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.
0. https://www.catholic.com/qa/the-churchs-position-on-transgen...
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.
Immaterial and cultural goods. This is a fascinating view on non-tangibles and one I feel inspired by. Reading this I asked myself (wait for the larger quote in a minute) how this affects views of IP, learning when texts are not available, cultural impact of characters and stories, the output from universities, publication of papers, ownership of research done by public or even private (!) funds, and more. Particularly I wonder about open weights vs open source for AI, and open source as a concept: where the old-school 'free software' GPLed version seems -- perhaps I am showing my bias -- most aligned with the ethical stance here?
> 66. Certainly there is a right to private property, which has its own specific meaning and purpose, yet it is always subordinate to the universal destination of goods.
'Always subordinate'.
> among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data. In a context where the wealth of nations depends increasingly on knowledge and technology, when these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods. In turn, it widens the gap between the included and the excluded, between those who can participate in the digital revolution and those who remain on the margins.
Wow!
I cannot interpret this; it's not my right. But moving from the questions I asked above, to this paragraph, is powerful.
So ... women should have the same dignity as men and should get the same access to "employment, education, social and political responsibilities". But of course they cannot be trusted with spiritual matters, so they cannot become priests. In other words, to me this is still the same old hypocrisy that made me leave that institution and also today make me deeply distrust any words of wisdom coming from there.
Just declaring the discrimination to be "not that important" is quite typical then (as it does not affect you) and well, my catholic aunt would disagree, but she is not important.
May I ask, what the principal role of women is in catholocism, besides being good mothers?
Says who, exactly?
Now, I don't know if Pope Leo actually believes in the full equality of men and women or if he's really being a hypocrite here. It's fully possible that you're absolutely right to scoff at him for it.
But the thing is, the limitation of priesthood to men in the Roman Catholic Church is such a deeply ingrained thing, it would be very, very hard for a single Pope to change it, especially early on in his papacy. If one wanted to, one of the first things he'd have to do would be...
...why, it would be to release an encyclical talking about the equality of men and women. Whether that was its core message or not.
What I do know is, that a main motivation to introduce the celibate, was that priests don't inherit church land to their offspring anymore.
In other words, I applaud reforming what is possible, but I would not want that job as hypocrasy seems required. Because on the other hand all this should be gods own unique church and I could not preach that, while knowing about all the well, human compromises so to say.
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.
Whatever term you pick to describe a concerted effort to overcome the tendency to bigotry, they'll just hijack that, too.
There's a whole industry built around this, and the media is so receptive to the right-wing that they'll openly describe how they'll do it[1], will execute the plans in public, and the mainstream media will act as their stenographers.
[1] https://xcancel.com/sykescharlie/status/1396844806547050499
We should just stop using the term woke. It has been demonized in the common parlance...
We should just stop using the term social justice. It has been demonized in the common parlance...
We should just stop using the term critical race theory. It has been demonized in the common parlance...
We should just stop using the term diversity. It has been demonized in the common parlance...
And on and on and on. Why should we stop using terms because bigots demonize them "in the common parlance"? Bigots demonize every term.
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
> 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.
All one has to see is how frequently people call any non-white/non-male hire or appointment a “DEI-hire” because they can’t possibly conceive that marginalized groups would see any success based on merit. They start from a position where they are all incompetent and being given an unfair advantage until proven otherwise. It’s also on you to guess whatever their arbitrary bar is.
You don't need to generate a new account just to spew racism.
You can argue that yo udon't think DEI helps and suggest an alternative but DEI is not racism even if you put it like this on purpose.
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.
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
I don't know a single person working the fields, doing dangerous work in a factory, working a coal mine, etc. Of course, I am fortunate enough to be in this position.
Power is continuing to squeeze people as much as it can, and life is very unaffordable and getting worse for most, but I think we still have it a whole lot better than a century ago (by and large).
> 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?
The delta between 1903 and today in this regard might be small, but the line between them isn't flat, and that makes it even more tragic and frustrating to have this questioned as if it's an impossible problem.
It took many forms: capitalist social democracy, communism, fascism... Left or right, without making a value judgement, they were all revolutions seeking to empower the working masses.
Of course, when you get rid of kings, it's really really hard to make sure the vacuum is not filled by something even worse. Credit where credit's due, as a European, I do believe that the US is one of the few cases that was somewhat successful in not completely bungling this opportunity (although there's the detail of slave labour, and the conquest of natives...).
And after many-many horribly failed attempts, much of the world did end up in a relatively healthy state around the second half of the 20th century. Fukuyama's end of history and all.
Now we seem to be regressing again. Perhaps it's part of the eternal cycle and it was always coming. Perhaps it's not actually regressing all that much, and it just looks like it to our coddled selves, or we have become more ambitious on what we think is right. Perhaps people have found new loopholes on how to get ahead and dominate the rest of us, and we just need to catch up and get it under control again.
Perhaps that quote from 1903 is relevant now, but it doesn't mean that it was relevant the whole time since. Perhaps it was, I wasn't there.
Well, it's rather patronising of of me to call that "the hard part", after all the terrible struggles workers have gone through to earn a seat at the table, but you know what I mean.
That's an important point. It's so hard to think of a better system, if you take the task seriously and actually think through all the consequences of each option.
As a result, as usual, the loud people that ignore all the details end up capturing everyone's imagination with a good story, and we stumble upon yet another century of nightmares.
Do you actually have a answer for something that is actually substantially better? Because I really don't if I'm being honest with myself, and I am yet to hear one.
That's one way to put it. Another perspective (mine) is that capitalism enables anyone to try and make things better, and if you make things better for the right user, they will reward you.
Fun techcentric utopian speculation about this: Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway" and Ruthanna Emry's "A Half-Built Garden."
Essentially, can we leverage our current post-scarcity society to expropriate everything people need in a sustainable way that cuts capitalism and the State out of the loop? For example, why would people buy food if they can get it for free from farming syndicates or similar? (see: Global Village Construction Kit, Food Not Bombs, Food Not Lawns) Why would people buy medicine if they can print it for free from pirated recipes? (see: Four Thieves Vinegar Collective)
I see the Right to Repair and FOSS movements as a foundation to build upon for this. Anarchism (or at least, anti-capitalism) exists right under everyone's noses, in all the FOSS software installed on their computers. Existent example of people laboring without profit motive and contributing to the commons.
My personal life goal is to figure out how to capture that same energy to tackle the bottom layers of Maslow's hierarchy.
I'm not entirely cynical, people generally are very open to be generous with one another and collaborate for a common good, but up to a point.
Currently people spend the majority of their hours doing relatively hard work for the collective's benefit (kinda). Exactly because capitalism makes selfishness into selflessness (very kinda). Also people are relatively civilized to one another thanks to the considerable latent force of the state's monopoly on violence.
People will be nice to each other when it doesn't cost them much and/or when the opposite costs them dearly. But will they work as hard as now for each other just to be nice? Will they not harm each other when there are no significant consequences?
I suppose that's the post-scarcity idea: that people neither need to work hard, nor have significant reasons to harm, if they have everything they want. Sure, let's talk if we ever get there, but until then we have other problems to deal with.
PS: Don't forget that people are able to do FOSS because they have well paid jobs that don't completely drain them of their energy. For others, getting the reputation for a better job is the incentive. There's a very different social infrastructure making that work, FOSS doesn't sustain itself, not even close. But yes, it does prove that when people's needs are covered, some of them will do great things for everyone without much incentive, but usually not enough to cover everyone's wants.
What I am weary of is that such experimentation, and the energy it generates, will eventually be overtaken by the next iteration of people who want to stop nibbling at the margins and break a few eggs already, some sort of anarchist revolutionary vanguard. Much like with communism, skilful opportunists with a thirst for power will be all too happy to take over this energy and direct it toward building the next totalitarian regime, one which will of course claim to be rendering the State obsolete, but will be about as anarchist as North Korea is a people's democratic republic.
Being anti-communism is good not only for the individual's health but for their society as a whole.
For example, do you believe the Capitalist system has nothing to do with the eagerness of the United States to drop bombs throughout the world for the past 100 years? Personally I see these actions as unnecessary and evil but pushed to continue by the people who stand to gain the most wealth and influence from them.
I ask because if we can take a country with a communist economy, or striving for one, and blame all its evils on communism itself, I have a few things I'd like to point out as being the horrors of capitalism:
1. Atlantic slave trade - millions dead (many on the ships), millions enslaved
2. Settler colonialism and indigenous genocide - British empire, all over the world
3. Congo Free State, Leopold II - 1 to 5 million dead via colonial extraction regime
4. British India famines - 3 million dead
5. Irish Famine - 1 million dead
6. Opium wars - directly caused by British using the military to defend market access. 100k dead, devastating to Qing China for a century
7. Indonesian anti-communist massacres - 500k-1mil alleged "communists" killed after the USA, UK, and Australian intelligence agencies propagandized against them
And I attribute them to communism because that's literally how history attributes them, though obviously pro-Communism thinkers would disagree.
The 1956 student massacres in Hungary, where my grandma was almost killed. The Holodomor, the various "Russianization" campaigns, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, The Great Leap Forward, etc.
B) Fine, drop communism altogether -- it's evil and disgusting and bit my finger and should never be tried again. Can we work on a society where the means of production are owned by groups of laborers?
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."
> It is not your duty to finish the work [of perfecting the world], but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.
[https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.2.16?ven=english|Mishnah...]
>Therefore man was created single in the world to teach that for anybody who destroys a single life it is counted as if he destroyed an entire world, and for anybody who preserves a single life it is counted as if he preserved an entire world.
(Directly from the Mishna in the Talmud Yerushalmi)
> If we focus only on contingencies, we risk letting the succession of emergencies dictate the direction of our path. We are living through a rapid phase of transition, a “change of era,” in which — while some are vying for the future of new technologies and others dedicate themselves to reflecting on the matter — most people are watching and waiting, observing from afar and merely hoping for the best. For this very reason, crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?
I wonder if meeting Colbert played any part in that.
Edith Stine
Every single religion is not free.
If you can't even accept the basic truth that we do not know, you are fundamentally biased.
I was a Nihilist when i was 16. This alone took years to get to that point and accept that truth. It took and still takes time after this to really pinpoint something tanguable.
But still the first step is to accept the nothing and the unkown.
The next step is to see evolutionary traits. Understanding why things which are are.
"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; ..."
Of course people are going to ignore it if there's no force behind it.
But I would argue it is way easier there. Building software has way more grey areas.
What grey areas are there for doctors?
It is however just that very small minority of the population with highly psychopathic/narcissistic traits - those that, in pre-historic times, would have been kicked out swiftly of hunter & gatherer / small village communities because of their parasitic nature - that in bigger civilisations seem to thrive due to abstraction (distance/time of the effect of their actions) and obfuscation (PR) and instead unfortunately seem to rise to the top (CEOs, presidents, 'thought leaders' ...) to steer the world's overall economy and mindset - and steer it in the abyss.
Sometimes I think humanity was just not made to scale, and this aspect is one very large aspect of it.
The critical point is that the violators have to be punished more consistently then the demanded consistency of the ideals.
> 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.
The casual reference to a 135 year old encyclical that dealt with the seismic shift of industrialisation took me quite aback for a number of reasons.
Two I recommend, from the last 40 years:
Veritatis splendor, John Paul II, 1993
Argues that Christian freedom is fulfilled, not limited, by objective moral truth: some acts are intrinsically evil regardless of intention or circumstance, conscience must be formed by divine law rather than self-authorization, and the Church must faithfully teach this moral truth as the path to authentic human flourishing in Christ.
https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
Fides et Ratio, John Paul II, 1998
Argues that faith and reason are complementary paths to truth: reason needs faith to avoid skepticism, relativism, and reductionism, while faith needs reason to express, defend, and deepen its understanding of divine revelation and the human search for meaning.
https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...
What you ignore is that the Church historically was a patron of Arts and Science, a preserver of history, works, documents and even pagan mythology. How many scientists has the Roman Church executed? One, Giordano Bruno, and it was not even due to his scientific views but rather his heretical views. Just as comparison, how many scientists has the Chinese Cultural Revolution executed?
> The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes
Sure hope your rosy inflection point happens real soon.
Otherwise, the direction this is taking us is pretty obvious.
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.
Engineers/technologists tend to have no such guardrails, and are also usually embedded into entirely profit motivated environments, whatever their own values might be.
I have fond memories of a boss who was an actual, licensed engineer while the rest of us were very much normal software devs. Boss was pretty chill except when someone someone suggested we should be called "engineers" rather than "developers", at which point they said "if you guys were building bridges, people would be dead." (I don't think all software needs to be built to rigorous engineering standards but man... I think about that line a lot.)
Absent US government intervention to codify the term "engineer", probably the only way out of the "engineer" trap is through further title inflation, where the developers all become "vice presidents". :)
The most famous example may be the perpetual war between architects and engineers/builders.
With luck, one out of 100 inventions will show promise on those points.
There's always a lifetime wake where the overwhelming vast majority of the work remains undeployed no matter what. The more undeployed milestones and inventions that some scientists have under their belt, the more accomplished they often are whether anybody knows it or not.
OTOH, equally active engineers more often need to have most of their time engaged in actual deployment of some kind or another, otherwise not as much progress will be able to reach as many people that could benefit. So many times nothing would be accomplished without a long-term focused engineering effort once an objective has been identified. But it can be hard to stop a train when it's already coming off the drawing board at full steam.
It does seem a lot more likely for a judicious researcher to cast off some major progress in what could very well turn out to be an unsavory development, such as likely misuse, even if it could be marketed as the most popular thing they have so far. Just add it to the pile of other things that best remain undeployed. There's plenty more where that came from, and the best is yet to come.
Perhaps popularity alone is not always the best measure of progress.
> 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".
Why does it have to be either/or?
From a high-level view, there are powerful cultural/political forces that nudge us towards building harmful, wasteful things without us being aware of said forces. The government, corporate greed, and billion-dollar marketing budgets are to blame.
But on the ground, from an in-the-trenches perspective, I think an engineer at Meta, for example, shares in some level of blame, too. Mainly because there is plenty of evidence showing how much harm Meta products have brought upon society. Yet Meta couldn’t be built without engineers opting in to work there in exchange for $300k salaries.
We desperately need moral clarity and courage at both the policy-level and the individual level.
Ofc they share the blame, but it is not solving the problem.
You can say for example: loan sharks are bad for society; so government gives anyone 0 percent credit. You just removed one problem, created another.
Just and sustaining system with individual morality is destined to fail. Only option is social regulation. Which is at government level.
It's not either/or in strict terms, it absolutely is either/or in practical terms. When the conscientious engineer chooses not to take the 300k job, the next one in line does. If enough choose not to, it just became a 400k job.
Can you change society in such a way that nobody would take such jobs? In strict terms, sure, in practical terms it probably entails enormous costs, both economical and societal. And then you still have other countries.
There's an entire legal code filled with things on which we can't rely on the morals of the people. We can't stop theft, rape and murder, what makes you think that stopping engineers is any more feasible?
The best thing builders can do is use their knowledge and authority to pressure the other side.
Are we all going to stop building things until the government is fixed and all political problems are resolved? No? Then we must think about how we should build in a world with imperfect government.
Sure, IF we could just go and fix our governments in some magical way then the problem would disappear. That goes from hunger, climate change, videogame addiction and AI. The problem is that what you value in life in different than what others do, so we now have a system in which sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you don't.
But back to the topic, I do think that how OpenAI and Anthropic handled the government and them asking to drop guardrails is something a company can actually and actively do without having to reinvent the universe.
Everyone likes to talk about "fixing the government". It feels nice to understand the problem with something else that is broken. The problem is that replacing the people in charge is a no-op if you don't have a pool of good people to choose from and the will to choose them.
"That which can be automated by the AI should be."
Like it or not if you knowingly build stuff that is used for evil purposes you are complicit
You can't build an orphan mulching machine and get away with just a shrug. "I don't really agree with mulching orphans but someone else paid me to build that. If I didn't build it someone else would have" just does not absolve you of your involvement in mulching orphans
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_.
Even with all morally good actors locally, there is no guarantees for external forces. Thinking it hypothetically, even with global coordination ( all good actors ) there is not a proven path that would lead us to better place from any starting point from past.
In the AI case, each firm is in an arms race, and nobody can slow down without effectively collapsing due to positive gross margins only being viable with a frontier model that attracts marginal demand. An appeal to morality might have an impact but more effective action would be to address the structure that the AI companies are situated in that causes this dynamic in the first place. In practice, thats going to be a global agreement to slow down, and global regulations.
- Fuck you, got mine
- If I don’t do it, someone else will
- Might makes right
- Greed is good
Ironically, these are often the same people denouncing multiculturalism, yet the culture they strive for is completely morally bankrupt.
That's not to say we should be naive about greed or malice existing or being powerful motivators (especially the former), but it is obviously not true that they're the only forces at play and therefore you are "just doing the logical thing" by succumbing to them. It's just the more destructive version of the same naiveté.
I haven’t read the full Magnifica Humanitas yet, but I would be pleasantly surprised if he touched on not just dehumanization of the other, but dehumanization of the self. Expanding on your thought, succumbing to those forces under the guise of just doing the logical thing is in a way self-dehumanization - to believe you are only capable of the “logical” thing instead of the moral thing.
Everything in life in trade-offs. Simple example is speed/quality/cost. I can tell easily:
- services should be cheap - services should be fast - services should be high quality
Now I created an utopia. Obviously this is amazing to listener. They agree. But is it achievable?
It is not saying greed is good or might makes right. But system means you need to construct from this ideals best outcome ( which comes at some trade offs)
I believe the Amish figured this out over a century ago.
The Amish rather came to a different conclusion (which I don't want to judge on, but on which I nevertheless have a different opinion than the Amish).
The central idea concerning the Amish's relationship to technology is that only technology is allowed if it does not destroy their community.
My personal values are much less based on upholding a community, but rather are much more rooted in individual freedom and independence. This means that I (likely) come to very different conclusions regarding this class of problems than the Amish do:
For example, I am less opposed to various kinds of technology that Amish would likely consider as as "community-destroying".
On the other hand, I guess I am much more opposed to technology that can be used to surveil the user and/or makes the user dependent on the whims of big tech companies than I guess the Amish are (i.e. the Amish would likely consider this as a much smaller problem concerning which technology to allow vs disallow; as I wrote: by my understanding their central concern is which consequences some technology has for keeping their community together).
To give evidence for the previous point: (by my impression - I am not US-American) you will rather not find many Amish people at political rallys against surveillance laws. The people who attend such rallys typically also have strong opinions on which technology to use or not to use (just talk to such people who are very strongly opinionated :-) ), but - as I pointed out - these technology choices come from very different basic premises than those of the Amish.
Woman have less value under the church than man. Alternative sexual views are evil.
Church and any kind of believe system hurts our society and divides us.
Any belief system? And yet I bet you value freedom over slavery, wisdom over ignorance and compassion over brutality. That’s a belief system, despite not being a religion.
If the majority says, no we want to be able to control other human beings, these people will reinact slavery. From a society point of view though we see that its not a working model anymore.
A real believe system can't be argued with. You believe in this god? This god says x and thats why you do things? Okay thats it. You don't even question were this information even came from.
If we delete all religion tomorrow and science, there is a realistic chance that the society rediscover the same existing rules like math and gravity, but religions might appear again but with different names, different rules etc.
I can change your mind with logic and arguments if its not a believe system, i can't do that with religion.
Wisdom over ignorance: The chance of survival is higher with wisdom
Compassion over brutality: This is just basic Game theory
What may make sense for you individually may also be empirically proven to be detrimental to the whole.
The new testament contrasts with the old, the gospel is one of tolerance and equality. It's a big part of why you have the rights that you do, as do women.
That said a lot of what you're saying can be ascribed to religious institutions and sects and individuals and specific churches. But your general prescription is like saying "this logical axiom is evil because XYZ ascribes to it and they are also evil".
You also have a belief system -- that people who believe in God do so because they don't question their beliefs, that religious people are only led by dogma. Yet your belief is wrong. Have you tried questioning it?
> but religions might appear again but with different names, different rules etc
Religions and scripture spread also evolutionarily. Christianity is popular because it is rooted in many truths.
> Compassion over brutality: This is just basic Game theory
And the game has been played.
Its just a control structure from the church without education.
Its probably even because of missing education. Educate people properly and they can handle "Fornication culture".
I don't have a believe system. I have a theory why people believe in gods and religions. We have evidence for it. People studied the origin of religions:
"It evolved from humanity's psychological and social needs, primarily our desire to make sense of the natural world, cope with the fear of death, and foster community cooperation."
We know how little people knew when religion started to emerge. Never seen space, never seen above a cloud besides a few poeople going up mountains. Thunder was not understood. Between 1400-1700 we had witch trials.
It is dogma. What is your argument against dogma?
"Christianity is popular because it is rooted in many truths." were is your argument for this? Its popular due to luck, power and wars. Missionaries as well and especially probably the most critical thing: Early indoctrination.
>> Compassion over brutality: This is just basic Game theory > And the game has been played.
Yes exactly. Compassion wins because its better, not because religion says so. Its an evolutionary win.
ok
"and any kind of believe system hurts our society and divides us."
People shouldn't believe anything?
Disagreement and conflict are natural. How we handle these disagreements while striving for widespread peace and prosperity is the question.
There is no inherant issue with this. in contrary it makes me mentally stronger.
I can choose on my own terms if/when i want to end my life. If i get very sick, i don't have to hope for a god or priests blessing to end my life, i will just do it.
But religion is different: if you believe that homosexuality is wrong due to your religion, there is nothing i can argue about. Your priest told you this based on some book or story from 2000 years ago and you do not question this.
I know plenty of strong christians and muslism in germany who do not like homosexual people. And its dividing our society.
You believe that you don't believe.
> But religion is different: if you believe that homosexuality is wrong due to your religion, there is nothing i can argue about. Your priest told you this based on some book or story from 2000 years ago and you do not question this.
This isn't the Church doctrine. The Church doesn't target homosexuals or even homosexuality in particular but ALL sexual practices that deviates from the unitive and procreative aspects of human sexuality. Christians don't believe in this because a book written thousands of years ago say so but because deep in their souls it makes sense and is the truth for them. Homosexuals are welcome on the Church as any other sinner what is ridiculous is to expect the Church to condone sins and bless sinful relationships be them homosexual or heterosexual.
> I know plenty of strong christians and muslism in germany who do not like homosexual people. And its dividing our society.
Perhaps it is something else that divides.
The church creates a believe system which indoctrinates all of us and took our cultures away.
The germanic tribes were believers in nature, church removed all of this.
Church also doesn't see woman as equal.
Just because they might sometimes also say postive things or things we might align, doesn't mean i need their oppinion. And especially not on hn
The point is that times change, and institutions change, and holding grudges for long ago sins and policies is ineffective.
1990 there were nearly 60 Million people in the church in germany (nearly everyone) now we are down to under 40 Million which crossed the line of 50%
This is real tangable progress.
The only downside is, that we do not sit together and formulate something which might give people hold who are not ready to be self stable mentally and might need something like this. And we also do not try to align together on rituals which help us to live better together.
I'm also still affected by the indoctrination of the church. As you can see, i argue against church not just because I like to argue, but because i really really hate religion and especially the christian church in germany, due to my own values and experience. This is not old i'm only 36.
This weekend I upgraded the PC of a church lady who has about a 10-year old mini-PC, so now it has the latest Windows 11. This was not easy, it was a shambles of Windows 10 combined literally with amounts of older Windows 11. From which auto-updates would take it no further. OTOH on the bright side autoupdates could do no further damage.
I attribute all success to a miracle, considering there is only 32GB of soldered-in drive space and 4GB memory :\
I don't think it would have come to pass if it weren't for the Pope's smiling face appearing with delight each time I rebooted, when her PC's everyday desktop background picture came into view. This is where he is joining in with the tribal rhythms while visiting Africa, honoring their traditional culture while they honor his visit in their colorful regalia.
When you're dealing with anything that challenging, or more so, you need all the blessings and prayers you can get :)
> much more compelling than those found in the various "manifestos" which come out of Silicon Valley.
As an aside, at least Trump is drawn to the grandeur of high culture from historical times, but he also doesn't understand a jota about aesthetics, and so the White House gets turned into a tacky gypsy-style abomination with one dollar ornaments.
When you compare the robber barons to Google and Meta it’s kind of embarrassing- they build massive empires of iron horses screaming across the world and covered cities in magnificent buildings (stations, libraries, etc). G&M built an empire of advertising and … not much else?
When power fears death, some strange things happens.
EDIT: link to the interview with Thiel <https://xcancel.com/rcbregman/status/2036113528126394834#m>
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.
I quickly learned as an adult that whether you're a person of faith or not, it's not pointless at all. It's the foundation of everything. Philosophy is how you explain the deeper reasons behind why you follow whatever religion you do, or adhere more meaningfully to whatever kind of agnosticism, atheism and/or 'spirituality' (with or without woo) you espouse.
Maybe you mean mathematics is amoral and are committing the common conflation of "engineering is just applied science and science is just applied mathematics," which is a really bad case of missing the forest for the trees.
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.
Would you also recommend "The Human Use of Human Beings"?
God & Golem is the most succinct and up to date though, probably a 2hr read.
The book Cybernetics is a lot of math and ergodic theory stuff that went beyond me, but is the longest and you still get a lot out of it skimming over that stuff if you don't have the background for it. The last revision of it in the 50s added some of the same blackbox function copying/imitation learning/distillation stuff, reinforcement learning with reward hacking concerns, and superintelligence as genie/monkey's paw.
I would read the three in reverse order of publication.
He also foresaw another big area of potential existential danger, Wiener filter for guidance and control of missiles (later superceded with Kalman filter bringing the nuclear hard targets era with 15min retaliation windows) and refused to work on it or share prior work, and he also had bioweapons delivery concerns before the bioweapons treaties, publishing this open letter in The Atlantic in 1947:
The scandal broke out in worldwide media starting in 2002 (not coincidentally, the same year South Park released Red Hot Catholic Love). This reminds me of when Contrapoints off-hand commented about how things were different in the 70s but that was "30 years ago".
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?
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?
These two are not mutually exclusive, it's just that no one wants to pay for it.
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.
> 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.)
Your sentence doesn't really make sense, and there is a lot of deities..
> You end up incorporating a lot of Christian thought without realizing because it's so deeply ingrained that it seems like the only option.
Depends on the country, some Northen european countries have a very high proportion of atheists, so it happens probably less there.
Western thought traces back to the Greeks. Aquinas refers to Aristotle as "The Philosopher." Aristotle died over 300 years before Jesus was born.
> The Catholic Church, for all its many faults, retains a serious intellectual tradition.
On Aquinas, the Church Doctor, Bertrand Russell had the following to say:
"Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times."
The problem I have with this is that it's structurally a motte-and-bailey claim. If I have to take it literally, then it's obviously true and it's simply unserious to deny it: the Church does have a pervasive influence on Western civilization. The way it's often rhetorically used, however, is in opposition and to the exclusion of other strands of thought that are equally foundational: the renaissance, the enlightenment, the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, the scientific enterprise, in a smaller but still real way classical antiquity. To the extent it can be said to exist, Western civilization is a patchwork. It is beautiful and I very much like it, but I don't think any one patch gets to have all the credit.
> In fact I think atheists should make more effort to learn about the vast diversity of other faiths
A better version of myself for sure would make that effort. The problem, of course, is that other faiths are just as deep and complicated as "our own", and it would take a lot of time and effort to do so with any level of seriousness.
I don't think this is actually true; I think your own bias is colouring the conversation here.
The minimalist claim that the West is massively influenced by the Church is true to the point of banality, the maximalist claims those ideas are usually deployed to champion simply do not follow.
If only there were a name for this rhetorical fallacy...
Their point is that despite your subscription to reason, without exposure to other cultural norms, you may be blind to what Christian values you live by. Becoming aware of them can help self evaluation of your ethical framework
For that matter, reading the Christian scriptures through a historical lens reveals a very different kind of thought than the modern version of Christianity and Judaism. It takes a huge amount of effort to read these documents in context; just reading them in the original languages is hard enough. But the past is a very foreign country and they see things very differently there.
No one is asking you to believe in anything, but it's self-limiting to refuse to engage with works of historical/cultural importance.
However I reject the idea that engaging with religious texts is insightful and something to promote
> 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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/n2ctech/magnifica-humanitas-epub/releases...
Codex helped write the converter, but the EPUB text is parsed from the Vatican HTML. The script doesn’t rewrite or summarize anything; it just repackages the source into EPUB with TOC, footnotes, metadata, and cover.
v1.1 has both EN/FR EPUBs.