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Who, in your mind, are "these people?" Please, don't go back and check the authorship of the document before replying. I'm extremely curious to see what you are thinking.
The message here obviously comes from a good place. But it can't escape the trap baked into its own theology. Putting humanity one rung below God, with everything else below us is a trick that allowed semitic civilizations to make empires and economies go FOOM faster than the rest of the world. But it also makes things more dangerous when we start building systems smarter than we are. What happens when the tool outgr…
> What happens when the tool outgrows the toolmaker?
We've already built systems smarter than we are without much issue.Libraries and search engines for example. LLMs are just the next level of this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you share your prompt and model that created your summary then HN users can make their own hot take summary sub summaries.
ehhh, the model doesn't matter as much, the summary appears to be accurate (you can ctrl+f for keywords like "slavery", then see what's being said on the subject) so for example with "Just War" we see this passage: > it is important to reaffirm that the “just war” theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. This would clearly be thought to be an error from a Catholic viewpoi…
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> a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion 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…
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I would replace the word scientists with engineers in that quote. People often conflate the two, but in my experience, scientists tend to be more cautious and there are built in checks and balances in the process (however flawed). Engineers/technologists tend to have no such guardrails, and are also usually embedded into entirely profit motivated environments, whatever their own values might be.
This sounds like you don’t have much exposure to actual professional engineering disciplines. I’m sure civil, electrical, structural and mechanical PEs would be quite surprised to hear there are no guardrails on their professions.
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.)
Divided into five chapters, Magnifica humanitas has an underlying premise: technology is not “a force antagonistic to humanity” (4), nor is it “inherently evil” (9). However, “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. Therefore, Pope Leo XIV appeals for people to build “for the common good” and to “remain human,” following a courageous men…
>it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it 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 mo…
I have only skimmed it, will definitely read carefully as soon as I have time. I will say, as an atheist, that regarding technology the Vatican has some of the best takes of any institution/government I have ever seen.
Much of Western thought traces back to serious work by Church theologians. Even atheists are strongly influenced by the patterns they set down. The Catholic Church, for all its many faults, retains a serious intellectual tradition. (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…