look to religious leaders or computer scientists for answers. Look to the people who study this topic professionally: economists.
testfrequency · 5h ago
A bit reckless to put full faith in economists who will inherently have their own separate set of biases.
I would like to also think that a religious figure like the Pope interacts with and understands humans on a more personal level than any economist could.
I also just want to make clear that I am atheist.
tbct · 5h ago
David Autor was recently interviewed by Martin Wolf on the effect of AI on jobs. The question of if its fair to compare a possible economic shock on knowledge work to the China shock in manufacturing. He had two responses to the question:
1. The geographic dispersal of knowledge work should allow retraining of displaced workers, in opposition to the loss of manufacturing jobs which centre around single employer towns.
2. The china shock resulted in a sudden drop in prices, whereas AI would lead to efficiency gains.
The second point, to me, feels more pertinent, and mixed with the first could allow for a freeing up of labour, ideally into higher value add work. I think the time horizon is also worth speaking about here, as most economists will be thinking in 5-10 years where we can expect substantial improvements in models, but barring new model architecutre, it seems doubtful that we'll see some sort of emergent intelligence from LLMs.
Post-ASI, knowledge labour necessarily has zero value, at which point the challenge is to design an equitable society.
Economists don't study human dignity or justice which the Pope was talking about.
vFunct · 3h ago
They literally do.
kulahan · 29m ago
They explicitly don’t. Money and dignity are in no way related. They may, on occasion, study how people will deprive themselves of dignity for money, but of course this is not within a hundred miles of the primary interest of the field. It is essentially macro-psychology. It is trying to remove identification of the individual to find generic patterns.
vFunct · 12m ago
Economics isn’t just “money”.
Economists study things like stripper names to abortion effects on crime. Go ahead and read the book Freakonomics.
baggy_trough · 6h ago
Leo XIV is not merely talking about human material welfare.
_m_p · 4h ago
If economists are so smart, why aren't they rich?
vFunct · 6h ago
Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's benefit. It's just what people do. They don't sit around doing nothing because AI took their job- they'll figure out something else, to fill a new hole in the economy.
Moore's law applies to people's productivity as well, not just transistors on a chip.
dragonwriter · 5h ago
> Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's benefit. It's just what people do.
It's not “just what people do” in some kind of simple, automatic, no-conscious-action-required sense, it’s a difficult process that often requires violent conflict between those empowered by the new development and those they exploit (that was certainly the case after the Industrial Revolution), a major part of which is people looking for and publicly calling out the problems.
vFunct · 2h ago
Yah the Industrial Revolution wasn't a direct cause of any war. There are zero wars that are a result of economic efficiency. And, no, colonialism isn't economic efficiency. Economic efficiency is a very specific thing. It doesn't mean "whatever unfair thing I don't like".
achierius · 1h ago
Really? None of the British invasions of the African interior would have been possible without industrialized. "We've got the Maxim gun and they've..." etc. People died, societies were conquered -- you might not consider those to qualify as wars, but the people conquered certainly did.
vFunct · 1h ago
Warfare exists independently of economic efficiency. Colonialism would have happened regardless of technological advancement.
delusional · 5h ago
It's like 80 years happen and people forget that we go to war in our own countries as well. Conflict is not just something that happens in the middle-east.
The stability has to be cherished and nurtured.
kmnc · 4h ago
What hole will they fill if AI is already filling it? There is no knowledge based work that won’t get replaced. There is no physical based work that won’t be replaced. Sure humans can and will adapt to a post human labour world, but the process of getting there is going to be brutal without some major political paradigm shifts. If AiAccountantBot3000 makes all accountants obsolete tomorrow, what is going to happen? Nothing, except for a lot of unemployment and poor former accountants.
vFunct · 2h ago
That's their job to figure it out, not yours.
achierius · 1h ago
Are you really betting that the person to replied to isn't a knowledge worker? This is HN, it's more likely than not
Barrin92 · 1h ago
>If AiAccountantBot3000 makes all accountants obsolete tomorrow,
It won't. This just reflects the diminished view technologists have of work rather than any actual reality. It's a category error as absurd as asking, "what if a debugger makes programmers obsolete".
90% of being an accountant, just like 90% of being any knowledge worker has nothing to do with actual knowledge, but with mundane personal and organizational work. If you're a programmer, were you ever concerned that a smarter programmer replaces you? If you think of reasons to be fired, that's the first one? Look at the 20 most common professions in any country, if it came down to just automating their literal tasks they'd all be gone 30 years ago.
dopidopHN · 5h ago
I wish you interesting time!
codpiece · 4h ago
No, don't do that. We all live in the same time. Please take it back before the Gods notice.
9283409232 · 5h ago
> Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's benefit
I can't imagine how you believe this when everything says otherwise. Climate change, the oligarchs hoarding all the wealth, the collapsed middle class, widespread hunger and homelessness, the many wars, and genocides. Generally, everything points to the fact that people will not respond to changes in technology for the benefit of everybody.
sitkack · 4h ago
I think their post was libertarian satire.
vFunct · 3h ago
Has there ever been a time where economic efficiency reduced the GDP instead of growing it?
Same with AI.
9283409232 · 2h ago
GDP has nothing to do with the quality of life of your citizens. This is the same logic as people who say the market is up so the economy is good while there is rampart homelessness and no middle class. You will never see the problem while you look at people as GDP.
vFunct · 2h ago
It literally does. Billionaires don't exist without everyone else also becoming wealthier.
It's why China was able to eliminate extreme poverty while creating hundreds of billionaires.
You may think this inequality is unfair, but economics isn't concerned about inequality. Why? Because inequality doesn't matter. What only matters is poverty, and the elimination of it.
And I always find it hilarious that socialists can never say "I want to eliminate poverty"
9283409232 · 1h ago
I would love to eliminate poverty and traditional economist are wrong, income inequality matters. Norway has a lower GDP than US but a significantly higher quality of life cand longer life expectancy. Income distribution is much better in Norway than it is in the US with the top 10% only holding 25% of the wealth in Norway compared to 70% in the US with the top 1% having 30% of that. You mention China but the top 10% of earners in China have 40% of the income which is still less than the 70% in the US.
vFunct · 1h ago
Doesn’t matter. A billionaire’s existence doesn’t take away from the poor, since wealth isn’t zero-sum.
> In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.
I don't think he's suggesting that AI is inherently bad, but that (like any tool) it can be abused by those with wealth and power in a way that violates human dignity.
In fact, one of the problems the previous Pope Leo warned about in "Rerum Novarum" was not just the intentional abuse of power through technological advances but the unintentional negative consequences of treating industry as a good in itself, rather than a domain that is in service to human interests.
For those who are interested in how this social teaching informed economic systems, check out the concept of distributism, popularized by Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton.
First: A lot of Catholic morality derives from the postulate that man was specially made by God and "in God's image" which gives man an inherent, unique-among-all-creation dignity. Because of this, the church is very sensitive to anything which diminishes the "specialness" of man, as they fear it will undermine people's reasons for treating each other with respect. Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism (man wasn't at the center of the universe) and anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created) before coming around due to overwhelming evidence. The pope is concerned that AI falls into this category of "challenge to human dignity" because it gives the sense that man's cognitive abilities are not unique.
Second: A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning. Indeed, if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding, its painfully clear that his conception of the "soul" is just his attempt at understanding metabolism without any solid physics or chemistry. Obviously no one today says that the soul is in charge of the "locomotion" of living things, but up until very recently the one last bastion of unexplained behavior where the religious could justify their belief in the soul was the intellect. AI is a direct assault on this final motte, as it is concrete evidence that many of the "intellectual" outputs of the soul could, at least in principle, have a naturalistic explanation. (There was plenty of evidence of the intellect being fully naturalistic prior to AI, but it wasn't the kind of irrefutable "here's a fully natural thing that does the thing you said natural things couldn't do" evidence).
Aquinas: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm
While this concern certainly exists to some extent in the Church, and may be somewhere in the Pope's thoughts, his explicit comparison to the Industrial Revolution and Rerum Novarum's response to it, and to it as a threat not only to human dignity but also to justice and labor, indicates that a—arguably the—major concern is for it as a potential occasion of and force for material mistreatment.
Can you elaborate on how you arrived at this conclusion? There are multiple Popes that have rejected “god-of-the-gaps” explanations instead invoking the idea that science helps one learn more about God, not as a rationale for invoking God where we are ignorant.
I read Aquinas and realized that the whole ancient conception of a soul is tied together with the ancient concept of vitalism. Within vitalism you need something to explain why living matter is different than non-living matter, and that something is the presence of a soul! Hey presto, add a few layers of philosophy and divine revelation and you arrive at the Christian immortal soul.
(In this case "god of the gaps" does not refer to the Catholic God himself, but instead it refers specifically to the concept of the soul)
Aquinas, in his Summa, makes a series of assertion-of-fact about souls. Specifically, he claims that the soul explains (or "is the principle of") certain otherwise-unexplained phenomenon.
It doesn't matter how he got there (i.e. whether he was arguing with someone online, or trying to explain catholicism in terms of Aristotle, or if he was just an LLM stochastically putting ink on parchment), the fact is that inventing a supernatural thing that explains a bunch of unexplained phenomenon is precisely what I meant by "god-of-the-gaps style reasoning."
And therein lies my point: the purpose of Aquinas was purely to explain preexisting Catholic theology, using Aristotle as a starting point. He invented nothing.
You can say "the Catholic Church invented the soul to explain [etc]" and then I'd just push it back to Christianity itself, and if you'd concede on that, we'd have resolved my initial argument.
This is simply not true, and I've quoted the passages from Aquinas that explicitly assert metaphysical differences between living and non-living matter in this very thread.
If you want a tidy introduction to metaphysics of this sort, consider this one [0].
[0] https://a.co/d/3g8SgTf
The immateriality of the intellect is included there. Aquinas would say it is only the intellect that can understand a universal concept, which is itself immaterial. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative difference from the capabilities of AI. It is really the reductionists who are guilty of 'woo' here.
> The lowest of the operations of the soul is that which is performed by a corporeal organ, and by virtue of a corporeal quality. Yet this transcends the operation of the corporeal nature; because the movements of bodies are caused by an extrinsic principle, while these operations are from an intrinsic principle; for this is common to all the operations of the soul; since every animate thing, in some way, moves itself. Such is the operation of the "vegetative soul"; for digestion, and what follows, is caused instrumentally by the action of heat, as the Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 4).
That is to say: we cannot explain things like digestion "naturally" as we would require an "external principle" that does not exist for living things, instead because they "move themselves" they require a super-natural explanation, i.e. the soul.
Indeed, Aquinas puts the following as a potential object, which he rebuts
> Objection 1: It would seem that the parts of the vegetative soul are not fittingly described—namely, the nutritive, augmentative, and generative. For these are called "natural" forces. But the powers of the soul are above the natural forces. Therefore we should not class the above forces as powers of the soul.
> On the contrary, The Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 2,4) that the operations of this soul are "generation, the use of food," and (cf. De Anima iii, 9) "growth."
Edward Feser's book Aquinas is a good starting point for understanding it.
Indeed, Aquinas is using the soul the way that modern scientists use "dark matter". Except where the modern problem is unexpected rates of universal expansion, Aquinas' problem is vitalism-qua-"why are living things different than non-living things."
Once we abandoned vitalism, the conception of the soul must therefore also change. But in my reading of history, there is no clear break; no "before" and "after". Aquinas' definitions and concepts were never really abandoned, the church just retreated from the bailey of "the soul explains all the features of living matter including how it moves around" to the motte of "the soul explains intellect/reason/will since thats the only thing left thats not obviously physical."
Indeed, you will see that Aquinas' language suffuses most official Catholic teaching on the soul, even though the official teachings are usually a slightly generalized version of Aquinas's concrete assertions.
I wish I could find the document, but about 2 years ago, the Vatican released an official document explaining that Rome had been using certain philosophical traditions, including Thomism, in its official documents and councils for a few hundred years, because it was convenient, yet without making it official to any degree. I was so happy when it came out because it vindicated what I had been telling all my Thomist friends, that Thomism is not official Catholic doctrine.
Second, the soul is not, on the Aristotelian-Thomistic thesis, a "supernatural" being, as an angel or God would be since (though not material themselves) they properly belong to the material order.
So these are natural, not supernatural explanations, which nevertheless go beyond the purely material (corporeal) and so are 'above' them. In the quoted article, he means that these characteristic activites of living things are not simply reducible to those of the material parts themselves, since the living thing possesses the principle of its own organization/growth/reproduction etc. that non-living material does not, so something beyond the non-living 'corporeal' order must be operating.
No, it just claims that human souls are created differently than animal souls, and therefore have different properties. It defends this with the same kind of zeal that you defend a round earth with, and for the same reasons.
> as they fear it will undermine people's reasons for treating each other with respect
I didn't realize the members and minds of the Catholic Church were so united in motive!
> anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created)
Come on, you know the Catholic Church has never taught this.
> A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning Indeed, if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding--
He's one Catholic theologian, even if eminent, out of hundreds who are just as eminent. Why single him out? Where does the Bible say Aquinas is infallible? What a strange strawman.
That's... not much different than what I said (which was that humans are extra special)? I think it was in the early 1900s that the church Magisterium finally said that human souls belonged to different "orders" than plant and animal souls. And hey, wouldn't you know it, but the "orders" spelled out by the Magisterium broke exactly along the lines Aquinas laid out in the Summa. That's why I singled him out.
Re evolution:
The church excommunicated at least one scientist for early work on evolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorio_Chil_y_Naranjo
Or you could go back to Genesis 2:7 and countless other Biblical passages. This isn't about the Church, it's just a core tenet of Christianity.
> The church excommunicated at least one scientist for early work on evolution
Because he followed Lamarck and Darwin, a vague deist and an agnostic. For a prominent scholar who claimed to be Catholic, excommunication was probably the correct course of action to avoid the scandal of confusing Catholics. This had nothing to do with theistic evolution, which neither of them believed in
But theistic evolution just says that maybe God used natural processes to create the physical bodies of the original humans, apart from their souls which are created individually and instantly for each person.
This was conceded even by St. Augustine as a possibility.
Qualia are "what it 'feels like' to experience some sensory input."
Up until recently, most LLMs were "once through" meaning that the only "sensory inputs" they "experienced" would be the raw text. So we might argue that "experiencing sensory input" means "tokenizing raw text," and that therefore the tokens that the LLM processes internally are the qualia.
But that's un-satisfying. We don't say that the impulses sent from the eye to the brain are the qualia, and the tokenization process sounds more like "eye turning light into electrical signals" than what we actually mean by qualia.
So now we focus on the "feeling" word in our definition of qualia. A feeling isn't a token or an electrical impulse, its our internal reaction to that token or electical impulse.
So because once-through LLMs have no input that corresponds to "their internal reaction to a token", they can never be said to "experience" a "feeling" using our previous definition of experience as "processing some input".
But this directly suggests the solution to the qualia problem: if we were to build an LLM that did accept an input that represented "its internal reaction to the tokens it previously experienced" then we'd have invented qualia from scratch. The qualia would be precisely the log file that the LLM generated and "sent back around" as input for the next round.
If what we are is a gyre in a multi dimensional fractal then the interactions and problem solving going on inside of our brains is still happening and making choices even if those choices are being made inside of and purely as a consequence of the whole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Buddhism)
These are all very much responses people have modeled in flies in lab setting.
[1] https://blog.entomologist.net/do-insects-and-animals-possess...
The Church's understanding of morality draws heavily from natural law theory. Natural law theory grounds morality in human nature: what is good for human beings is determined by what it means to be human. Morality enters the picture, because unlike other animals or beings, a central part of what it means to be human is rational and to be able to choose freely between apprehended alternatives. This forms the basis for rights and responsibilities.
Now, it would be a mistake to say that the Imago Dei does not inform this understanding. In fact, the image of God consists of Man's rationality and freedom which stands in analogous relation to God (God is obviously infinitely different from human beings, but nonetheless the analogia entis holds, because it is analogical, neither univocal nor equivocal). It is Man's nature as intellectual being that makes him created in the image of God. (Angels, too, are created in the image of God for the same reasons. They have angelic intellects which differ from human intellects; whereas human beings apprehend reality through the senses from which the intellect then abstracts forms imperfectly, angels can apprehend the forms of things directly.)
I would also say that "postulate" is not the right term, as the Church is not postulating. It accepts this as true.
> Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism (man wasn't at the center of the universe) and anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created) before coming around due to overwhelming evidence.
The Universe we inhabit is, in this greater cosmology, quite lowly in comparison. So even if human beings were to inhabit a spatial center (whatever significance you wish to attach to that), it would be a lowly center. W.r.t. evolution, the opposition the Church has is not to various biological explanations of change and adaptation, but evolutionism, which is a metaphysical position, not a biological one, one that many who advocate for evolution also hold without realizing it is the domain of metaphysics, not biology. The Church still holds that each soul is the result of a special act of creation. I won't get into the metaphysics here, but it is decidedly not Cartesian.
> A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning.
I have no idea what you mean here. The intellect and will are held to be immaterial faculties, making human souls intellectual [0]. Aristotle gives arguments for this position. Roughly, the intellect cannot be a purely physical faculty, because abstraction ultimately involves the separation of form from particulars. Because matter (understood as prime matter, etc) is the particularizing principle, the joining of matter with form is what is the cause of concrete instances of that form. Thus, if the intellect were material, the apprehension of form would mean the instantiation of the apprehended thing in the intellect as a particular, which is clearly not what happens! When you apprehend "triangularity" or "Horseness", you do not instantiate a concrete triangle or a concrete horse in your mind! And, in fact, if you did, you would by the very act fail to grasp the universal concept, because particulars by definition exclude all others particulars except themselves. You would possess this triangle or this horse, and not any other of the potentially infinite instances of them. You would not grasp what it means to be a triangle or a horse.
So, it is not a matter of the Church feeling threatened in some way. Concerns have nothing to do with some kind of conceptual threat to the "specialness" of human beings. AI, on this account, simply cannot reason; if it could, then it could, but it cannot. The computational formalism is, to put it in Searlian terms, all syntax and no semantics, which is to say no intentionality. And even here, the physical device isn't even objectively a computer and isn't objectively computing (both Searle and Kripke present arguments for this, for example). But whether computers can reason is actually besides the point.
> Obviously no one today says that the soul is in charge of the "locomotion" of living things
You seem to misunderstand what a soul is. The soul is the form of a living thing. Thus, the soul of horse is that principle which causes it to be the kind of thing it is, and thus is its organizing principle. This isn't Cartesian metaphysics here where you have one thing, the res cogitans, and a second thing, the res extensa, kind of glued to one another, but really two separate things. By analogy, if you have a sphere of bronze, then the "soul" of that ball is the "sphericity". The sphericity makes the ball of bronze what it is. The sphere ceases to be a sphere if you were to melt it or hammer it into a cube.
If this topic interests you, you will find Feser's "Immortal Souls" interesting [1]. He gives a thorough treatment of the subject.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6GmCyKylTw
[1] https://a.co/d/6fWau6Q
This is true, although I do want to draw a bit of a distinction between the churches understanding-qua-official-teaching, and understanding-qua-what-actual-catholic-officials-believe. I often see very devout people look at something like CCC 1956:
> The natural law, present in the heart of each man and established by reason, is universal in its precepts and its authority extends to all men. It expresses the dignity of the person and determines the basis for his fundamental rights and duties
and come away with "Our moral rights and duties derive from our dignity via natural law" which isn't quite right, but nevertheless drives their behavior.
Its just like how the church finally, in 1822, explicitly allowed heliocentric books to be published. Technically, the church never officially asserted geocentrism as a doctrine and so heliocentric books should have been fine, but in practice, the chief censors were actually prohibiting them from being published because it was the common view among officials at the time that the church had in fact officially condemned heliocentrism in the Galileo case.
> I would also say that "postulate" is not the right term, as the Church is not postulating. It accepts this as true.
Yes, the better word for me to use would have been axiom; I was muddling my mathematical terms a bit.
> I have no idea what you mean here. The intellect and will are held to be immaterial faculties, making human souls intellectual
I am saying that because of the belief that "you can't explain that physically" where that = "abstraction", we've entered "God of the gaps" territory.
Now its true, I have read philosophical arguments that abstraction (or in the case of Ed Feser's argument, Incompossibility) is fundamentally impossible to do physically. And indeed, if those arguments succeeded we would be out of the woods. But I've universally found the philosophy to be very weak; to the point that even an amateur philosopher like myself can see that there are real-actual logical flaws, or that they rely on what appear to be extremely weak premises.
> Concerns have nothing to do with some kind of conceptual threat to the "specialness" of human beings. AI, on this account, simply cannot reason; if it could, then it could, but it cannot.
This is precisely the worry. This is a falsifiable prediction of Catholic theology: the instant there exists an AI which can actually reason, Catholic theology will have been falsified.
Now no doubt the Catholic philosophers will respond to such an eventuality by simultaneously claim that the machine isn't "doing it right" and that "our other accounts of Catholic theology are better anyway", but real credibility-damage will be done to Catholic theology.
[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
[2] "and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast so that the image of the beast should even speak, and to cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain." (Rev 13:15)
[3] `Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work`
For context, within Catholic understanding of St. John, any time he talks about the "beast" or "those who dwell upon the face of the earth", he's referring to people who's hearts and minds are centered on this illusory paradise, or as St. Paul calls it, "the flesh", and as St. John says, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, which all pass away".
This is in sharp contrast to "those who dwell in heaven" or "an angel, that is, a man" which represents anyone who's heart and mind are of the "the spirit" in St. Paul's words, or rather, who shun "all that will pass away as the flower fades and the grass withers" as St. Peter puts it.
So the "beast" here does not mean some mythical creature, but simply Adam and those who follow his principles and are made of "the dust of the earth", as opposed to Jesus, the New Adam, who is made of "stardust" as St. Paul compares.
Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life. Getting ahead of the problem, from the social side, could reduce the short-term suffering.
I realize you're kind of suggesting this later in your comment, but HN'ers really think prosperity is a default output of technological advancement.
I think short-term suffering, or at the very least disruption (as we're seeing) is essentially inevitable, but with all of these preemptive frameworks being implemented, or at the very least discussed (though just the latter isn't really good enough at all, of course) in turnaround times that are unprecedented, I really do not foresee a techno-dystopia; however, again, perhaps that's just wishful thinking.
Quite honestly, I think a pragmatic place to start, outside of theology and moral philosophy, is to make AI development necessarily adherent to some consortium of standards outlined by governments and implemented by boards within industries - like what we see with many engineering professions in the US and other countries.
Is this really true though? Being an agricultural feudal society is much much worse than the dreamy view we have of farming these days, and almost everyone even today chooses to work in a factory rather than a farm if they have that choice, in china, Africa, everywhere.
We have this image of gloomy coal powered cities being the worst place possible but in fact it was still better than the alternatives
Cities at the time were charnel houses -- even worse, I think, than the popular imagining of them today. The rate of death in London, as well as in other cities during the revolution, was so high that it needed a constant inward flow of immigrants to even maintain its population. Without the safer, more livable countryside to provide a continuous supply of fresh meat for the mills, those cities would have depopulated through a combination of plague, malnutrition, violence, and workplace injury.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act has an OK overview but is a bit thin and just a starting point. The political upheavals still echo in British politics today. I think it's fair to say that some of the changes were driven by the lure of profit (and associated national revenue) and some out of a desire to avert a domestic repeat of the American and French revolutions.
They were so angry about their fall in circumstance they revolted (and have been slandered by capitalists since).
What does power have to do with violating dignity? Justice and labor I could understand, but a sense of dignity can be destroyed without absolutely any typical power or coersion.
Unless of course by power in this case you don't mean political, but influential, for example by making sure through media that several generations of certain demographics grow up being taught that they're incompetent at best and intrinstically evil at worst. Then sure, I can see that, and have.
Of fence fame
https://newrepublic.com/post/191981/essential-jobs-will-doge...
Also, what is an American pope doing using a word like "defence," which is spelled with an 's' here?
It's not an article written by the Pope in English.
Edit: why the downvotes? It's true he said very little, and it will take more time for him to elaborate on a position. I guess you guys hallucinate more than a bad AI. As an example, I saw a commentary that the prior Pope Leo's Rerum novarum was not really that influential until a few decades after it was written. This stuff happens on long timescales.
> Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
The encyclical he references, Rerum Novarum, can be found here [0] and is much more interesting since it's more than just a single sentence.
[0] https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/docum...
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
which was discussed here at:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877709
It...does not. It follows the basic structure:
1. There's a problem with the present condition under industrial capitalism 2. Socialism is the wrong solution. (There are lots of problems with this part, including that it makes the very common error of misinterpreting the socialist opposition to private property—ownership of the non-financial means of production separated from the workers whose labor is applied to those means of production—as an opposition to individual human property generally; the latter may be a feature of some schools of socialism but is not a general feature of socialism.) 3. Laying out what Leo XIII saw as the Catholic solution.
The first part takes 3 paragraphs. (1-3) The second part takes 17 paragraphs. (4-20) The third part takes 43 paragraphs. (21-63)
It is simply wrong to take the second section is the main focus, and it is equally incorrect to describe the solution taking up the vast majority of the document as nothing more than "let the rich get richer, let's just ask them to be fair, with some intervention from the church."
"it is expedient to bring under special notice certain matters of moment. First of all, there is the duty of safeguarding private property by legal enactment and protection. Most of all it is essential, where the passion of greed is so strong, to keep the populace within the line of duty; for, if all may justly strive to better their condition, neither justice nor the common good allows any individual to seize upon that which belongs to another, or, under the futile and shallow pretext of equality, to lay violent hands on other people's possessions."
And then even worse still
"When work people have recourse to a strike and become voluntarily idle, it is frequently because the hours of labor are too long, or the work too hard, or because they consider their wages insufficient. The grave inconvenience of this not uncommon occurrence should be obviated by public remedial measures; for such paralysing of labor not only affects the masters and their work people alike, but is extremely injurious to trade and to the general interests of the public; moreover, on such occasions, violence and disorder are generally not far distant, and thus it frequently happens that the public peace is imperiled. The laws should forestall and prevent such troubles from arising; they should lend their influence and authority to the removal in good time of the causes which lead to conflicts between employers and employed. "
So stop industrial action immediately and in the future try to remove the causes!
Thank you for convincing me to read it further, it gave more gravitas to a hastily formed opinion on my end, but did not change it. Back to my message, I hope this is not what we get from Leo XIV on the new challenges, even though the fact that he chose his name on the basis of Leo XIII is not very promising.
Actually, I respect more something as honest as: Ἀπόδοτε τὰ τοῦ Καίσαρος τῷ Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ τῷ Θεῷ.
[0] http://www.edwardfeser.com/unpublishedpapers/socialismvsthef...
This is not accurate.
Leo XIII explicitly calls for state action to protect the rights and interests of the working man. Leo says that the public authority—i.e. the state—has a duty to "prevent [the violation of rights] and to punish injury" (Rerum novarum 37). He proceeds to make note that the poor—unlike the rich, who have means of shielding themselves due to their wealth—depend upon the state to a higher degree and therefore should be "specially cared for and protected by the government".
Furthermore, Leo states that the working man has, "has interests in which he should be protected by the State," namely their spiritual and physical well-being (Rerum novarum 40). In the following sections he argues for restrictions to be put in place to ensure that workers have appropriate time for rest in accordance with their work.
Suffice it to say, Pope Leo XIII absolutely does not envision a world where the wealthy are merely "just ask" for fairness. He certainly places limitations on proper government action in his refutation of socialism, but it is completely wrong to portray this as a rejection of state protection of workers in its entirety (this becomes much more obvious when reading his work in line with prior teachings pertaining to state action).
Having re-read Rerum Novarum within the last week, what you are saying is reductive to the point of not accurately portraying the contents of the encyclical. I would encourage you and others to (re)read the encyclical with an eye towards getting a more full and accurate understanding.
This is an extremely common theme across the Catholic Church, though?? It’s one of the primary reasons the church is against Socialism - it reduces people to their economic status and strips them of their inherent human dignity through that process. Agree with it or not, it’s absolutely ignorant to imply the Church doesn’t apply its moral teachings to economic scenarios.
Antiqua et Nova. Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877709
The Vatican doesn't tend to translate current documents or speeches into Latin, though certain kinds of documents are, by tradition, issued originally and authoritatively in Latin and those are translated into other languages. This speech was given in Italian, so...
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
I ask because .va is presumably for Vatican, so 'vatican.va' is kind of redundant, they could just use 'va' right? (You might need an 'http://' or a fully-qualifying '.' suffix in a browser, which I suppose is an argument against doing it, but still.)
.va is the ccTLD for the State of Vatican City (equivalent to, say, .uk for the United Kingdom)
vatican.va is the domain used by the Holy See as such. Given the relation between the Holy See and the State of Vatican City, this is very loosely parallel to royal.uk ("The Vatican" is a common metonym for the Holy See)
vaticanstate.va is the domain used by the State of Vatican City (this is like gov.uk)
Several subordinate organizations of the Holy See or the State of Vatican City have their own second-level domains under the .va ccTLD.
> ICANN will initiate an emergency response for name collision reports only where there is a reasonable belief that the name collision presents a clear and present danger to human life.
I think it's generally frowned upon by ICANN nowadays.
ccTLDs could, if they wanted to go against the grain, but I'm not aware whether anyone still does.
https://uz./
"You meant, more relevant to God?"
"No, in sociological terms."
YPM is a gold mine.
I would like to also think that a religious figure like the Pope interacts with and understands humans on a more personal level than any economist could.
I also just want to make clear that I am atheist.
1. The geographic dispersal of knowledge work should allow retraining of displaced workers, in opposition to the loss of manufacturing jobs which centre around single employer towns.
2. The china shock resulted in a sudden drop in prices, whereas AI would lead to efficiency gains.
The second point, to me, feels more pertinent, and mixed with the first could allow for a freeing up of labour, ideally into higher value add work. I think the time horizon is also worth speaking about here, as most economists will be thinking in 5-10 years where we can expect substantial improvements in models, but barring new model architecutre, it seems doubtful that we'll see some sort of emergent intelligence from LLMs.
Post-ASI, knowledge labour necessarily has zero value, at which point the challenge is to design an equitable society.
The full interview is fairly interesting in itself: https://www.ft.com/content/4e260abd-2528-4d34-8fa4-a21eabfd6...
Economists study things like stripper names to abortion effects on crime. Go ahead and read the book Freakonomics.
Moore's law applies to people's productivity as well, not just transistors on a chip.
It's not “just what people do” in some kind of simple, automatic, no-conscious-action-required sense, it’s a difficult process that often requires violent conflict between those empowered by the new development and those they exploit (that was certainly the case after the Industrial Revolution), a major part of which is people looking for and publicly calling out the problems.
The stability has to be cherished and nurtured.
It won't. This just reflects the diminished view technologists have of work rather than any actual reality. It's a category error as absurd as asking, "what if a debugger makes programmers obsolete".
90% of being an accountant, just like 90% of being any knowledge worker has nothing to do with actual knowledge, but with mundane personal and organizational work. If you're a programmer, were you ever concerned that a smarter programmer replaces you? If you think of reasons to be fired, that's the first one? Look at the 20 most common professions in any country, if it came down to just automating their literal tasks they'd all be gone 30 years ago.
I can't imagine how you believe this when everything says otherwise. Climate change, the oligarchs hoarding all the wealth, the collapsed middle class, widespread hunger and homelessness, the many wars, and genocides. Generally, everything points to the fact that people will not respond to changes in technology for the benefit of everybody.
Same with AI.
It's why China was able to eliminate extreme poverty while creating hundreds of billionaires.
You may think this inequality is unfair, but economics isn't concerned about inequality. Why? Because inequality doesn't matter. What only matters is poverty, and the elimination of it.
And I always find it hilarious that socialists can never say "I want to eliminate poverty"
Focus on the poor, not the rich.