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Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

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Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#321

Post by mike_hearn »

tptacek wrote: post #149
mike_hearn wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but I think that's a bit generous. Let's look at Chapter 3, titled "TECHNOLOGY AND DOMINANCE. THE GRANDEUR OF HUMANITY IN LIGHT OF THE PROMISES OF AI." This whole section is clearly about AI and social policy. It makes occasional Biblical references but if you strip those out it sounds like any Democrat podcast. If random people were given these quotes stripped of context, how many would guess it was the Pop…

So, I'm not sure about your religious background but conversing about this will get tedious very quickly if I have to hedge everything I'm saying, so from the jump let me just say I respect your writing on HN and I assume you're not Catholic, and you can correct me if I'm making any broken assumptions about you. Also, just to get this out of the way: I said "Chapter 5" was the section full of policy prescriptions, bu…

Thanks. I respect Christianity and feel it has a lot to contribute to the topic of AI, even if not like this, but I'm not a Catholic.

I haven't read the other chapters so will take you at your word about what they say and the Christian agenda in them.

It's tempting to describe the sort of politics in chapter three as US politics because that's roughly where it kicked off first, but there's nothing US specific about it. Leftism has always been a very globally consistent set of beliefs. We wouldn't describe communism as British politics, for example, even though Marx developed his beliefs while living in London and wrote in a British context (Das Kapital is full of references to Parliament and living conditions in 19th century Britain).

What I'd really like to see from the Vatican is engagement with the question of consciousness, and why AI should or should not be considered something with rights. I think a lot of people view this question as obvious but when I studied it, I ended feeling that it's neither obvious nor something that can be answered from first principles. A bit like animal rights, a principled answer essentially requires some kind of religious grounding.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#322

Post by Starman_Jones »

whimsicalism wrote: post #318
Starman_Jones wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-Catholic, this shows such a poor grasp on what makes Catholicism different from Protestantism that it’s comical. Some early Calvinists, for example, said that Catholics were wrong because they DIDN’T believe that. It would have taken you so little effort to uncover your lack of understanding before broadcasting it to the world.

What specifically is wrong?

Catholicism introduced the whole concept of purgatory, which specifically avoids the idea of eternal suffering. Water baptism is not a requirement for grace (read: salvation), although it is a requirement to be recognized as belonging to the Church.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#323

Post by scotty79 »

evnp wrote: post #269
scotty79 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few years ago, I tried to extrapolate where it will end up by writing SciFi short story. I decided on Pseudo as the name for future AI entities. Short for pseudo consciousness. I hope it catches on. In my prediction however they are semi-autonomus. Although without clear goals or drives apart from their occupation.

Any chance you'd be interested in sharing the story?

Nothing to share really. It was just a bit of background exposition. I didn't have any cool ideas about how to use the concepts from it in anything interesting. I'm not a writer. I'm just a SciFi fan that gets very brief, random bursts of inspiration every few months or years.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#324

Post by whimsicalism »

Starman_Jones wrote: post #322
whimsicalism wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specifically is wrong?

Catholicism introduced the whole concept of purgatory, which specifically avoids the idea of eternal suffering. Water baptism is not a requirement for grace (read: salvation), although it is a requirement to be recognized as belonging to the Church.

someone who knowingly/culpably rejects baptism is not going to purgatory. as a non-catholic, i think you are misinterpreting here.

this is verbatim from the Catechism,

> Baptism is necessary for salvation for those to whom the Gospel has been proclaimed and who have had the possibility of asking for this sacrament

Sure, there are other routes - but not for someone who has culpably rejected a water baptism. Again, from the Catechism,

> Purgatory is the state of those who die in God’s friendship, assured of their eternal salvation, but who still have need of purification to enter into the happiness of heaven.

> He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.336

Purgatory is not meant for those who culpably refused to enter, absolutely not.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#325

Post by xp84 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #136
xp84 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few of those are ever running. Mostly we have just two brands of smooth-brains whose only policy aim is “preventing that other group of assholes from gaining any power, because they and their supporters are pure evil!”

Each side gets the smooth brains they crave because for ~50% of the population it's become a team sport / religion situation. A majority of people have not thought through 1/10th of the policy positions they automatically support/reject based on the team hat color. There's a quote I will mangle and I forget the source of that's something like "If you agree with all the positions of your chosen political party, either…

Comment is spot on, though I'd like to point out:

> because for ~50% of the population it's become a team sport / religion situation

It's kinda even worse. We can only have two parties because of FPTP, and turnout is about 60% of voting-eligible population on average. We know from recent popular vote that that 60% is split roughly 50-50.

So 30% of the voting population is Team Blue Hat, and 30% is Team Red Hat.

If you can get 15.1% of the population to vote for an unserious clown, they'll win their respective party's nomination. And in most states, one of the parties is a pretty sure lock in the general.

15% is a pretty low bar. Compare: Up to 30% of people think "chemtrails" are at least a "somewhat" real thing, and 5% of people believe vaccines contain microchips. So the bar for getting a guaranteed win is somewhere between those two wacky and easily disproven beliefs.

https://www.cnn.com/us/chemtrails-conspiracy-theory-explaine...

https://www.rutgers.edu/news/nearly-half-americans-still-uns...

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#326

Post by anon291 »

crooked-v wrote: post #312
anon291 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal posts keep changing. First it was, it's not intelligent if it can't come up with something new. Now it has to seek out self help literature

The goalposts keep moving because people once upon a time thought that "able to perform tasks intelligently" and "able to take the role of a person" were the same thing, and task by task that turned out to be entirely false.

Well sure, so I think we need to figure out what we want. Why do we want a computer to take on the role of a person? Having something pretty intelligent to which I can delegate many tasks is already useful.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#327

Post by xp84 »

xp84 wrote: post #325
steveBK123 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each side gets the smooth brains they crave because for ~50% of the population it's become a team sport / religion situation. A majority of people have not thought through 1/10th of the policy positions they automatically support/reject based on the team hat color. There's a quote I will mangle and I forget the source of that's something like "If you agree with all the positions of your chosen political party, either…

Comment is spot on, though I'd like to point out: > because for ~50% of the population it's become a team sport / religion situation It's kinda even worse. We can only have two parties because of FPTP, and turnout is about 60% of voting-eligible population on average. We know from recent popular vote that that 60% is split roughly 50-50. So 30% of the voting population is Team Blue Hat, and 30% is Team Red Hat. If yo…

Correction: "So 30% of the voting population is Team Blue Hat, and 30% is Team Red Hat." should have said "of the voting-eligible population"

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#328

Post by jewthrow467843 »

7e wrote: post #316

If Judaism were smart, they would label AI as their Messiah finally come. Then at least some prediction would finally come true in a major religion.

The most common prophecy in the Old Testament, repeated in many places in many different ways is the return of Jews from all over the world to Zion.

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#329

Post by Self-Perfection »

pona-a wrote: post #280
OrangeMusic wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you give them an infinite amount of time and processing, that wouldn't change. Hrm I doubt it actually. Llms are capable of discovery, as recent math news showed. This means a "society" of Llms could likely have progress.

Only by having the LLM random walk the hypothesis space with a validator rejecting invalid ones. The reason why LLM hypotheses are any good is because it already consumed a civilization worth of knowledge. You couldn't have bootstrapped such system with nothing but a few priors/axioms and let it discover the universe.

Well yes, LLM need rich and favorable substrate to grow and learn (or we might say bootstrap)

As well as DNA needs specific substrate (cell with ribosomes and other machinery). As well as humans (one need oxygen atmosphere, food, parents).

But in the world we live in existence of favorable substrate for humans or LLMs is a given thing. It is _already_ bootstrapped. Can we infer something about LLM limits or possibility of it achieving AGI from its bootstrapping requirements?

Re: Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

#330

Post by Starman_Jones »

whimsicalism wrote: post #324
Starman_Jones wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Catholicism introduced the whole concept of purgatory, which specifically avoids the idea of eternal suffering. Water baptism is not a requirement for grace (read: salvation), although it is a requirement to be recognized as belonging to the Church.

someone who knowingly/culpably rejects baptism is not going to purgatory. as a non-catholic, i think you are misinterpreting here. this is verbatim from the Catechism, > Baptism is necessary for salvation for those to whom the Gospel has been proclaimed and who have had the possibility of asking for this sacrament Sure, there are other routes - but not for someone who has culpably rejected a water baptism. Again, fro…

You’re right, I was mistaken. My bad.
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