> 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 · 48m 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.
EventH- · 12m 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.
deadbabe · 41m 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.
bloaf · 4m 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.
kjkjadksj · 32m 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 · 4m ago
"While animals and plants certainly have a form of soul, it remains distinct from the human experience."[1]
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 · 15m 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.
lokar · 1h ago
> … Chesterton
Of fence fame
turing_complete · 1h ago
For those who don't know Chesterton: He is one of the most insightful, most entertaining writers you will ever read.
drewcoo · 1m ago
Disagree. He was a smug, utterly conservative Catholic who wallowed in his biases, an authoritarian and an anti-semite.
drewcoo · 9m ago
"New challenges?" "Like any tool?" Impedance mismatch!
Also, what is an American pope doing using a word like "defence," which is spelled with an 's' here?
asveikau · 1h 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 · 2h 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.
marc_abonce · 52m 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 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.)
pelagicAustral · 24m 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...
josephcsible · 23m 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.
ronsor · 1h ago
You could always use `www.va` or `about.va`.
jen729w · 52m ago
`the.va`?
delusional · 1h 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 · 37m 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 · 29m 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.
If Haile Salasie I did not exist, Murda Inc. would be forced to invent him.
andrewmutz · 2h 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 · 1h 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 · 1h 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.
baggy_trough · 2h ago
Leo XIV is not merely talking about human material welfare.
vFunct · 2h 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 · 2h ago
> Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's benefit. It's just what people do.
It's not “just what people do” in some kind of simple, automatic, no-conscious-action-required sense, it’s a difficult process that often requires violent conflict between those empowered by the new development and those they exploit (that was certainly the case after the Industrial Revolution), a major part of which is people looking for and publicly calling out the problems.
delusional · 1h 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 · 57m 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.
dopidopHN · 1h ago
I wish you interesting time!
codpiece · 1h ago
No, don't do that. We all live in the same time. Please take it back before the Gods notice.
9283409232 · 2h 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
These are all very much responses people have modeled in flies in lab setting.
[1] https://blog.entomologist.net/do-insects-and-animals-possess...
[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.
Of fence fame
Also, what is an American pope doing using a word like "defence," which is spelled with an 's' here?
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
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
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.)
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./
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...
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.
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.