791–800 of 1001 posts
It makes me angry that people are taking this seriously. Reading this screed would require having to continually parse out the generally loathsome Catholic ideology and dogma from whatever insight it might contain. I have no desire to even try. The Catholic Church is not anywhere close to being a neutral institution who will be writing something like this in good faith (no pun intended). This is an organization based…
> As Pope Francis warned, we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it: “It must also be recognized that nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our own DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired… have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the…
The pope can say a lot of things, but not everybody on this planet is Christian. So even if we restrict the power of AI, others may not. And this might turn out to be a mistake. I just hope this is taken into account.
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I'm not Muslim (an agnostic Catholic if anything) but I love the Hadith | If the final hour comes while one of you has a seed in his hand, if he can plant it before it takes place, let him do so. I take it to mean it is never too late to do something good, even (or especially) something you will never benefit from.
To me that never made sense. If the world is really ending, there is no point in planting a tree. It only made sense as in, you never know if the world is really ending. So assume it is not and do the right thing, even if things seem dark. Everything we do matters. Always.
Start with video. No one needs AI creating videos with humans in it. But it will eventually get so good that we won’t be able to trust any video. And people will create videos of others to destroy them, which is already happening.
I’d further suggest that it be illegal to create any fake image of a person without their consent. That consent must literally be for every picture and every frame in which their likeness appears. Not one frame can be altered without their consent.
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I have only read a few passages (and some of the excellent quotes others have shared here), but I find the underlying message here so much more compelling than those found in the various "manifestos" which come out of Silicon Valley. I think reading this helps me imagine a version of the future I'd actually like to live in. A version where technology is used well (rather than preaching for abstinence from technology)…
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That is objectively false, and trivially disproven by the fact that the Catholic Church reveres a woman as the greatest human being to ever live.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not Muslim (an agnostic Catholic if anything) but I love the Hadith | If the final hour comes while one of you has a seed in his hand, if he can plant it before it takes place, let him do so. I take it to mean it is never too late to do something good, even (or especially) something you will never benefit from.
To me that never made sense. If the world is really ending, there is no point in planting a tree. It only made sense as in, you never know if the world is really ending. So assume it is not and do the right thing, even if things seem dark. Everything we do matters. Always.
Yeah you get it.
I'm curious if there has ever been an instance where people have been able to "tame" a technology to consider a broader, societal good, or if we've always just been at the whims of how any particular tech naturally concentrates or dissipates power. For example, if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century, this appears to me largely a consequence of the fact that industrial technology at the…
Instead, the global powers blocked nuclear technology from disseminating to most countries.
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Indeed. This paragraph shows something that most people really don't understand about AI. > 98. It is appropriate to preface this discussion with two considerations. First, any statement regarding AI risks becoming quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing. Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Inde…
> the exercise of moral and spiritual discernment The likes of Sam Altman and Peter Thiel have openly stated they view humans as largely disposable. I don't think we can expect much humanism from them.
There are a lot of great aspects of the pope's writing. The most important one probably being that a spiritual leader understands that there is a large technological and societal change on the horizon. I still quite often experience the well described phenomenon of talking to "normal people" (my family in Europe for example) that seem to think that AI is gonna be roughly as important as the electric car and is not go…
From that perspective, no, machines cannot be baptized, nor can they be Christians, and Jesus cannot save them (because they are not fallen).
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> Much of Western thought traces back to serious work by Church theologians. The problem I have with this is that it's structurally a motte-and-bailey claim. If I have to take it literally, then it's obviously true and it's simply unserious to deny it: the Church does have a pervasive influence on Western civilization. The way it's often rhetorically used, however, is in opposition and to the exclusion of other stran…
The events you mention still took place within the Abrahamic framework of thought. Ideas like a linear timeline progressing from A to B (rather than a cyclical one) or utopian political projects bringing final justice to society are Abrahamic in nature. So I agree with the grandparent comment: unless one takes the time to study and truly understand other belief systems, it's hard to see how Western "secular" schools…