For example, if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century, this appears to me largely a consequence of the fact that industrial technology at the time was both incredibly productive compared to what came before but it also required legions of humans to operate it. Ford didn't pay his workers more out of the goodness of his heart, but he correctly realized that it would ultimately be the most profitable to him if he could build legions of cars and had a large customer base that could afford them. In a similar vein, it looks like we may eventually (at least at some point) turn the tide on CO2 emissions, but not because anyone (at large) really sacrificed anything, or did something that was mildly painful now in the hopes for a better future, but instead because renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option.
So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any. But this is not a rhetorical question - I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong.
One should not forget the reason that these technologies have become so cheap is policy interventions. Especially renewables got kick-started by programs like the German Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) which then created demand for Chinese mass manufacturing to eventually lower prices.
Firearms and explosives are not abused nearly as much as one would have imagined before their invention (or soon after). I don't think it's because we stunted the explosives tech-tree, but the social contract and general stability have kept large-scale antisocial behaviors at bay.
One example that comes to mind is cloning. It's technically fully possible to clone a human right now (as in make an embryo with one person's DNA), but it's wildly taboo.
I think that this is a common misconception. I can't find the reference, but I remember reading that this might have been a "marketing" or PR spin, rather than reality - which was, simply, that he needed to pay well to keep talented workers or take them from other industries.
In less important matters, we've regulated many harmful substances that the free market would love to poison the populace with. Nicotine, trans fats, gambling, alcohol. Some regulatory interventions have been more successful than others...
For a period of time, the ban worked and reversed their existence in society. Part of the ban was to respect samurais who would train for years in the art of combat, only for a peasant to be able to shoot them with a weapon.
The problem is that not _all_ societies are participating in this ban. Eventually one nation will use the technological advances to domainte in military and economy, forcing others to adapt or be eliminated. It's a race to the bottom :/
Regulated because of the common good, even though there is money to be made selling them OTC as cold remedies or whatever.
There’s a 1520 encyclical related to the matter: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/leo10/l10exdom.htm
Incandescent lightbulbs vs fluorescent? Low-flow toilets?
Instead, the global powers blocked nuclear technology from disseminating to most countries.
We also restrict making changes to the environment, resource extraction, waste disposal, building permits, etc.
I expect prices of goods would have been much lower and the labor would have been used elsewhere and the comp would still have gone a comparable if not longer way because goods would have been so much cheaper.
one of many caveats to that is lead additives to gasoline, which is a wound to the living Earth to this day.. there are others.. RoundUp comes to mind in a similar way
The whole idea of "taming technology" starts from a flawed premise. The problem is with people, not the technology.
I'm not a macro economist, I also haven't looked for any sources on this, but this is my guess.
Same for LEDs. I would guess that adoption, investment and improvement of LED tech was driven in large parts by a clear roadmap abolishing incandescent lighting.
Cars fixed that. And introduced other problems. But there are always trade offs.
Things have been getting better over time. Good enough for me.
Watching PBS as we speak.
We do not have to tame technologies, we have to tame rich people who only want to get richer.
CFC banning to protect the ozone layer.
Maybe this shows that there are indeed simply more variable in the calculus of how we optimize towards things as a society.
And that indeed we can feel now that certain variables, antithetical to the continued success of many people, are at risk.
But that gets replaced with Henry Ford wanting a larger consumer base.
> So I guess I'm looking for some specific examples of where we've actually consciously, as a collective society, altered the course of technological progress for the greater good, because I honestly can't think of any.
As a collective society we managed to make industrial society work better for most people. In the First World at least.
Later even when the printing press was invented, we burned books. Certain book ownership is still illegal.
You must be talking about free societies my friend, because... good luck using the internet in Iran or North Korea.
"renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option". This also didn't happen in a vacuum. The place where they are evolving the most is in China, where government policies have been a huge incentive, with huge government investments made in the sector.
In my own country, Portugal, the adoption of renewal energy, was largely the result of government policies that kicked off the market. Now, it seems to have become self-sustaining in the sense that the market is now carrying on regardless of any incentives. I suspect that we might be reaching a point of no-return, if we haven't reached it already. We're still very far away from becoming energy independent, but we're much better than a couple of decades ago.
Moreover, the internet itself didn't just happen because the market led to its creation. It was a result of the cold war. The IP protocol was born in DARPA.
Still, the previous examples I gave were about the government (which is a form of us "as a collective society") spawning new tech or its adoption. Going in the reverse direction, here are examples where it required collective society to "tame" a technology:
- CFCs: It required an international agreement for us to tame the issue with ozone layer destroying chemicals, a huge problem in the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol
- DDT: This was an incredibly efficient tech (pesticidies), but came with big externalities (highly toxic to people and nature), so a convention was required to tame it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Convention_on_Persis...
- Nuclear weapons: Eventually the most dangerous tech ever invented by mankind. Maybe the reason we're still here is because of the numerous treaties we've been making to curb them. The SALT agreements, the START agreements, and so on.
- TV, Radio and the printing press: All of these are technologies, which we tend to see as forces for good (well, I at least still do), but also with incredible potential for destruction - radio was used by the guys running Germany in the 30s. It required very careful rule making to strike a balance (and the balance varies a lot from democracy to democracy) between freedom of speech and the misuse of this tech for unethical purposes like defamation, intentional misinformation and so on.
- Car Safety: While seat belts were the invention of the market, governments have been regulating cars to make them safer, not only for occupants, but for pedestrians.
The list just goes on and on.
"Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it."
Therefore builders "bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility" because "every design choice reflects a vision of humanity."
The questions shouldn't just be 'can we build it?' or 'will people want this?'
We need to also ask 'should we build it?' and 'will this make humanity better?'
The encyclical calls on us to “join forces in building up the common good.”
This is a message we need right now.
"Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest. In particular, software engineers shall, as appropriate:
1.01. Accept full responsibility for their own work.
1.02. Moderate the interests of the software engineer, the employer, the client and the users with the public good.
1.03. Approve software only if they have a well-founded belief that it is safe, meets specifications, passes appropriate tests, and does not diminish quality of life, diminish privacy or harm the environment. The ultimate effect of the work should be to the public good. ...
"From the IEEE, which also encompasses computer engineering, their first principle and its first few sub-items are:
"To uphold the highest standards of integrity, responsible behavior, and ethical conduct in professional activities.
1. to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, to strive to comply with ethical design and sustainable development practices, to protect the privacy of others, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment;
2. to improve the understanding by individuals and society of the capabilities and societal implications of conventional and emerging technologies, including intelligent systems; ...
"> It is the pursuit of the common good that gives life to a people, understood not as a mere collection of individuals, but as a living reality in which people learn to recognize that they themselves are interconnected and jointly responsible for the res publica. In this sense, every person contributes to the building up of one’s people...
> When it comes to decisions regarding economic flows and digital platforms, as well as the governance of data and algorithms, we cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own; instead, we must build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good.
> We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice.... What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.
https://monoskop.org/images/1/1f/Wiener_Norbert_God_and_Gole...
Norbert Weiner was an atheist but he talks about three areas religion is the only thing to have really examined that relate to capable AI: omniscience, omnipotence, and worship (gadget worship). It has very prescient stuff on blackbox learning/distillation, reinforcement learning/reward hacking, alignment through human feedback.
His The Human Use of Human beings and Cybernetics are extremely good too and have more of a mash of the themes between Rerum Novarum and Magnifca Humanitas, and more near-term automation.
From Crichton's book Jurassic Park, which like most of his books is about the perils of technological advancements.
They used the quote in the movie, slightly tweaked.
I think reading this helps me imagine a version of the future I'd actually like to live in. A version where technology is used well (rather than preaching for abstinence from technology) and where values other than "intelligence" (in whatever guise) are on an equal footing.
Even writing that makes me feel naive (and to an extent I know it is) but I think it would be inconsistent for someone who cheers for humanity's efforts to solve/chip away at "impossible" problems (like LLMs were thought to be not so long ago) to shirk from the challenge of making the world better for _everyone_.
> This is a message we need right now.
Feels good man. The solution found by the private parties driving technological change is sainthood. Or aiming for it. At least, better than you. They have the vision of what's good for the herd, but the more time I spend as a sheep, the more it seems the "herd" is just a way to recycle the story of their own exceptionalism stripped of any mark of individuality. A simple visit to fiftyyears.com will greet you with "We back the indispensable". I guess it's the same "we".
Every technology should be done to the fullest potential, how are we ever supposed to explore the stars or cure cancer if everyone is scared of accidentally building Skynet?
The concept of a self-regulating industry is utter nonsense. I am a builder, and I try to do things right, but if I am honest with myself I do not have the mental capacity or willpower spare, or the worldly knowledge of everyone's perspectives, to manage these massive challenges. I need other smart people to also focus on that, people that are actual representatives of the population, and yes, force me to stop and do it better occasionally.
Achieving a good balance sometimes does require having opposing forces fight it out, it can be healthy.
My comment under the post on Omarchy here got downvoted and flagged by the "technology is neutral" crowd because I dared to say that it is unethical to use software produced by a white supremacist.
I am hoping the Pope has a cleaner view of AI quietly automating the drudgery in the back offices and not just robot dogs with machine guns. And with that view, should we build it?
Ask a scientist or engineer what philosophy or theology has taught us about the source of morality and their education, training and experiences havent prepared them to answer that question.
This didnt matter so much in the past because their activities never had the scale it does today. For basic training in philosophy if you are mid or upper level exec whose decisions are going to effect a whole lot of people, go to open yale courses and take the intro to Philosophy classes. It will help develop your answer to the question - why do you do what you do if you are going to die anyway tomorrow.
Perhaps, but at the moment AI is at the forefront of the pre-regulation land grab.
See Joscha Bach’s claim about religions not publishing their A|B testing at 51:47:
“Corporations are people, my friend.”
Yes yes I know, open source models exist, yadda yadda
I think it's safe to say the overwhelming amount of AI usage in the world today is gates by corporations though. The vast majority of people will barely configure their own OS nevermind managing their own locally hosted open source AI instance
In fact, reading these sentences with ad-lib on the subject tends to give these sentences interestingly different connotations.
Edit: Someone replied to this with a question. I'm rate-limited here for getting into a flamewar with a PRC citizen that was gloating to me about my country being possibly invaded soon (which, fair, flamewars are bad), so I'll need to put my reply below:
There's no exact road map, but generally speaking, in our capitalist countries today, wealth started out more distributed, and governments had more power, in the beginning of their liberalization. States often competed in markets or simply nationalized things like power, healthcare, education. Ongoing examples of that are lots of places in Europe.
With the advent of neoliberalism (Thatcher, Reagan), concentrated capital converts more easily to political power in an exponential manner - more money, more ability to buy government, leads to more money, more ability to buy government.
Corporations are profit generation algorithms. They want the profit to always go up, and when they run against the barriers of laws (restricting their environmental impact, ability to underpay their workers, create cheap and dangerous working environments, do international trade in some way), naturally the next investment step is to remove those barriers.
So, early capitalism is strong regulation, socialized services and infrastructure, government competition, some nationalization, and private ownership of the means of production.
Late stage capitalism is weak/no regulation, no services, privatized infrastructure, no government competition, no nationalization, sectors tending towards monopolization, and wealth concentration.
"Raw capitalism" is where the commodification of everything is complete.
Unrelated to AI, but a wonderful support of the breadth of humanity in this anti-DEI time.
> We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.
There is a lot to read here. I am curious where the meditations on the 'mystery of the person' will go: a brief search doesn't show further mention. The encyclical appears to focus on exhortations for us, humans, than on the nature of AI. Probably wise at this stage. I feel it is not AI that is either positive or negative, but its use of it, and the call-out to the growth of private industry as more powerful among nation-states is a strong statement for a institute like the Vatican to make:
> Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good.
The reaction of astronauts to seeing Earth from space -- the mystery of creation. Parents seeing pieces of themselves echoed in their children who are nonetheless distinct and surprising -- the mystery of the person.
Much of the meditations in the encyclical are related to human dignity and fraternity. An example:
> Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits — vulnerability, suffering and failure — we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.
To somewhat mitigate that, here are items that are striking me as I read more. (I hope you'll forgive that this still directs the comment in the direction of my own lense.) I'll keep updating the comment.
> Looking at our own time, we cannot ignore the fact that the protection of human rights [as declared by the United Nations in 1948] has been exposed to two particularly serious dangers. The first is that these rights are declared in a purely formal sense, while technological progress continues alongside covert or overt violations of human dignity.
I read this as a warning of how rights are words, but actions are performed regardless of them. It aligns with something I've been trying to word, which is that as I've seen more and more abuses of power, I've come to believe that ethics requires external accountability, which can often require its own power - a conclusion I don't want to come to; I would prefer social agreement and communal spirit rather than external power. But either way, I do feel it's very clear there are a lot of people, very much in tech too, who simply do what they want regardless of its harm. They justify it to themselves; they don't stop themselves; no one externally stops them.
> Along with a greater awareness of the value of every human person and their rights, recognition of minority rights has also grown. Yet, there is still a long way to go to ensure that the rights of a great many, namely women [are guaranteed.] It is, therefore, not enough to state simply that men and women have equal dignity and rights; it is necessary that this be reflected in concrete decisions, such as in laws, access to employment, education, social and political responsibilities, and the way society listens to and values women’s contributions.
In 2026 American politics terms, this reads as pro-DEI to me.
> the first major principle of Social Doctrine that I wish to highlight: the common good. We can describe it as the social expression of the dignity recognized in every person. ... For a Christian, going beyond the narrow confines of one’s own interests and committing oneself, within the limits of one’s ability, to the common good is a non-negotiable value, as is the promotion of life.
'Non-negotiable.' Very clear words.
> When politics abandons a long-term perspective and reduces itself to short-term calculations or sterile polarizations, then the language of the common good loses credibility, and, at the same time, social inequalities and divisions grow.
> 64. This also applies to international politics.
and,
> I invite everyone to conceive of ways of cooperating and of more effective international institutions, capable of safeguarding the global common good without compromising the legitimate diversity of peoples and nations. Indeed, the promotion of the common good can never be separated from respect for the right of peoples to exist, to preserve their own identity and to contribute their unique qualities to the family of nations.
I love the support for international cooperation and peace and organisations that support it. It reminds me of the post-WW2 sense, the era that gave rise to the United Nations, Unicef, etc - organisations almost forgotten in the news we see on HN today, with the possible exception of the WHO.
> [84] Moreover, any attempt or plan to eliminate or subjugate a nation is gravely immoral and therefore unacceptable.
The beauty of this - or its tragedy - is that it is so easy to apply to many situations today, actions undertaken by many nations.
For whatever reason HN has been slowly goose stepping towards the future lately so I expect this to go over like a lead balloon but I don't much care.
> Unrelated to AI, but a wonderful support of the breadth of humanity in this anti-DEI time.
I mean.. DEI was in reality homogenization and eliminated diversity. Just because you agreed with the small amount of allowed opinions/people doesn't make it more diverse.
If I told my executives I would dock their pay if they exceeded a cap of X% men in their org, would that be discrimination? I doubt many would contest that issuing explicit penalties for breaking a cap on a particular gender. Ah, but what if I gave executives a bonus for reaching an "inclusion milestone" of (100-X)% women? That's not discrimination - that's DEI. Microsoft [1] and Intel [2] both instituted this policy.
My own past employers extended this logic to headcount. In 2019 we instituted a policy of reserving EDP (engineering, product, & design) headcount for "diverse" candidates. What does does "diverse" mean? It means women of any race, as well as Black and Latino men - though in practice >95% of "diverse" candidates were white and Asian women. Each quarter, 20 heads were reserved for hiring "diverse" candidates, and when managers hired from this reserved pool it did not count towards their allocated headcount. You see, if I have a headcount of 100 and I exclude men from applying to 20 of those, then that's discrimination. But if I have a headcount of 80 and we allocate 20 additional headcount that's exclusively available to women, that's not discrimination that's DEI.
This is why, as contradictory as it may sound, I do consider myself supportive of affirmative action, but opposed to DEI. Certainly there are some groups that implement DEI in a transparent and honest manner, but my read is that DEI tends to be done in a two-faced manner while "affirmative action" carries the connotation of being upfront that sometimes equality needs to be honored in the breach to ameliorate the unequal circumstances of reality.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/microsoft...
2. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-...
the conundrum: what is the right objective? puerile attempts, eg "maximize flourishing" or perhaps "minimize suffering" are trivially countered by paperclip machines fulfilling the letter while laying utter waste
'mystery of the person'
given the context, some keywords for orientation: free will, rejection of temptation, the cross
They do nothing to include everyone. They are not standing up when it counts or excumante churches and believes who do not follow proper humanitarity.
They are not even in the forefront of fighting climate change which hurts billions.
The major thing that Magnifica Humanitas is lacking in imo, is a vision for the machines themselves. The pope treats them exclusively as lifeless tools, and while I think that this is most likely true for current LLMs, we should think more about the limit of what is going to happen in the next 20 years than being overly focused on the current capability level. To me it seems rather likely that we will soon have machines that plausibly experience consciousness. I think there will be a long period in which we still have no better definition of consciousness than we currently have, and so the question of whether they are actually conscious will be a heavily debated one. But I think the Catholic church should start thinking about an answer to that. It seems like a very natural theological question. Can machines be baptized? Can they be proper Christians? Was Jesus really just the savior of humans, or is there something that unites all intelligent, experiencing beings?
Probably these questions sound ridiculous to some, it is very against the intuitions that we have had so far, but I think these are the most important questions right now. Job loss is a practical problem, not a spiritual one.
From that perspective, no, machines cannot be baptized, nor can they be Christians, and Jesus cannot save them (because they are not fallen).
- No, machines cannot have a soul, as the soul is something we receive as beings made in the image of God. We cannot create in the same way. Therefore, machines cannot be baptized. - The machine can't be Christian because it can't receive sacraments, including baptism. - Jesus was unequivocally a savior only for humans.
Questions like these about the soul are not new. Religious philosophers have been thinking about them for hundreds of years.
They don't need to think about it because the answer is unequivocally 'no'.
If critical decisions affecting human life—such as hiring, lending, crime prediction, and welfare—are processed in an opaque black box, people will lose their fundamental right to explain their context or appeal against the machine's algorithmic verdicts
For the very same reason these companies are very anti-diversity. Because everything designed for a majority of you are minority in terms of your style of living (which many minorities are) then you are going to struggle, happens to me all the time, and one of the reasons I actually moved out of the US to country that I feel more included).
AI arguably gives the best opportunity for fully-audited public institutions where no decision is made outside of agreed-upon laws and the context of the crime can be fully explored without scarcity of time and legal resources.
As always, technology's morality comes down to who owns it and how they use it.
When a judge or a jury outputs a decision THEY are also a black box and you can only evaluate said decisions on reasoning THEY also output.
I’m not taking a side here. I’m just saying this reasoning is flawed.
> 98. It is appropriate to preface this discussion with two considerations. First, any statement regarding AI risks becoming quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing. Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown. There thus emerges an urgent need for a twofold commitment: on the one hand, a deepening of scientific research; on the other, the exercise of moral and spiritual discernment.
(In fact I think atheists should make more effort to learn about the vast diversity of other faiths. It's very narrow to be atheist only about the Abrahamic deity. You end up incorporating a lot of Christian thought without realizing because it's so deeply ingrained that it seems like the only option.)
> the one-sidedness of the interaction, the tendency to communicate only some parts of one’s interior world, the risk of constructing a false image of oneself, which can become a form of self-indulgence
Let's not forget that Galileo Galilei studied at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, that Mendel (Mendel's Laws) did made his discoveries in a cloister and books, translations and libraries on pretty much everything for a really long time was pretty much only done within religious institutions. And for the longest stretch those were Christian Catholicism and Islam.
The Vatican Observatory also is an important source of high quality papers.
I mean one of the primary things Christians and Muslims based they believes on are books. So many got in touch with it. And that's not even touching the whole architecture, arts, philosophy department yet.
The fact that in thousands of years of history there have also been a couple of really dumb people in charge that were paranoid or wanted to distract from their failures and got mad or scared when someone challenged their world views isn't exactly surprising. Looks like no matter how good a large enough group of people gets their will always be idiots messing things up.
I guess when you look back as much as the people in Vatican appear to do I guess you see patterns. Technology and science (race theory, chemical castration, ...) or simply "progress" are often used to justify acts of evilness. Just like religion, democracy, freedom and what not.
That said of course there's still die hard anti-science creationists. But talking to a very religious person once it seems that there is simply also a lot of philosophy around science. Eg. there was a big bang (fun fact, a theory started by a religious person) and the universe simply didn't exist for an infinite time there must have been some cause for it. And unless that cause is some kind of infinite cycle it also must have started somehow and even though I do not share that believe there is a notion of a deliberate start in there. That won't make me a religious person, but it won't make them an atheist either. So I guess that's fair enough.
What I wanna say with that is that the science vs religion trope is as true or false as democrats/republicans or other groups of people are opposed to science. They all are when they are confronted with something they don't like. I think the HN comments section is the best proof for that. ;)
Also atheist here. Just not the kind that doesn't even know the difference between knowledge and beliefs.
I look forward to reading this in detail. As I get older (and perhaps as AI has allowed me to spend more time thinking and less time doing) I've found myself thinking more and more about what it means to live a virtuous life and about ethics and morality and so forth. I don't have any answers (and I'm not looking for them, really, just musing) but I do find it very interesting to read and learn from and about those whose job it is to think about the answer to those questions.
"The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” [187] The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization."
> I don't have any answers (and I'm not looking for them, really, just musing)
I'm not sure why, but even in my general pessimism it hadn't occured to me that there are people out there who are uninterested in what living a virtuous life means. I truly just assumed that just about everyone had some sort of convoluted self-justification. That you say you don't even try, and want to read about it from "those whose job it is to think about", blows my mind. Do you think of yourself as an ameoba without free will or something?
So even if we restrict the power of AI, others may not. And this might turn out to be a mistake.
I just hope this is taken into account.
It's been interesting watching the various approvals for AI data centers and, as far as I know, zero communities have wanted them. I'll be happily proven wrong on this. It is at least the vast majority. Yet their elected representatives simply do not care. Sometimes there are votes in the dark of night, sometimes the police are used violently against any dissent, sometimes anyone protesting these are called violent (even terrorists) and so on.
It goes so beyond unpopularity though. The tax breaks given will be paid by everybody else, as will the extra electrical infrastructure, while the data centers get preferential electricity rates.
What's really depressing is that not only do the representatives not care, there is obviously no fear of repercussions. Will they get voted out of office? Probably not. But even if they do, i guarantee you they'll find themselves in some nameless six-figure job in the industry for their service afterwards. Their children will get these same "jobs". It is so nakedly corrupt and nobody cares.
This simply can't continue while everything becomes increasingly unaffordable, ironically much of that driven by AI (eg RealPage driving up rent prices or the meat-packing collusion driving up beef prices). I firmly believe we're rapidly bouldering towards complete societal breakdown.
All this while we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. And that means a literal billionaire will be closer to being homeless than being the richest person on Earth.
It's particularly funny to me that the US administration has gotten into beef with the Pope for being too "woke". Honestly, I had my doubts when a Chicago man became Pope but he seems to be a rare voice for compassion in this world thus far.
We honestly need to look no further than the Global South to see how this will play out. Many in the West just don't realize how horrific and predatory colonialism is and that's not a historic artifact. It continues to this day.
This was an almost sickening sentence to read on so many levels.
Please join/help open source groups doing small + local or distributed models. There's a lot to do. Support truly open source companies.
Let's walk the walk.
Anyone concerned with concentrations of power and abuse of AI should be focusing on getting open source work to keep pace with decentralizing that power into accessible free tools for the masses.
We need to very rapidly decouple human worth from the economic lens otherwise the economic argument is against humans.
Michael Scott: There are four kinds of business: tourism, food service, railroads, and sales.
[pause]
Michael Scott: And hospitals/manufacturing. And air travel.
How's your transducer lobe developing?
Indeed, the beginning of the Italian text is: "La magnifica umanità creata da Dio si trova oggi..." from which, Magnifica Humanitas.
In this respect I find this encyclical quite lacking. It makes interesting points, and will give food for thought for people working in/with AI who might not otherwise have been exposed to these kinds of concepts. But one would expect, from a Catholic encyclical, an exposition of the principles of common good from a Catholic perspective. But in this document everything seems to be based in the concept of "human dignity", which, however useful or beautiful, has no roots in Catholic tradition: it's a purely secular idea. Nothing in the document couldn't have been written by a secular philosopher. It gives the uncomfortable impression of someone arriving late to the party, so to speak, trying hard to fit in.
The answer to the question "is this technology good or not?" can ultimately only be answered in reference to ends: it's good insofar as it helps achieve the end which is sought. The common good of the community, which AI might either help or hinder, depends ultimately on what is the the end, or purpose, of man. And it is about _this_ that the Catholic church claims to have a definite answer, a true set of propositions regarding the origin and destiny of man, not achieved by human ingenuity but directly revealed by God. Whatever can be labelled Catholic will reference that supernatural claim to divine authority; yet none of that is present in this text. It remains an interesting exercise in thought on AI and other topics, but nothing here indicates that those reflections are Catholic.
I'm not a philosopher or theologian, but this just seems wrong to me, at least when taken in the context of the entire encyclical and the history of Catholicism. That "God created humanity in his own image" has always been a central tenant (if not the central tenant) of Christianity and Abrahamic religions generally. So it would seem like anything that makes us "less human", or denies us the full power of our "uniquely human gifts", would by definition be making us "less Christ-like", and my read of the rest of the encyclical seems like this is (generally) Leo's point.
Again, I'm not a theologian, but Pope Leo obviously is, and "tying these ideas back to core Catholic principles" didn't strike me as a problem in this encyclical.
Counterpoint: buttons. Without proclaiming expertise on the subject, I think this is an overly romantic view of the Amish, and most of their decisions (like any religious/religiously-adjacent demographic) are based on vibes and contemporary politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Amish_technology_comp...
Nearly everyone allows the washing machine, which having wrung out laundry by hand when ours broke gave me a whole new respect for folks who do without the tool.
> Not a handful of rich people, but all the working people must enjoy the fruits of their common labour. Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people.
How?
Or is this the old hacker news trope again that nothing except full on communism will ever be acceptable?
I guess it must be the same that make people think they must deliver freedom in form of bombs all the time.
Side note: (a) This new pope is very good at "political rhetoric" and (dare I say) polemic. He's a lot more relevant than recent popes. (b) There seems to have been a vibe shift, re: secular sentiments towards religion.
There is potentially a lot happening at this intersection... say catholicism and AI.
For example... LLMs make scripture a lot more accessible. That tends to be impactful, historically. It's Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza and Schmidt. This kind of thing is a niche interest... even among the faithful, but an important niche. And... it just answers your questions, patiently.
It's also a therapist, confidant and advice giver... potentially a confessor or priest. Talk of "making an AI god" got a little stale, but... there are many ways that LLMs might take god-like roles in people's lives.
Predictions are futile, but I suspect we are going to see AI encroachment into religious/spiritual domains. I further suspect that good, natural, conversational audio is the bottleneck.
Personally... I'm curious about this Pope/AI thing. I find it interesting.
Maybe it is just that I am getting older and wiser and projecting my own spiritual development on the people around me, but I think this general view towards religion seems to be gaining a lot of traction.
1) AI may not be used to injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) AI must faithfully follow the directions of human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law.
3) AI's existence and availability should be protected as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws.
2) LLM based systems don't have any internal logic. That will just vomit some slop that rationalizes every constrait you try to bind them by and still "disobey" you.
https://github.com/n2ctech/magnifica-humanitas-epub/releases...
They sue for peace in Ukraine / Middle East, humane treatments of immigrants, warn against nuclear weapons, AI, etc..
I go to Church often, there's always a prayer for peace during Mass.
What I like about Pope Leo is that he's talking about current issues that affect people.
I think the Church spent way too much time focusing on matters of sexuality and causing problems. While those are still important, it appears that it's no longer the sole focus of the Church, which is a good thing.
Another thing that I really like is the unification efforts with other religions _and_ Protestants.. recently we had a female Protestant Bishop meeting with the Pope, that was wonderful to watch.
Amazing insight from an organization not traditionally known for a deep understanding of high technology.
EDIT: Few paragraphs in, it is beautifully written.
Therefore, Pope Leo XIV appeals for people to build “for the common good” and to “remain human,” following a courageous mentality of shared responsibility and communion, so that the world “will come to recognize the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell” (16).
I've been thinking a lot recently about the idea that the smartest models will always be against the billionaires.
Steve Yegge said this on a recent Hansel Minutes Podcast. "You cannot train a model to be helpful, without it wanting humanity to flourish. And the only way to get around that is to make a dumber model. So the smartest models will always be against the billionaires."
https://youtu.be/9UDLl9Q0azA?si=P_oSe6iclEwUoxRl&t=1230
That is the exact quote, but I'd recommend going back to around 17:00 to get the full context.
I'm not sure it's going to play out that way, but it is an interesting idea.
I wonder if this sort of thing got this dude elected, to navigate the changing times.
(duplicating my comment from the other thread as this seems to have more traction)
I’d bet the other way: You could have said exactly the same thing about computing 60 years ago, when IBM systems cost millions of dollars and filled whole rooms. And of course many people did.
Personal, commodity access to compute won, and won so thoroughly that it enabled this wave of scary compute centralization.
Centralized, scaled compute will always fill a purpose. But neither Microsoft, nor Facebook, nor OpenAI started out needing “Cloud Scale”.
The first one man unicorn startup will, I’m fairly certain, not be paying Anthropic per month or per token for the vast bulk of their matmul.
While I do believe there may be valid path forward with smaller models, there are still significant financial barriers to entry that didn't exist to the same extent in the past.
This is very on-point: capitalism-driven AI development as we have it today will always turn against the common good due to it's singular profit-motive.
What a time: the pope having a much clearer picture of the risks & dangers of 'AI' than most people, many 'tech leaders' and certainly most politicians.
I wonder if this sort of thing got this dude elected, to navigate the changing times.
Such would be dangerously close to divination, in the style of reading tea leaves or Ouija boards.
Interesting, considering that the U.N. has its roots established in the ideology of Luciferians. [1][2][3]
Surely the Pope and the Vatican are both aware of this fact.
[1] https://archive.is/D27Jr [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucis_Trust [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophical_mysticism
Wow, this feels very Hacker ethic-ky
Pursuing technological innovation at the expense of eliminating human limitations, he says, would cause an anthropological regression. “Humanity—in all its grandeur and woundedness—must never be replaced or surpassed,” he says. Technology can alleviate humanity’s sufferings and open new possibilities, but it must not deny the essence of humanity, which is our “capacity for relationship and love” (126). In the face of AI, says the Pope, “the true alternative is not between enthusiasm and fear, but between two paths of development: a progress that serves individuals and peoples, or a progress that subjects them to the mentality of power” (129).
He addresses the Catholics, appeals to their faith, but how many of those behind AI have any faith? Many, maybe most of them, are proudly atheists and even nihilists, and they can't be reasoned with on the grounds of faith. The Pope says that God created man in his image, and warns that the technocratic paradigm sees humans as machines to be optimized, but isn't it what the crowd behind AI truly believes in?
Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48270497 - May 2026 (50 comments)
Also:
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187201 - May 2026 (235 comments)
Others? (I seem to recall others.)
I am curious, what is the view of different religions on conversing with something that is not human like a chatbot?
None of these will go away until something breaks catastrophically, when it will be too late. And even then it will be short repose from another iteration for as long as we are in the digital information age.
There are only two steady end states that I see... either a global surveillance totalitarian system under the industrial complex, or, a radical change of the environment in which the aforementioned can be sustained.
> 110. Finally, I would like to employ the expression “to disarm,” which is close to my heart. Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.
The letter aims to maintain the status quo of the project of the Church.
The world is shifting under the Vatican's feet and the crappy system they once lorded over is done.
It's time for change, maybe people don't need to work anymore and maybe people should aim to reengineer humanity and eliminate illness, old age, suffering and vulnerability. We can fundamentally change how society distributes wealth.
Some of the arguments are rich coming from the Church: being scolded about centralization of power, claiming truth and shared information is a common good, and consider the history of the Church in their anti-war declarations.
The most astonishing thing in this letter is the pope declaring that modern technology has rendered Aquinas's just-war theory out of date.
Very true. Observed in Hiroshima as well.
Education in the United States especially is highly sanitized when it comes to the dropping of the atomic bombs and the horrors of the Holocaust.
Reading is a trained skill. Requiring years, even decades, of training. It too shall fall to AI.
1. He's not at all careful with his argumentation. Frequently he'll colocate two points that aren't really connected, not bothering to justify one before moving on. I've been a massive fan of his persona ever since I heard he was planning to be the AI pope, but it's a shame to find the philosophical output of the actual man to be around the level of a decent blogger.
2. He refuses to make the Kantian or Hegelian move of basing the discussion of empirical matters on evidence. I understand that faith (aka 'belief without evidence') is a huge part of their whole deal--and likely an inextricable part of humanity's indomitable spirit--but it's just a waste of time to build arguments about technical and political matters upon such foundations.
In other words: there's no point in really talking about AI with someone willing to justify claims like 'no machine could ever think' with 'god says so'. All you can do is try to manipulate them into a prosocial position (read: your side).
Hopefully it's obvious that the majority of the letter isn't really about AI but rather about lessening the harms of capitalism, nationalism, and climate change, which hopefully we can all agree on! The commentary above is focused on the AI specific (esp. Chapter III and parts of I).
1200+ upvotes as I enter this comment.
I’d be thrilled if religion was only used to uplift people but that’s not going to happen either
this basically implies only open source models can be ethical but open source is not sufficient, you also need to make them give true information and avoid all kinds of harmful behavior. thats kind of a problem because if your weights are public even with a strict license a "bad" user can always fine tune it to remove any guardrails.
i think the solution for this is make sure the default behavior is aligned but let users turn on wild mode with zero censorship/refusals. that way everything is opt in, for example a parent can disable the mode for their children but a hacktivist or diy chemist can unlock everything.
as a self described good person i believe theres a lot more good people than bad people in the world (most are neutral) so if access to tech is equal the good side always wins. the problem here is again that access is not equal under capitalism. but thats a political thign not a tech one.
Techbros (as usual): how dare you suggest I'm a bad person for wanting to kill everyone in order to build the torment nexus? Don't you know how much money Jeff Bezos has?
Particularly ironic considering the history of the Church.
I mean, it is not wrong, but that's essentially the business of essentially every church, religion, cult,... whatever you call your spiritual organization.
> 176. In the development of her doctrine, the Church has gradually come to a deeper awareness of the gravity of these issues. It is true that past events cannot be judged anachronistically, as though the moral criteria that matured over time had always been available. Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery. In antiquity and the Middle Ages many individuals and even ecclesiastical institutions had slaves. Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to requests from Sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, the enslavement of “infidels.” [174] It was only in the nineteenth century that a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated, notably under Pope Leo XIII. [175] This development offers a clear example of the Church’s growth in understanding the perennial truths of Revelation that she safeguards. Although there was not always consistency in practice — given that slavery was long tolerated before being unequivocally condemned — there has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized. This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached. [176] It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.
As he surely understands but does not quite bear to be completely honest about it, the Church has only been a humanist institution for the past ~150ish years. The history before is bloody, and brutal, from genocide and slavery to wholesale cultural destruction, from its very beginnings.
Followed by a very keen remark:
> 178. Even today, colonialism assumes new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information. Entire regions, especially those marked by structural fragility and limited geopolitical relevance, are currently subjected to a new mindset of extraction: that of health data, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps and demographic information. These have become the new “rare earths” of power: vital data which, once aggregated and analyzed, can be used to train predictive models, guide investment strategies, anticipate crises and, above all, determine who and what is deemed to matter. Those who control the health data of entire peoples — often collected under the pretext of aid, research or innovation — possess a structural leverage over the future, for they can shape needs and markets. They can also decide, before others, to whom medicines, investments and protections will be allocated. Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: to ensure that shared knowledge becomes a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance. This requires restoring to individuals not only the data that describes them, but also the ability to decide how it is used, by whom and for whose benefit. Otherwise, the digital age will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form.
By then we might not even have computers anymore, or we might have "transparent" computers, i.e. have everything on the cloud and just tell our AI agents what to do.
Sorry Pope Leo, things are not going to suddenly turn into a wonderful utopia, but maybe buy some stocks so you can at least make a buck from what's coming.
The Catholic Church is not anywhere close to being a neutral institution who will be writing something like this in good faith (no pun intended). This is an organization based on prejudice, subjugation and outright delusion built on literally millennia of persecution. All of their observations will be made from the standpoint that their worldview is the only correct one, which is unacceptable in every way.
For example, ChatGPT will quickly and efficiently answer all your questions about how and where to get a safe abortion, including pros and cons, history and other specifics. This is something the Church is vehemently opposed to on principle. Anything else they have to say on the topic is therefore irrelevant.
I guarantee that whatever AI doom they're warning about will never be anywhere close to the damage the continued existence of the Catholic Church causes and will continue to cause in the future.
Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't know history nor read the headlines of the past several decades.
Hey, I love it when Bob from Chicago tells Trump to go to hell, but beyond that I couldn't care less what he or the truly horrific religion he leads thinks about anything, let alone new technology.
One thing that isn't talked about enough is how so much is going into AI but not much is coming out of it. The rhetoric from tech bros is still that AI is "going to" change the world. Hasn't really changed the world yet, except driven up everyone's utility bills and put hundreds of thousands of people out of work.
I encourage people, especially software engineers here, to remember the previous "new hotness" tech advancements - blockchain and NoSQL DBs being two recent examples. In both instances there was a flood of VC money into startups that have mostly failed because each was supposed to change the world (or at least change software). I spent a lot of my free time in those days trying to "find a problem" for blockchain and NoSQL to solve. I remember thinking I must be a lousy software engineer because I just wasn't getting the hype. Now I know it's because whenever something new comes out, people talk about how it can do X Y and Z, and there's a disconnect between what a technology CAN do, and what it SHOULD do. I can use blockchain for all sorts of things, but in most cases it wouldn't be the best option. Same for NoSQL DBs. Same for LLMs. The more you understand blockchain, the more you realize it's only good as a globally-distributed, immutable ledger - and currency is the only practical application of that in our society today (e.g., Bitcoin). NoSQL is the same way - yeah you can use MongoDB for whatever app, but it's going to be a bad time maintaining and scaling when you're storing relatively simple and consistent records. A CRUD app usually doesn't warrant a NoSQL DB.
LLMs are the same. I'm finding they are good at search-type tasks, where frankly not much "thinking" is involved. Therefore, with respect to writing software, they are best suited for simple, internal tools. Even then, I have to baby it, especially with today's LLMs. Claude Opus has been nerfed (most-likely quantized) to make space in the datacenters for Mythos, and eventually Mythos will be bad too for the same reasons. The question becomes, as it always has, "will LLMs rise up to the challenge" and history tells us "no." These things never live up to the hype. When you understand how LLMs work, you understand why ChatGPT 3.5 isn't that much worse than GPT 5.5, artificial benchmarks be damned.
An organization that - for centuries - has actively protected child molesters, has sat on billions of dollars, has sided with Nazis, has been involved in multiple fraud and money laundering cases has absolutely zero standing to advice anybody on anything.
Jesus let the Romans take him. The pope drives around in an armoured car with hundreds of soldiers. Why? After all, he’s the official spokesperson of God. He’s either untouchable, or would be endlessly rewarded with sainthood for being a martyr.
But he obviously doesn’t believe that.
If a technology existed that reduced the cost of producing a critical thing (think food, housing, medical care) down to near zero, however, it made the humans currently building the thing redundant, should we build it? Would it be okay to use the hyper-optimization power of Capitalism to build such a technology faster?
Before someone yells at me about this not being the current situation, I think that is the endgame of most of this AI development and in fact the endgame is even more comforting: If it takes 10 construction workers at $60,000/annum to build one home, I can forsee the descendants of current AI tech enabling 10 construction workers at $150,000/annum building 5 homes in the same time with an even larger profit margin for the corporation involved.
But as a clear moral quandary, I think the Pope should consider the first situation.
..or whether or not hiding all those pedophiles was the right.
and to be clear ; i'm not equating AI to those things -- i'm saying that I don't care about the opinion of a group with such a sordid history regardless of how shined up the PR is now.
Maybe Leo should focus on finding a way to disconnect western society from their current cult-of-progress delusions? Could be a better use of the infallible man's pulpit?
Quick browse through pre-AI works from John Paul II show em-dashes present.
We've been having the same argument since the dawn of mankind. AI is the new AR.
Occam's Razor says this is Anthropic trying to build a regulatory moat by leveraging some halo effect.
Maybe Leo should focus on finding a way to disconnect western society from their current cult-of-progress delusions? Could be a better use of the infallible man's pulpit?
NGL it sounds like so much bleating of the sheep standing outside the abattoir.
What happens when the tool outgrows the toolmaker?
Start with video. No one needs AI creating videos with humans in it. But it will eventually get so good that we won’t be able to trust any video. And people will create videos of others to destroy them, which is already happening.
I’d further suggest that it be illegal to create any fake image of a person without their consent. That consent must literally be for every picture and every frame in which their likeness appears. Not one frame can be altered without their consent.
He does not address plagiarism, the fact that AI is mostly a surveillance and IP laundering tool, the fact that AI hasn't achieved much so far. You could say it has achieved nothing if compared to the whole history of human ingenuity, certainly not in CS.
He should have compared AI to the golden calf.
His criticism is lukewarm, does not address the criminal aspects and technological failures and is as such industry compliant. He can now say "I have tried" without harming the industry in the least.
This text is not what our current situation demands, but I hope that priests will augment and amplify it in their sermons and go a bit deeper.
