971–980 of 1001 posts
Nobody should take the Pope seriously or the Vatican. An organization that - for centuries - has actively protected child molesters, has sat on billions of dollars, has sided with Nazis, has been involved in multiple fraud and money laundering cases has absolutely zero standing to advice anybody on anything.
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…
For a period of time, the ban worked and reversed their existence in society. Part of the ban was to respect samurais who would train for years in the art of combat, only for a peasant to be able to shoot them with a weapon.
The problem is that not _all_ societies are participating in this ban. Eventually one nation will use the technological advances to domainte in military and economy, forcing others to adapt or be eliminated. It's a race to the bottom :/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wondered if that was the Pope's way of throwing shade at Palantir and Peter Thiel.
The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Catholic work, written in English, and one of the most popular works of literature of the past century. So it is not unusual for an English-speaking Pope to quote from it. Further, what shade would be thrown, and why? What criticism of Palantir would the Pope be attempting to make here?
The quote in question:
> It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.
Palantir very much strikes me as a company that is attempting to "master all the tides of the world".
And honestly, just reminding people that Lord of the Rings is a book concerned with morality and the fight against evil counts as throwing shade at Palantir, since they named their company after a corrupted device from those novels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of terrifying that "we may" turn the tide on CO2 is an acceptable level of optimism. If we don't, we all die. it isn't something to leave up to mindless market mechanics.
We're now, in 2026, currently at 1.5 degrees above baseline. This used to be the threshold at which we decided it would be too late and everything would be fucked and human civilization would inevitably collapse. That won't happen, of course, since we kept increasing the threshold every time we approached the previous threshold. Luckily for us now, human society won't collapse until we hit 2 degrees!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that makes it hard. I am open for banning all comercial advertisement - but general society is largely fine with it. So is someone designing new targeting algorithm for ads breaking his potential oath of doing good for society? What grey areas are there for doctors?
Tangential, but where do you draw the line on commercial advertisement? If a podcast is sponsored by a business & supports behavior the business benefits from, is the podcast advertising? What if it also contains useful educational content related to that activity?
A podcast I can choose to listen or not. A news site I can also evade. But any (internet) service people must use, should be ad free. Ideally all of society, but any regulation here will have a hard time in the real world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Already in full swing: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoisonFountain/
I have found my people. Thank you for sharing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Catholic work, written in English, and one of the most popular works of literature of the past century. So it is not unusual for an English-speaking Pope to quote from it. Further, what shade would be thrown, and why? What criticism of Palantir would the Pope be attempting to make here?
> What criticism of Palantir would the Pope be attempting to make here? The quote in question: > It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. Palantir very much strikes me as a company that is attempting to "master all the tide…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think not just (computer) scientists but the general population thinks to serve the common good makes sense, not last because we understand it's eventually for our own good. It is however just that very small minority of the population with highly psychopathic/narcissistic traits - those that, in pre-historic times, would have been kicked out swiftly of hunter & gatherer / small village communities because of their…
Humanity was not made to scale quickly. The trouble we have nowadays is that there is no backpressure, largely because the systems that generated that backpressure were dismantled in the name of "freedom" and other myths.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if it's really "highly debatable" that an entity that appears conscious is therefore conscious. The Chinese room thought experiment is obviously flawed to me. It's not the "computer" that is conscious, it's the running software.
The point of the Chinese room is to show you that the guy who has memorized the standard responses to various questions in Chinese does not in fact know Chinese. He's mindlessly parroting things.
An AI cannot be removed from its box, because it doesn't have one. It really does have enough information inside of its essence to reply. In fact, that information makes up its essence.
I agree that in some sense their knowledge is distinct and of a different character to human knowledge. But what that means conceptually or morally exactly is very complicated, and cannot be dismissed easily