Artificial Intelligence and Peace
vatican.va
vatican.va
Religious flamewar about Catholicism (or any other religion of course) is a perfect example of a generic flamewar tangent, the thing we most want to avoid here. Such disputes are as tedious and repetitive as they are nasty and community-destroying. It's hard enough to hold this place together without any of that!
I've posted a dozen moderation replies to commenters who I saw doing this in the thread, regardless (of course) of which side they were on. I'm sure I missed some others, but the intention is to be as even handed about this as we can.
In the meantime, everybody, no more religious flamewar on HN please!
I wish every AI hype guy yelling "luddite" at the top of their lungs whenever they encounter resistance could simply understand this utterly true point. People have become so confused by what is essentially just accumulated marketing, they don't even have a consistent or rational idea of what something like progress actually is, or perhaps at least, what it could be. SV ideology has created a culture existentially committed to what amounts to an empty signifier: "progress" becomes simply whatever the economic winners happened to do, something defined after the fact.
Everyone wants to believe history is simply climbing this one big mountain, and we simply need to keep up and go forward. But perhaps we are just in the ocean, holding on to whatever planks and buoys we can, hoping we can weather the storms we might see on the horizon.
This is actually a pretty balanced/nuanced take on the topic. It almost reads like an OpenAI blog post about alignment...
The Vatican directly charters universities across the globe. I imagine they have several experts on the topic who are working with them, and I imagine they also have clergy and religious knowledgeable in both catholic theology and mathematics, computer science, HPC and AI. Fun fact, the first american woman to earn a phd in computer science was a nun
The Catholic church has many scientists in the ranks, and is responsible for a fair share of scientific discoveries.
The father of genetics was sworn to abstinence as a priest, and the Jesuits (the current pope's former order) have been particularly prolific in astronomy.
Isn't it the responsibility of the one in christian speak, not even the few.
Also: Franciscan monk Paolo Benanti, the Pope’s AI adviser on ensuring algorithms respect human dignity https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25534031-000-the-pope...
I interpreted that sentence as "each and every one", not "someone else".
> To speak in the plural of “forms of intelligence” can help to emphasize above all the unbridgeable gap between such systems, however amazing and powerful, and the human person: in the end, they are merely “fragmentary”, in the sense that they can only imitate or reproduce certain functions of human intelligence. The use of the plural likewise brings out the fact that these devices greatly differ among themselves and that they should always be regarded as “socio-technical systems”.
That's true now and will probably be true for a few years -- but it seems we could soon have systems that are fully general agents, not just narrow tools. Those would raise some thorny theological questions. For example, will the following be still true?
> The unique human capacity for moral judgment and ethical decision-making is more than a complex collection of algorithms, and that capacity cannot be reduced too programming a machine, which as “intelligent” as it may be, remains a machine.
And what about even more advanced AGI, systems that are more intelligent than any human?
> Human intelligence is an expression of the dignity with which we have been endowed by the Creator, who made us in his own image and likeness (cf. Gen 1:26)
... says Francis and cites Genesis, but that leaves open the status of superhuman machine intelligence. If intelligence makes us similar to the Creator, doesn't this mean that superintelligence is even more similar to Him than us? In a word, will it be a sort of angel? (Or, if it doesn't behave ethically, a devil?)
Probably that is too far away and to speculative for him to comment about. But I would like to know what his advisors have to say on these questions, if anything.
The human capacity for moral judgement and ethical decision-making can't be reduced to programming a machine with a complex collection of algorithms only because it already is exactly that. Human cognition is embodied in a machine which implements the algorithm determined by its structure and the laws of physics.
Most disturbing to me in this Papal message is the paragraph titled "Shall we turn swords into ploughshares?"
Anytime the phrase "grave concern" is used, whether diplomatically, ethically, morally, or otherwise, it generally means the event has happened, the decision was made, the behavior was expressed, or the news was delivered.
For Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems ("LAWS") to be specifically referenced means the Vatican probably has reports of its use in combat, albeit experimentally, and not just drones and remote piloting of UAVs.
It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics. Catholicism is an institution implementing and developing a religious philosophy that has a profound love of humanity, creativity, and understanding.
> The inherent dignity of each human being and the fraternity that binds us together as members of the one human family must undergird the development of new technologies and serve as indisputable criteria for evaluating them before they are employed, so that digital progress can occur with due respect for justice and contribute to the cause of peace. Technological developments that do not lead to an improvement in the quality of life of all humanity, but on the contrary aggravate inequalities and conflicts, can never count as true progress. [8]
The entire thing is worth reading, but this particularly summarizes my feelings.
AI is good, but only insofar as it advances and centers the beauty of humanity.
What are these misconceptions? Catholicism uses shame to induce conformity, has had numerous priests abuse children (and protecting the offenders), has a long history of violence against non-adherents, historically deeply homophobic, and so on. All of that is factual.
Edit: Oh! And now I remember, they killed and buried hundreds of children in Canada at their "schools" for indigenous people. Graves unmarked, families never knew what happened to the kids. But it's OK! Pope here said sorry, sort of, after being pressured, for decades. Also they found graves. Canadian govt. couldn't give a rats ass because the church is as powerful as governments.
But remember! We love all of God's children.
Do people really have this much cognitive dissonance that they lose the ability to think? Like how much delusion do you have to be under to even say the above and think it makes it better for Catholics.
Even one priest raping a child under the protection of the church is entirely unacceptable.
Nobody does this with public schools. If people always brought up the abuse and cover ups by teachers and unions regardless of the topic they would be down voted and told it is not relevant to the topic.
If people actually cared about making abuse and coverups known they would bring it up every thread schools are brought up. Instead they only do it with the Church. It is almost as if they just want to attack the Church and ignore it in their own preferred abusive institutions.
I still don't get what the problem is. What does the asymmetric treatment between schools and church abuse have to do with the facts?
> If people actually cared about making abuse and coverups known they would bring it up every thread schools are brought up.
So you are saying I don't actually care about the abuse coverups? You think I have another agenda? You have a sick mind.
> It is almost as if they just want to attack the Church and ignore it in their own preferred abusive institutions.
It's not that, at all. Shame on you for trying to reframe it as such.
Nothing.
>So you are saying I don't actually care about the abuse coverups? You think I have another agenda? You have a sick mind
I don't know what you believe. I think if somebody is willing to randomly (completely unrelated to to the topic) bring up abuse by the Church in every thread, but is not willing to do the same thing for schools it shows they have a bias.
I have no issue accepting that abuse has happened in the Church and it is despicable. My issue is nobody seems to care about the much larger abuse problem in schools.
>It's not that, at all. Shame on you for trying to reframe it as such.
Please explain the asymmetric treatment if it is not because people on HN in general don't like the Church, while they do like public schools.
> Please explain the asymmetric treatment if it is not because people on HN in general don't like the Church, while they do like public schools.
When you find a post on HN that talks about public schools maybe this topic will open up there too, and you can have your day there.
> people on HN in general don't like the Church
I don't like psychopaths either, and for good reason. I don't like the Church because of what it has enabled, the lies, the hypocrisy, and so on. You are trying to frame it as HN folks have a hard on for going after the church for no good reason. Well, lots of reasons have been listed once the OP basically said "there is no good reason to object to the church, it's all misconceptions. Lol.
> My issue is nobody seems to care about the much larger abuse problem in schools.
This isn't true. You just happened to come to a comment section that is talking specifically about the church and you are mad because it's not talking about what you want to talk about. Why not go post a tech story about schools, and then find someone challenging misconceptions about schools.
These comments aren't trying to nefariously undermine the problem in schools, that's just you being frustrated, or whatever is motivating you to get mad.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2022/may-web-only/south...
In the case of Australia which had a five year long Royal Commission into Institutional Sexual Abuse of children that took in tens of thousands of interviews across schools and all religuous institutions the final report included:
Many children have been sexually abused in religious institutions in Australia.
Based on the information before us, the greatest number of alleged perpetrators and abused children were in Catholic institutions.
In many religious institutions, the power afforded to people in religious ministry and the misplaced trust of parents combined with aspects of the institutional culture, practices and attitudes to create risks for children.
Alleged perpetrators often continued to have access to children even when religious leaders knew they posed a danger.
We heard that alleged perpetrators were often transferred to other locations but they were rarely reported to police.
The Catholic Institutions in Australia with the worst behaviour were the Christian Brothers who operate globally and there was no evidence seen that as an international group dealing with the education of minors, most often orphaned minors, their behaviour in Australia was somehow better or worse than their behaviour elsewhere - they rotated bad priests in and out, dodged responsibility, and hands down "won" the prize for most children abused.
You're sort of singling out Catholicism though. Islam does all those things much much worse than Catholicism ever has - in the present day too! I'm not Catholic and I don't care to defend them. Still, I don't want them singled out when Islam is demonstrably worse in every way.
Yes, because church is the context of this post, and the OP opened the door. What does your comment have to do with the facts?
Unfortunately, there are parts of the country where this type of racism is acceptable and even common. There as similar attitudes towards Catholics, due to America's history as a predominately protestant country. The formula is the same both way - pick a heinous crime from a few members, blame it on the group as a whole, and feel smug about yourself.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: yikes, you posted 16 times in this thread! That's egregious. I'm going to assume that you hadn't seen this comment before posting any of those.
It certainly isn't physically impossible, but I acknowledge that it may be metaphysically impossible.
Just to say that I don’t agree that it’s always about misconceptions but more often about mistrust or not feeling accepted.
That said there have been signs of a more open environment and their ceremonial texts can often be an interesting read.
its not a misconception to focus on the totally cancellable, ostracizable, things that institution is known for
https://www.ncregister.com/blog/the-truth-about-giordano-bru...
George Lemaître was a Catholic Priest.
which means that computer technology since the 70s is really just "faster paper", faster by more then a single order of magnitue... but ultimately paper-equivalent to this day
maybe LLMs, once their computational characteristics are better understood, will finally move computing beyond paper so fast it can write on itself over 2,000,000,000 times per second
Huh... "paper" is just storage, the whole point of "computer technology" is to have a tool to do computation not just storage. So no, computers are not just faster paper.
> It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics. Catholicism is an institution implementing and developing a religious philosophy that has a profound love of humanity, creativity, and understanding.
Just because the Pope released this statement doesn't change how the Catholic church got its reputation, both good and bad. The magnitude of history of the Catholic Church up to the present defines its reputation far more than a single statement about AI.
That said, it's good that they are adding their humanistic perspective to the debate. They are not the only ones saying these things - but their members, from developing country farmers to Supreme Court justices - need to be informed and aware since AI will probably affect everyone. I think it would be negligent if they didn't.
I’d like to know if anything else about Catholics and the Catholic church makes you sad? And what do you believe are “misconceptions”?