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.
Same with AI.
It's why China was able to eliminate extreme poverty while creating hundreds of billionaires.
You may think this inequality is unfair, but economics isn't concerned about inequality. Why? Because inequality doesn't matter. What only matters is poverty, and the elimination of it.
And I always find it hilarious that socialists can never say "I want to eliminate poverty"
Focus on the poor, not the rich.
It won't. This just reflects the diminished view technologists have of work rather than any actual reality. It's a category error as absurd as asking, "what if a debugger makes programmers obsolete".
90% of being an accountant, just like 90% of being any knowledge worker has nothing to do with actual knowledge, but with mundane personal and organizational work. If you're a programmer, were you ever concerned that a smarter programmer replaces you? If you think of reasons to be fired, that's the first one? Look at the 20 most common professions in any country, if it came down to just automating their literal tasks they'd all be gone 30 years ago.
> 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:
This is not accurate.
Leo XIII explicitly calls for state action to protect the rights and interests of the working man. Leo says that the public authority—i.e. the state—has a duty to "prevent [the violation of rights] and to punish injury" (Rerum novarum 37). He proceeds to make note that the poor—unlike the rich, who have means of shielding themselves due to their wealth—depend upon the state to a higher degree and therefore should be "specially cared for and protected by the government".
Furthermore, Leo states that the working man has, "has interests in which he should be protected by the State," namely their spiritual and physical well-being (Rerum novarum 40). In the following sections he argues for restrictions to be put in place to ensure that workers have appropriate time for rest in accordance with their work.
Suffice it to say, Pope Leo XIII absolutely does not envision a world where the wealthy are merely "just ask" for fairness. He certainly places limitations on proper government action in his refutation of socialism, but it is completely wrong to portray this as a rejection of state protection of workers in its entirety (this becomes much more obvious when reading his work in line with prior teachings pertaining to state action).
Having re-read Rerum Novarum within the last week, what you are saying is reductive to the point of not accurately portraying the contents of the encyclical. I would encourage you and others to (re)read the encyclical with an eye towards getting a more full and accurate understanding.
It...does not. It follows the basic structure:
1. There's a problem with the present condition under industrial capitalism 2. Socialism is the wrong solution. (There are lots of problems with this part, including that it makes the very common error of misinterpreting the socialist opposition to private property—ownership of the non-financial means of production separated from the workers whose labor is applied to those means of production—as an opposition to individual human property generally; the latter may be a feature of some schools of socialism but is not a general feature of socialism.) 3. Laying out what Leo XIII saw as the Catholic solution.
The first part takes 3 paragraphs. (1-3) The second part takes 17 paragraphs. (4-20) The third part takes 43 paragraphs. (21-63)
It is simply wrong to take the second section is the main focus, and it is equally incorrect to describe the solution taking up the vast majority of the document as nothing more than "let the rich get richer, let's just ask them to be fair, with some intervention from the church."
"it is expedient to bring under special notice certain matters of moment. First of all, there is the duty of safeguarding private property by legal enactment and protection. Most of all it is essential, where the passion of greed is so strong, to keep the populace within the line of duty; for, if all may justly strive to better their condition, neither justice nor the common good allows any individual to seize upon that which belongs to another, or, under the futile and shallow pretext of equality, to lay violent hands on other people's possessions."
And then even worse still
"When work people have recourse to a strike and become voluntarily idle, it is frequently because the hours of labor are too long, or the work too hard, or because they consider their wages insufficient. The grave inconvenience of this not uncommon occurrence should be obviated by public remedial measures; for such paralysing of labor not only affects the masters and their work people alike, but is extremely injurious to trade and to the general interests of the public; moreover, on such occasions, violence and disorder are generally not far distant, and thus it frequently happens that the public peace is imperiled. The laws should forestall and prevent such troubles from arising; they should lend their influence and authority to the removal in good time of the causes which lead to conflicts between employers and employed. "
So stop industrial action immediately and in the future try to remove the causes!
Thank you for convincing me to read it further, it gave more gravitas to a hastily formed opinion on my end, but did not change it. Back to my message, I hope this is not what we get from Leo XIV on the new challenges, even though the fact that he chose his name on the basis of Leo XIII is not very promising.
Actually, I respect more something as honest as: Ἀπόδοτε τὰ τοῦ Καίσαρος τῷ Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ τῷ Θεῷ.
[0] http://www.edwardfeser.com/unpublishedpapers/socialismvsthef...
> 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.
Of fence fame
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.
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).
These are all very much responses people have modeled in flies in lab setting.
[1] https://blog.entomologist.net/do-insects-and-animals-possess...
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.
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.
The immateriality of the intellect is included there. Aquinas would say it is only the intellect that can understand a universal concept, which is itself immaterial. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative difference from the capabilities of AI. It is really the reductionists who are guilty of 'woo' here.
> The lowest of the operations of the soul is that which is performed by a corporeal organ, and by virtue of a corporeal quality. Yet this transcends the operation of the corporeal nature; because the movements of bodies are caused by an extrinsic principle, while these operations are from an intrinsic principle; for this is common to all the operations of the soul; since every animate thing, in some way, moves itself. Such is the operation of the "vegetative soul"; for digestion, and what follows, is caused instrumentally by the action of heat, as the Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 4).
That is to say: we cannot explain things like digestion "naturally" as we would require an "external principle" that does not exist for living things, instead because they "move themselves" they require a super-natural explanation, i.e. the soul.
Indeed, Aquinas puts the following as a potential object, which he rebuts
> Objection 1: It would seem that the parts of the vegetative soul are not fittingly described—namely, the nutritive, augmentative, and generative. For these are called "natural" forces. But the powers of the soul are above the natural forces. Therefore we should not class the above forces as powers of the soul.
> On the contrary, The Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 2,4) that the operations of this soul are "generation, the use of food," and (cf. De Anima iii, 9) "growth."
Edward Feser's book Aquinas is a good starting point for understanding it.
Indeed, Aquinas is using the soul the way that modern scientists use "dark matter". Except where the modern problem is unexpected rates of universal expansion, Aquinas' problem is vitalism-qua-"why are living things different than non-living things."
Once we abandoned vitalism, the conception of the soul must therefore also change. But in my reading of history, there is no clear break; no "before" and "after". Aquinas' definitions and concepts were never really abandoned, the church just retreated from the bailey of "the soul explains all the features of living matter including how it moves around" to the motte of "the soul explains intellect/reason/will since thats the only thing left thats not obviously physical."
Indeed, you will see that Aquinas' language suffuses most official Catholic teaching on the soul, even though the official teachings are usually a slightly generalized version of Aquinas's concrete assertions.
I wish I could find the document, but about 2 years ago, the Vatican released an official document explaining that Rome had been using certain philosophical traditions, including Thomism, in its official documents and councils for a few hundred years, because it was convenient, yet without making it official to any degree. I was so happy when it came out because it vindicated what I had been telling all my Thomist friends, that Thomism is not official Catholic doctrine.
Second, the soul is not, on the Aristotelian-Thomistic thesis, a "supernatural" being, as an angel or God would be since (though not material themselves) they properly belong to the material order.
So these are natural, not supernatural explanations, which nevertheless go beyond the purely material (corporeal) and so are 'above' them. In the quoted article, he means that these characteristic activites of living things are not simply reducible to those of the material parts themselves, since the living thing possesses the principle of its own organization/growth/reproduction etc. that non-living material does not, so something beyond the non-living 'corporeal' order must be operating.
While this concern certainly exists to some extent in the Church, and may be somewhere in the Pope's thoughts, his explicit comparison to the Industrial Revolution and Rerum Novarum's response to it, and to it as a threat not only to human dignity but also to justice and labor, indicates that a—arguably the—major concern is for it as a potential occasion of and force for material mistreatment.
Can you elaborate on how you arrived at this conclusion? There are multiple Popes that have rejected “god-of-the-gaps” explanations instead invoking the idea that science helps one learn more about God, not as a rationale for invoking God where we are ignorant.
I read Aquinas and realized that the whole ancient conception of a soul is tied together with the ancient concept of vitalism. Within vitalism you need something to explain why living matter is different than non-living matter, and that something is the presence of a soul! Hey presto, add a few layers of philosophy and divine revelation and you arrive at the Christian immortal soul.
(In this case "god of the gaps" does not refer to the Catholic God himself, but instead it refers specifically to the concept of the soul)
Aquinas, in his Summa, makes a series of assertion-of-fact about souls. Specifically, he claims that the soul explains (or "is the principle of") certain otherwise-unexplained phenomenon.
It doesn't matter how he got there (i.e. whether he was arguing with someone online, or trying to explain catholicism in terms of Aristotle, or if he was just an LLM stochastically putting ink on parchment), the fact is that inventing a supernatural thing that explains a bunch of unexplained phenomenon is precisely what I meant by "god-of-the-gaps style reasoning."
And therein lies my point: the purpose of Aquinas was purely to explain preexisting Catholic theology, using Aristotle as a starting point. He invented nothing.
You can say "the Catholic Church invented the soul to explain [etc]" and then I'd just push it back to Christianity itself, and if you'd concede on that, we'd have resolved my initial argument.
This is simply not true, and I've quoted the passages from Aquinas that explicitly assert metaphysical differences between living and non-living matter in this very thread.
If you want a tidy introduction to metaphysics of this sort, consider this one [0].
No, it just claims that human souls are created differently than animal souls, and therefore have different properties. It defends this with the same kind of zeal that you defend a round earth with, and for the same reasons.
> as they fear it will undermine people's reasons for treating each other with respect
I didn't realize the members and minds of the Catholic Church were so united in motive!
> anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created)
Come on, you know the Catholic Church has never taught this.
> A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning Indeed, if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding--
He's one Catholic theologian, even if eminent, out of hundreds who are just as eminent. Why single him out? Where does the Bible say Aquinas is infallible? What a strange strawman.
That's... not much different than what I said (which was that humans are extra special)? I think it was in the early 1900s that the church Magisterium finally said that human souls belonged to different "orders" than plant and animal souls. And hey, wouldn't you know it, but the "orders" spelled out by the Magisterium broke exactly along the lines Aquinas laid out in the Summa. That's why I singled him out.
Re evolution:
The church excommunicated at least one scientist for early work on evolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorio_Chil_y_Naranjo
Or you could go back to Genesis 2:7 and countless other Biblical passages. This isn't about the Church, it's just a core tenet of Christianity.
> The church excommunicated at least one scientist for early work on evolution
Because he followed Lamarck and Darwin, a vague deist and an agnostic. For a prominent scholar who claimed to be Catholic, excommunication was probably the correct course of action to avoid the scandal of confusing Catholics. This had nothing to do with theistic evolution, which neither of them believed in
But theistic evolution just says that maybe God used natural processes to create the physical bodies of the original humans, apart from their souls which are created individually and instantly for each person.
This was conceded even by St. Augustine as a possibility.
The Church's understanding of morality draws heavily from natural law theory. Natural law theory grounds morality in human nature: what is good for human beings is determined by what it means to be human. Morality enters the picture, because unlike other animals or beings, a central part of what it means to be human is rational and to be able to choose freely between apprehended alternatives. This forms the basis for rights and responsibilities.
Now, it would be a mistake to say that the Imago Dei does not inform this understanding. In fact, the image of God consists of Man's rationality and freedom which stands in analogous relation to God (God is obviously infinitely different from human beings, but nonetheless the analogia entis holds, because it is analogical, neither univocal nor equivocal). It is Man's nature as intellectual being that makes him created in the image of God. (Angels, too, are created in the image of God for the same reasons. They have angelic intellects which differ from human intellects; whereas human beings apprehend reality through the senses from which the intellect then abstracts forms imperfectly, angels can apprehend the forms of things directly.)
I would also say that "postulate" is not the right term, as the Church is not postulating. It accepts this as true.
> Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism (man wasn't at the center of the universe) and anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created) before coming around due to overwhelming evidence.
The Universe we inhabit is, in this greater cosmology, quite lowly in comparison. So even if human beings were to inhabit a spatial center (whatever significance you wish to attach to that), it would be a lowly center. W.r.t. evolution, the opposition the Church has is not to various biological explanations of change and adaptation, but evolutionism, which is a metaphysical position, not a biological one, one that many who advocate for evolution also hold without realizing it is the domain of metaphysics, not biology. The Church still holds that each soul is the result of a special act of creation. I won't get into the metaphysics here, but it is decidedly not Cartesian.
> A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning.
I have no idea what you mean here. The intellect and will are held to be immaterial faculties, making human souls intellectual [0]. Aristotle gives arguments for this position. Roughly, the intellect cannot be a purely physical faculty, because abstraction ultimately involves the separation of form from particulars. Because matter (understood as prime matter, etc) is the particularizing principle, the joining of matter with form is what is the cause of concrete instances of that form. Thus, if the intellect were material, the apprehension of form would mean the instantiation of the apprehended thing in the intellect as a particular, which is clearly not what happens! When you apprehend "triangularity" or "Horseness", you do not instantiate a concrete triangle or a concrete horse in your mind! And, in fact, if you did, you would by the very act fail to grasp the universal concept, because particulars by definition exclude all others particulars except themselves. You would possess this triangle or this horse, and not any other of the potentially infinite instances of them. You would not grasp what it means to be a triangle or a horse.
So, it is not a matter of the Church feeling threatened in some way. Concerns have nothing to do with some kind of conceptual threat to the "specialness" of human beings. AI, on this account, simply cannot reason; if it could, then it could, but it cannot. The computational formalism is, to put it in Searlian terms, all syntax and no semantics, which is to say no intentionality. And even here, the physical device isn't even objectively a computer and isn't objectively computing (both Searle and Kripke present arguments for this, for example). But whether computers can reason is actually besides the point.
> Obviously no one today says that the soul is in charge of the "locomotion" of living things
You seem to misunderstand what a soul is. The soul is the form of a living thing. Thus, the soul of horse is that principle which causes it to be the kind of thing it is, and thus is its organizing principle. This isn't Cartesian metaphysics here where you have one thing, the res cogitans, and a second thing, the res extensa, kind of glued to one another, but really two separate things. By analogy, if you have a sphere of bronze, then the "soul" of that ball is the "sphericity". The sphericity makes the ball of bronze what it is. The sphere ceases to be a sphere if you were to melt it or hammer it into a cube.
If this topic interests you, you will find Feser's "Immortal Souls" interesting [1]. He gives a thorough treatment of the subject.
This is true, although I do want to draw a bit of a distinction between the churches understanding-qua-official-teaching, and understanding-qua-what-actual-catholic-officials-believe. I often see very devout people look at something like CCC 1956:
> The natural law, present in the heart of each man and established by reason, is universal in its precepts and its authority extends to all men. It expresses the dignity of the person and determines the basis for his fundamental rights and duties
and come away with "Our moral rights and duties derive from our dignity via natural law" which isn't quite right, but nevertheless drives their behavior.
Its just like how the church finally, in 1822, explicitly allowed heliocentric books to be published. Technically, the church never officially asserted geocentrism as a doctrine and so heliocentric books should have been fine, but in practice, the chief censors were actually prohibiting them from being published because it was the common view among officials at the time that the church had in fact officially condemned heliocentrism in the Galileo case.
> I would also say that "postulate" is not the right term, as the Church is not postulating. It accepts this as true.
Yes, the better word for me to use would have been axiom; I was muddling my mathematical terms a bit.
> I have no idea what you mean here. The intellect and will are held to be immaterial faculties, making human souls intellectual
I am saying that because of the belief that "you can't explain that physically" where that = "abstraction", we've entered "God of the gaps" territory.
Now its true, I have read philosophical arguments that abstraction (or in the case of Ed Feser's argument, Incompossibility) is fundamentally impossible to do physically. And indeed, if those arguments succeeded we would be out of the woods. But I've universally found the philosophy to be very weak; to the point that even an amateur philosopher like myself can see that there are real-actual logical flaws, or that they rely on what appear to be extremely weak premises.
> Concerns have nothing to do with some kind of conceptual threat to the "specialness" of human beings. AI, on this account, simply cannot reason; if it could, then it could, but it cannot.
This is precisely the worry. This is a falsifiable prediction of Catholic theology: the instant there exists an AI which can actually reason, Catholic theology will have been falsified.
Now no doubt the Catholic philosophers will respond to such an eventuality by simultaneously claim that the machine isn't "doing it right" and that "our other accounts of Catholic theology are better anyway", but real credibility-damage will be done to Catholic theology.
[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
[2] "and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast so that the image of the beast should even speak, and to cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain." (Rev 13:15)
[3] `Moreover, AI may prove even more seductive than traditional idols for, unlike idols that “have mouths but do not speak; eyes, but do not see; ears, but do not hear” (Ps. 115:5-6), AI can “speak,” or at least gives the illusion of doing so (cf. Rev. 13:15). Yet, it is vital to remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity—it is crafted by human minds, trained on human-generated material, responsive to human input, and sustained through human labor. AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life, and it is also fallible. By turning to AI as a perceived “Other” greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God. However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work`
For context, within Catholic understanding of St. John, any time he talks about the "beast" or "those who dwell upon the face of the earth", he's referring to people who's hearts and minds are centered on this illusory paradise, or as St. Paul calls it, "the flesh", and as St. John says, "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, which all pass away".
This is in sharp contrast to "those who dwell in heaven" or "an angel, that is, a man" which represents anyone who's heart and mind are of the "the spirit" in St. Paul's words, or rather, who shun "all that will pass away as the flower fades and the grass withers" as St. Peter puts it.
So the "beast" here does not mean some mythical creature, but simply Adam and those who follow his principles and are made of "the dust of the earth", as opposed to Jesus, the New Adam, who is made of "stardust" as St. Paul compares.
Also, what is an American pope doing using a word like "defence," which is spelled with an 's' here?
It's not an article written by the Pope in English.
What does power have to do with violating dignity? Justice and labor I could understand, but a sense of dignity can be destroyed without absolutely any typical power or coersion.
Unless of course by power in this case you don't mean political, but influential, for example by making sure through media that several generations of certain demographics grow up being taught that they're incompetent at best and intrinstically evil at worst. Then sure, I can see that, and have.
Improvements in AI may eventually improve quality of life for the majority of people, but we may go through a phase where a few people reap huge rewards while most suffer a decrease in their quality of life. Getting ahead of the problem, from the social side, could reduce the short-term suffering.
Is this really true though? Being an agricultural feudal society is much much worse than the dreamy view we have of farming these days, and almost everyone even today chooses to work in a factory rather than a farm if they have that choice, in china, Africa, everywhere.
We have this image of gloomy coal powered cities being the worst place possible but in fact it was still better than the alternatives
They were so angry about their fall in circumstance they revolted (and have been slandered by capitalists since).
Cities at the time were charnel houses -- even worse, I think, than the popular imagining of them today. The rate of death in London, as well as in other cities during the revolution, was so high that it needed a constant inward flow of immigrants to even maintain its population. Without the safer, more livable countryside to provide a continuous supply of fresh meat for the mills, those cities would have depopulated through a combination of plague, malnutrition, violence, and workplace injury.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act has an OK overview but is a bit thin and just a starting point. The political upheavals still echo in British politics today. I think it's fair to say that some of the changes were driven by the lure of profit (and associated national revenue) and some out of a desire to avert a domestic repeat of the American and French revolutions.
I realize you're kind of suggesting this later in your comment, but HN'ers really think prosperity is a default output of technological advancement.
I think short-term suffering, or at the very least disruption (as we're seeing) is essentially inevitable, but with all of these preemptive frameworks being implemented, or at the very least discussed (though just the latter isn't really good enough at all, of course) in turnaround times that are unprecedented, I really do not foresee a techno-dystopia; however, again, perhaps that's just wishful thinking.
Quite honestly, I think a pragmatic place to start, outside of theology and moral philosophy, is to make AI development necessarily adherent to some consortium of standards outlined by governments and implemented by boards within industries - like what we see with many engineering professions in the US and other countries.
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.
> ICANN will initiate an emergency response for name collision reports only where there is a reasonable belief that the name collision presents a clear and present danger to human life.
.va is the ccTLD for the State of Vatican City (equivalent to, say, .uk for the United Kingdom)
vatican.va is the domain used by the Holy See as such. Given the relation between the Holy See and the State of Vatican City, this is very loosely parallel to royal.uk ("The Vatican" is a common metonym for the Holy See)
vaticanstate.va is the domain used by the State of Vatican City (this is like gov.uk)
Several subordinate organizations of the Holy See or the State of Vatican City have their own second-level domains under the .va ccTLD.
Antiqua et Nova. Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877709
The Vatican doesn't tend to translate current documents or speeches into Latin, though certain kinds of documents are, by tradition, issued originally and authoritatively in Latin and those are translated into other languages. This speech was given in Italian, so...
"You meant, more relevant to God?"
"No, in sociological terms."
YPM is a gold mine.
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
andrewmutz•5h ago
baggy_trough•5h ago
tbct•4h ago
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...
testfrequency•4h ago
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.
turing_complete•3h ago
vFunct•2h ago
_m_p•3h ago