Magnifica Humanitas

So is the Church what? That the Church must serve humanity or that it is the "powerful few" as some here are saying?

In the first case, I claim that it has and that it does. I'm not sure how you can credibly claim otherwise. Only ideologically informed animosity could distort one's views here. If you know the mission of the Church, then I see no issue. Do members of the Church fail? Of course. Everyone does, and indeed this is captured best in the Christian acknowledgment that everyone is a sinner, without exception. Everyone falls short.

In the second case, I don't know what the implication is. Is it that the Church is one of the "powerful few" and therefore evil? The first question you must ask is what your notion of "power" here is. The second, whether the Church is actually powerful according to that definition. The third, whether you are falsely linking being one of the "powerful few" with being evil. The problem, after all, is not with power, but with the way power is used. In an ideal world, all power would be exercised morally, and all authority would have commensurate power.

I would say this: the Church has authority. Whether it has power depends on your definition of power and the particular historical epoch. It is not reduced to a simple boolean.

It's best to avoid cheap jabs that rely on boring and unthinking tropes that appeal to widespread prejudices rather than to informed reason.

Do you think we are even talking in the same ballpark of wealth? Elon Musk is slated to be the first trillionaire

https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/debunking-the-myth-of-va...

Seems you and I have together struck a nerve. Maybe our sentiments would have been better received in an alternate subthread, but it’s all I could think about while reading the parent / cousin comments.

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.

I have found that, for many of the statements about what AI should do, I would actally be happier if the letters "AI" were replaced with "companies"

> I don’t like putting blame on the builders

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.