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Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

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Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#51
post #38
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You talk a big talk of ending fantastical religions, yet you are just swapping out one eschatology for another. Your AGI is their Second Coming. Same thing, different crowd.

Is that so bad? Swapping out the eschaton of fake authority among men for the eschaton of information singularity seems like a wonderful deal - the kind of deal we are offered at birth.

Primarily, it is bad because it is blind fervor nonetheless, a promise of salvation based on wishful thinking and zealotry.

Secondly, who controls these promises of information singularity? Bunch of rich dudes, same as its ever been. Your new Pope is a tech CEO.

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#52

> And what has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words—and, as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them I love how he's framing AI as some new and fascinating form of consciousness... when in fact it is a cold, calcula…

> cold, calculating technology And if at least they were able to calculate properly at least...

It maybe wasn’t such a great idea to train them on Reddit discussion!

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#53
Will there be a battle? =)

I think Chris Olah is obviously a huge enthusiast of his work and sincerely believes that what he is building will benefit humanity. At the same time, he is influenced by his environment and goals. He dreams that new technologies will invent something that significantly improves the lives of people who do not even care about these technologies.

I also think Pope Leo XIVs probably does not deeply understand new technologies and AI in general. But his role is to be cautious about anything that could potentially be used against humanity’s interests. And honestly, despite the good intentions of inventors, nobody can predict how humanity will ultimately use these technologies. AI is already using in wars. And in general, the Church has historically been cautious about progress in almost any form.

What definitely unites both Chris Olah and Pope Leo XIV is faith. Faith in their goals and ideals.

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#54
"There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale."

"If AI models are going to be widespread"

"we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease."

A critic might charge that this is nothing more than "let's keep the AI hype rolling so the money keeps coming in". Surely the promotional statements (and the third one, which is marketing nonsense) were not necessary if they actually cared about the issues they're claiming to care about.

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#55
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a completely different expectation, based on what has happened with every major discovery or invention from electricity to refridgeration to transistors: Everyone has gotten wealthier relative to those who came before. The average "peasant" in every nation without a corrupt or totalitarian parasitic government live in more opulence and have a higher quality of life than every king of the past. That doesn't alw…

How about the power consolidation that’s brewing as we speak? How about the all encompassing surveilance to come? I don’t doubt AI could be used to take us towards a utopia but it could also lead us in the opposite direction.

For sure, there's a line in Ecclesiastes : "he who breaks through a wall may be bitten by a snake". We have no idea what snakes await us beyond the next few years, but like nuclear power, the internet, and even social media (which IMO is toxic to large swathes of the population today) we'll eventually arrive at a place where we can harness the blessings while controlling the risks. The first nation to align their laws to a sane governance model will reap the most rewards.

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#56

[flagged]

> The only thing that makes Ai the opportunity of the millennium is its power to empower us to render Pope and CEO alike irrelevant. All OpenAI, Google, Anthropic need to do is flip a switch and your AI and your “power” are gone. Or worse, they start making you think what their actual owners want you to think.

[dead]

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#57
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The displaced human workers risk joining the global poor, is what he’s saying. And that would increase competition for the manual labor jobs, thus worsening the situation for the global poor. Not to mention what will happen when robotics take off for these kinds of jobs.

Or they provide leadership and organize the global poor.

Because the global poor have been too stupid to organize until now?

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#58
post #42

> They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. I am not sure how anyone even remotely familiar with how LLMs work can say this. This is a fine-tune job. > The first is our duty to the global poor. I don't think they are affected by AI as much as low and middle class but I am not economist. > How can we ensure the gains of AI are shared globally? Opensource? > We find internal states that functionally m…

> LLMs experience joy and grief?

LLMs have functional states that correspond to those emotions. In particular, you can extract a concept vector which corresponds to a given emotion, and steering with that concept vector causes observable changes in behavior which roughly correspond to the expectation for the analogous emotion. Anthropic (and Chris Olah's team in particular) conclusively demonstrated this: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html

Re: Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas"

#59
post #38
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You talk a big talk of ending fantastical religions, yet you are just swapping out one eschatology for another. Your AGI is their Second Coming. Same thing, different crowd.

Is that so bad? Swapping out the eschaton of fake authority among men for the eschaton of information singularity seems like a wonderful deal - the kind of deal we are offered at birth.

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