> He called for guardrails on AI to stop it capturing individuals' "minds but … also our affections."
> Fr Baggot cited the example of Magisterium AI, a Catholic chatbot. He sits on the scholarly advisory board for the service, and said its creators had worked to prevent it being "anthropomorphic" adding, "We do not want people having an intimate relationship with it."
I appreciate that coinage, "artificial intimacy," and want to explore the implications of it more.
Although I don't like the future proposed by the AI companies, this is the least of my concerns. The only big concern is employment. Like, if AI creates more jobs than it destroys, sure, go ahead, do it now.
BTW I just don't want "deep" bonds, but some sort of bonds is always good. Not sure how "deep" he meant though.
I feel icky saying this but we should make a strong effort as a society to stamp out anti-social behaviors. Addictions are very high on that list.
You might think that you can engage this way without being a burden to others, but you can't.
GLP-1s can help stamp out addiction, but people are going to be people. You can provide them support, but you cannot prevent chronic, determined self harm and destruction. I speak from personal experience.
https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/the-growing-scientific-cas...
And for the same reason: they want their fucking money.
It's not my position to tell someone what to want. But the evolutionary firmware your body runs on is tuned for interpersonal bonds. If you want to go against that, nobody will stop you, but it strikes me as needless suffering in a world that already has a considerable amount.
I can certainly see folks getting so used to it, that they then measure all their IRL relationships by that. They could decide that “you’re not my friend,” because you don’t want to listen to them whine endlessly about their ex.
So, just like professional therapists then?
From what I’ve seen of LLMs, it’s the opposite.
All therapists give some some variation of "your problem is $SOMETHING_POSITIVE".
Never "your problem is you're too selfish" because those patients don't go back.
It's always "your problem is you're too willing to help" or "you give too much of yourself" or other similar such BS.
I know there's other responses saying the same thing, but this needs underscoring: good therapists won't put up with this forever. They should use techniques to guide your mind away from keeping you trapped. It's a slow progress with very nonlinear progression. But for those it helps, things can improve.
Eventually you realize you (and perhaps a higher power) freed yourself from your mental bondage. They showed you the path, and walked alongside you, but they weren't the ones making the changes.
Step 1: Stop giving them human or human-like names.
Claude, Siri, Gemini, etc.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Greenpoint/comments/1nmk49r/dystopi...
So maybe an improvement.
Good friend of the Church, Nietzsche predicted dystopia long ago but it never plays out the way people think. The chimp troupe is highly unpredictable. One day it props up Hitlers. Next day it kills him.
Definitely not an improvement to be friends with corporate-owned machines versus being friends with God
I've been looking for this phrase for years.
It describes the phenomenon perfectly, even accounting for the diminishing of emotional/mental/physical closeness that occurs.
From the language the Church uses ("Jesus loves you.") to the practices the Church does (confession to a priest).
The most charitable take I can make from this is that religious leaders genuinely believe what they claim to believe so they don't think it's "artificial." There are a lot of less charitable takes I could make, but I'd stop here.
If you did try to understand basic Christian theology, you'd likely still disagree but would be less confused.
This too is a charitable take; no snark meant.
Jesus is an ahistorical figure who was originally crucified in the firmament above the earth. Notice no mention of an earthly ministry in the Pailine epistles; Paul is arguing for salvation from a heavenly figure. In his letters, Jesus is still to be revealed, rather than returning. Only decades later did the stories about a human man get written.
The Didache was most likely part of the letter written by the "pillars in Jerusalem" (James the Just, Peter, and John) after their meeting with Paul. This was the meeting to discuss the matter of preaching to gentiles and whether circumcision ought to be required for christian converts. It contains many of the tenets later ascribed to Jesus, but doesn't associate him with teaching them.
The reason the earthly story was embraced by the church was to stop people like Paul from having visions of Christ that the church couldn’t control. By pointing to a real guy on earth, they could control the message. Otherwise, any yokel on the street could teach that Jesus revealed new teachings and the church risked being undermined.
Marcion was probably the first to create a collection of writings associated with christianity: he collected some of Paul's letters and had his own gospel. It was thought that he had a shortened version of Luke (as testified by Eusebius and Tertullian). Marcion, however, claimed that his gospel had been "judaized"; this suggests that his shorter version was the original gospel before others modified it.
Acts was written as a direct response to Marcion’s scripture. It was written to harmonize Paul’s high-jacking of the religion by making he and Peter appear to be in alignment when actually he was at odds with the leaders in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem pillars (James, Peter, John), were strict adherents of Judaism, whereas Paul taught that Jesus made the Law / Torah unnecessary. They were almost certainly Essenes, one of the three flavors of Judaism at the time (the other two were the Pharisees and Sadducees mentioned in the new testament). John the Baptist was clearly also an Essene. He's said to wear camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and honey. His practice of baptism also aligns with daily ritual water immersion believed to be a core practice of the Essenes.
This is a very long way of saying that Jesus first appeared in visions and spoke to the early leaders without walking on earth. It's a fringe belief about which I was quite skeptical, but damn if the evidence doesn't line up. See Robert Price, Earl Doherty, and Elbe Spurling for more info. Elbe's online book is free and contains a huge amount of historical information about the region at the.
——
So, I’ll ask you this: which of us has spent more time earnestly trying to understand the faith? I know I read more actual research (as opposed to dogma) than most USA christians, especially evangelicals.
But how did the Church's claim that it was a real guy on Earth stop anyone from claiming visions of Christ?
edit: I'm not sure we're talking about the same things here. Your claims are all from a history/historicity point of view, but you ask me about faith, and claim to reject dogma.
edit 2: The OP was criticizing the claim that Jesus loves you (Claim 1) and criticizing Reconciliation. You took a historicity approach that included disputing Jesus's existence, that's one way to address Claim 1, but other than that I'm still not sure we're talking about the same thing.
There's an old heresy, Docetism, that would agree with your take on Jesus not having lived, but even they wouldn't reject the claim that "Jesus loves you".
And finally, LLMs. They certainly _could_ be used to help individuals bootstrap and quickly gain a basic competence in a new topic, and allow those individuals to reach greater expertise more quickly. But _a lot_ of people will just offload their thinking to the LLMs and actually erode their skills. Is this strictly inevitable from a conceptual standpoint? No. But practically speaking a lot of people will fall into this trap, which enlightened technologists will scratch their heads. "I don't understand why people say LLMs make you dumber, I've used them to advance my career and expand my knowledge, etc. Sounds like you guys just don't like progress."
Malnourished. The word you were looking for is malnourished. Junk food is a problem but the abundance of food didn't somehow cause "cleavage between upper and lower classes."
Americans today can afford to eat 4000 calories worth of food and it's already optimized for palatability and convenience. It's relatively easy to eat 4000 calories of Doritos, microwave burritos, and boxed cookies. There's advertising to remind you of its existence and researchers dedicated to optimizing the delight of eating these products (increasing the odds of overeating just because it's pleasurable and frictionless).
The transition from "abundance" to "abundance multiplied by advertising and product optimization" drove obesity more than simple availability of calories, IMO. I see a parallel with digital information. There was more than enough information on the Web to spend all day looking at it even before social networks were common. But that "home cooked" experience wasn't engineered for engagement time, so companies that optimized products for engagement were, in practice, a lot better at getting people to look at digital information for many hours per day.
Cigarettes are an appetite suppressant. Easier to control your calorie intake if you aren't feeling hunger pangs often
Counterpoint, the richest man in the world is clearly addicted to being on twitter and posts at all hours of the day. More generally I don't see why the richest wouldn't be addicted to social media like the rest of us – after all they have a lot more free time and disposable income
The richest people in SV send their children to schools that are deliberately devoid of, or carefully restrictive of, technology. This is do they can learn to think, not follow.
As far as I can tell, rich kids are just as addicted to phones/etc as anyone else.
Six seconds of DuckDuckGo:
https://parkervillesteiner.wa.edu.au/2022/08/08/hello-world/
Nadella lives in an AI generated cocoon of psuedo-information, if his words are to be believed. Zuckerberg thinks he's Caesar and has become Dominican, post metaverse, for some reason. Bezos has become a Miami club promotor with phallic rockets. Thiel rants about the coming Anti Christ in seminars and keeps trying to create 'libertarian' cities (that he would own). Altman talks about the coming age of the Dyson sphere. The immortal vampire guy goes to sleep at 4pm or something insane.
The highest echelon of wealth allows you to follow every possible impulse in a 'disciplined' way at any given moment.
"this guy blew grass clippings at my car so I " purchased every home around me for a mile and constructed a private compound free from the interference of lesser mortals, then bankrupted the guy that dented my car?
Well yes they're all nuts, but do any of these quirks suggest poor impulse control?
I think that's more likely related to how little they actually sleep, and trying to fill their waking hours, more than it is related to an addiction. It seems to be a pattern with these people that only need 4-5 hours a day of sleep.
I'd argue the iPhone crossed that line at some point within the past five years, though, admittedly, it is the iPhone + social media services working together. I doubt Jobs would have approved the gaudy, Myspace-aesthetic-level Messages backgrounds that iOS 26 was proud to launch with.
What are companies going to pay these now-dumber people to do, once they've automated away the jobs the smarter versions of these people did? Will the AI be able to perform the original jobs but unable to perform the jobs achievable by these now-dumber people?
Are we a better-off society if a net dumber population is doing a manual labor job that the robotics companies haven't solved yet?
Kill each other, in some ways.
AI is incredibly useful. I'm already getting a ton of use out of it. But you have to treat it like an untrustworthy source, or at least have a "trust but verify" attitude. You also have to understand that it is not sentient, doesn't "care" about you, and is just a hugely powerful autocomplete engine. Any sense of intimacy or understanding you have with it is an illusion.
In engineering I treat it like a junior intern that is very fast, has memorized a huge amount of info, but makes mistakes and has to be hand-held and anything they produce must be examined and tested.
So you spend your own experienced dev time chasing down a high volume of junior dev mistakes instead of writing high quality experienced dev code?
Sorting through large amounts of junior intern code does not seem like a valuable use of an experienced dev's time.
Like any dev tool you have to play with it.
It won’t do your thinking for you or write difficult stuff.
While I'm highly skeptical that the current iteration of LLM tech will lead to mass joblessness, the reasoning above is flawed. If it costs less to employ a bot than to employ a human, then the price of human labor will fall until it reaches equilibrium with the bot. And if that equilibrium price happens to be below what it takes to keep a human alive, then it doesn't matter if "human wants are infinite" because it would be cheaper to fulfill those wants without paying a human.
“Life is suffering” meant something very different when the Buddha first said it to now. The idea that “the only constant is change” is a relatively modern creation(or at least the significance of it), so this idea that economics is going to keep working the way it always has - at least feels like it’s going to change if we get more advanced AI.
AI is a fundamentally antisocial anti-human technology
I don't know any yacht owning people but the few people I know with boats are very happy with it's size. The people looking for a football field on water are _limited_. Human desires are limited and if that limit can be achieved without the collective efforts of all humans then under our capitalistic model somebody is going to starve.
While I agree that the replacement of humans with AI would lead to joblessness, I think you'll see far sooner mass joblessness as a human with better technology can replace 50+ other humans (like containership engineer vs sailship crew).
Does anyone know where to find more? Where are the modern christian scholars? Are there christian publications easily available? In the universities I found those sources are available, but only in the specific context of studying religion but much less so as another voice on the subject at hand.
New Polity Podcast[1] also regularly features smart conversations.
Insightful analysis of the modern world and the Christian response to it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3hMSZqatHI
He also has a new book out, Against the Machine, which has good reviews, but I haven't read yet.
Recent article entitled "Your Friends Are Not In Your Phone" was fantastic: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/technology/your-friend...
Some suggestions for a variety of subjects:
* Fr. Stanley Jaki on Physics and the philosophy of science - I am working through https://www.abebooks.com/9780895267498/God-Cosmologists-Jaki...
* Philosophy in general, Peter Kreeft (I recommend "Jesus Shock", it's amazing how "used" to Christ we've become, and this book does a good job of pointing out just how different the reactions to him are) and Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue) are both good "recent" authors.
* Bioethics and philosophy https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Bioethics-Limits-Scie... (I will freely admit to bias here, but this is easy to read, clear, and to the point)
* Particularly interesting in the moment: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-limits-...
For super up-to-date happenings, you can go to Vatican News[1]. (A great example in the first article, "Holy See urges moratorium on autonomous weapons at UN debate on AI".)
For weightier, more timeless writings that address the issues of the current day, but are meant to be read indefinitely, the Papal Encyclicals[2] are the look. Rerum Novarum is a good one to start with.
I'd be skeptical of any persuasive writings by lay-persons (i.e. not priests or nuns). It's like the difference between a lawyer's opinion and a judge's ruling. They can be fantastic scholars, but they don't speak for the church.
1: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city.html 2: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/
As a Catholic myself, I wonder what the church should say/do with regards to technology like this and would like to know where you stand on it. Personally I think that further public discussions need to be held on the morality of potential implementations of AI (I’m thinking ahead by decades once LLMs can really make a dent in the workforce) but question the effectiveness of the Church participating in discussions like that.
That illusion of closeness could have the potential to warp how we relate to REAL people. Over time, if your "listener" never judges you or walks away, you might measure real human bonds against an unfair standard.
It reminds me of people who think slot machines have some element of skill involved. If you pull the lever juuuust right it will be a jackpot....
[1] https://ryanglover.net/blog/chauffeur-knowledge-and-the-impe...
[0] https://catholicus.eu/en/the-exorcists-of-the-vatican-realit...
mensetmanusman•4mo ago
However, it also led to the counter reaction of cross fit and extreme fitness by a small percentage.
The same will happen with AI. Most people will become smooth brains when they don’t have to exercise thought and a small fraction will use it to push the bounds of what humans are capable of.
conartist6•4mo ago
red_rech•4mo ago
b112•4mo ago
We're already losing physical books, and data online will slowly become more and more circumspect. That is, AI training on AI, with more and more nonsense blogs, will make simple accuracy of any data very rare.
A strong mind may have the capacity to not be taint by AI too much, but what if it cannot get anything non-AI tainted to feed it? What if there are no teachers of any caliber left, for they are all smooth-brains as you say?
What if society is run AI itself, and no one understands anything at all?
That incredible mind may make some progress, but will lack the solid foundation you and I have had.