Also pertinent and well-written, from the Vatican itself, including some quotes from Pope Francis:

https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. "Francis ... on 14 January 2025 ... approved this Note and ordered its publication."

via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750835, comment by jimmcslim on Pope Francis has died.

I think I will read this while running my agents in parallel. Thank you, my friend.

The writing is genuinely excellent.

In tech communities, we often talk about how many times productivity will increase, or whether AI has consciousness. But in religious documents, the focus is often on how the problems of the vulnerable and the community will change.

That is interesting to me. The worldview is Western and religious, so it feels somewhat unfamiliar, but at the same time, it seems useful as a way to rediscover values that we may have forgotten.

I follow a couple Jesuit brothers on Blue Sky who work at the Vatican Observatory. One of them was tapped to receive an award for another astronomer at a ceremony she couldn’t attend. Beforehand, he said that he would be doing this but couldn’t name the astronomer but said that it was someone well-known and I realized that the only contemporary astronomers I could name were either Jesuits or Neil DeGrasse Tyson. (I don’t remember the actual astronomer, but she was none of these).

Amongst scientific clergy, there’s also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit who was part of the team which discovered the Peking Man fossils (although looking at the Wikipedia page, it appears his legacy is a bit more complicated than one can address in an HN comment).

It is indeed a historically recent lie propagated by the Church's enemies, most notably Enlightenment talking heads and Protestants. It is part of the founding myth of scientism. It needs this myth to sustain its opposition and arrogation of science onto itself, just as Protestants need their countless myths about the Church to sustain their opposition and rebellion.

Historically, however, this framing of opposition would have been incomprehensible to Catholics. Scholasticism itself provided the intellectual foundations for modern science. Historically, you won't find a sustained and fertile scientific enterprise anywhere but the Christian West. As Jaki puts it, everywhere else, it was stillborn.

This battle between Religion vs. Science is an ignorant myth repeated by the ignorant and by tendentious bigots.