Antiqua et Nova: Note on the relationship between AI and human intelligence

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You could ask a deity do it for you, but my best guess is that AI might be a bit faster to respond to your needs. :)

" However, while AI holds many possibilities for promoting the good, it can also hinder or even counter human development and the common good. Pope Francis has noted that “evidence to date suggests that digital technologies have increased inequality in our world. Not just differences in material wealth, which are also significant, but also differences in access to political and social influence.”[103] In this sense, AI could be used to perpetuate marginalization and discrimination, create new forms of poverty, widen the “digital divide,” and worsen existing social inequalities."

Well he's not wrong.

It's great that they're tackling this, but I'm concerned that this take on AI will be quickly superseded by coming advances. As a particular point, they are treating embodiment and learning from direct experience as a significant distinction between AI and humans:

> 31. However, even as AI processes and simulates certain expressions of intelligence, it remains fundamentally confined to a logical-mathematical framework, which imposes inherent limitations. Human intelligence, in contrast, develops organically throughout the person’s physical and psychological growth, shaped by a myriad of lived experiences in the flesh. Although advanced AI systems can “learn” through processes such as machine learning, this sort of training is fundamentally different from the developmental growth of human intelligence, which is shaped by embodied experiences, including sensory input, emotional responses, social interactions, and the unique context of each moment. These elements shape and form individuals within their personal history.In contrast, AI, lacking a physical body, relies on computational reasoning and learning based on vast datasets that include recorded human experiences and knowledge.

But there's nothing about AI in general that limits it to learning only from prior data, and we're already seeing robots such as Boston Dynamics's Spot learning to navigate and act in novel environments. We're probably still far from passing Steve Wozniak's Coffee Test, but we're advancing towards it, and for a take that's supposed to be based on philosophy/theology, I would have hoped that they go a bit beyond the current state of the art.

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