You should welcome wisdom wherever it is to be found. Judge the document when it is available, not the source.

My guess is that it (re)affirms that LLMs don't have souls and only people do.

If you've read any Vatican publications, the theme is being the authority on the ontology of reality.

EDIT: A decree for bioethics https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu... I'd expect a similar deal for AI.

I hope you saw others' correction to the title here that indicate Olah is just a speaker at an event on the same day, not an author (although he almost certainly was consulted for his opinions while the Pope and his assistants were working on the Encyclical). So what matters here is what the Pope is trying to do, not Olah's intentions in his minor role.

The Pope has already spoken quite a bit about ai, and exhorted priests to keep ai out of their homilies, which should be a sacred fruit of prayer and study.

Just from what I have seen he said and my Catholic Theological background, I would say he will definitely be talking about at least a couple things: 1) the relationship between ai and our intellectual labor, and how to use it fruitfully to grow without losing ourselves in it (a very similar concern to many on hn as far as I understand); and more importantly for him and again for many 2) how to use ai in society in a way that everybody can enjoy the fruits of it, instead of just the elite few (similar to the priority of Rerum novarum). This Pope chose his name because of this theme, and has consistently demonstrated that social justice is amongst his highest priority concerns - to the point that he has asked the Church to stop focusing so heavily on sexual ethics because there are such weighty injustices in the world that require our focused effort and attention.

The encyclical is for the Pope to express the church's view on AI and its impact to society to other Catholics. My guess for why Christopher Olah is there is to signal that Anthropic is the ethical AI company.

There was an article in the FT a while ago about how confused and frustrated Trump was about the strait of Hormuz. The conclusion was that not everyone has a price but that concept was outside of the scope of his narrow mind.

> Who is this for?

For the shrinking Catholic church it's trying to regain relevance. For Anthropic it's PR.

It’s for me. It’s strange so I’m probably going to watch it. It helps that I generally like the modern Catholic church’s direction on things (besides abortion but I’m willing to overlook that).

It's part of the gradual agenda to label AI the antichrist.

This is very much trying to create a consensus around what being human means and why it’s valuable in an age where it will be easy to dismiss the intrinsic value of a human. Probably a bit more important than a marketing stunt.

Not at all. The Rerum Novarum timing is too intentional.

Thankfully we have you to tells us what true Catholicism is like. Maybe the Pope could come learn a little bit from you.

I did rather enjoy New Pope talking the horrors of deportations and walls… considering the Vatican has ultra-strict immigration and walls.

That is just what the (edited) title makes it sound like. The article states that Christopher Olah will be a speaker present at the encyclical release. It does not imply that he had any hand or influence in the content.

I think in the case of Anthropic, it shows they’re at the very least willing to engage with the most important people in the philosophical and theological realm they’re in the midst of disrupting.

When the question asked is roughly of “can an AI ever be considered a human soul?”, there isn’t a philosopher alive whose individual opinion would be considered more meaningful than Pope Leo’s.

It’s unlikely that the church’s opinion would influence the future business choices of Anthropic. I think it still remains a positive business move to publicly engage with the church.

I don't know enough to disagree with this specifically, but reductionism and generalizing is its own problem. A PR stunt is far cry from a power grab. Reductionism favors addressing large trends, and large boogeymen, classes, groups, etc.. instead of doing the diligent work of finding root causes, nuanced as they might be, and addressing those.

If what you say is right, I would challenge that by still insisting the corporations can only do what governments let them. You might say they run governments behind the scenes, to which I would say, who let them? They keep influencing elections? Then elections don't seem to be working, that's the root cause perhaps? In all the major political issues, that's the trend I'm seeing, democracy failing, but then I'll challenge myself and ask why is it failing?

The old sentiment of "if it can't be fixed, it isn't a problem" seems rampant. Modern democracy itself is a fix for some other sets of problems. In the US at least, it is in theory designed to be mended and fixed. Perhaps the real cause is lack of political will power by everyone pursuing politics, to even talk about changing the way the government is architectured, altering constitutions, talking about parting ways with land and population (secession), or incorporation of some. Perhaps the population just isn't that interested in educating themselves on matters of civics, therefore how democracy works needs a rewrite at its core?

Either way, I rambled on, i know, but it's with a point i hope is obvious: the common political sentiment around billionaires, corporations, oligarchs (or similar "woke" or "DEI" dogwhistles on the right) simply don't address root causes. They're reductive by design, not accident.