Software CEO to Catholic panel: AI is more mass stupidity than mass unemployment | Hacker News Reader

Software CEO to Catholic panel: AI is more mass stupidity than mass unemployment

theregister.com

83 pointsrntn109 comments

> Also on the panel, Father Michael Baggot worried that "artificial intimacy is going to distract us from, and deter us from, the deep interpersonal bonds that are central to our happiness and our flourishing."

> He called for guardrails on AI to stop it capturing individuals' "minds but … also our affections."

> Fr Baggot cited the example of Magisterium AI, a Catholic chatbot. He sits on the scholarly advisory board for the service, and said its creators had worked to prevent it being "anthropomorphic" adding, "We do not want people having an intimate relationship with it."

I appreciate that coinage, "artificial intimacy," and want to explore the implications of it more.

Some people probably don't want that "deep interpersonal bonds" though. I know I don't want. I know some people who don't say they don't want but act in every way that they don't want.

Although I don't like the future proposed by the AI companies, this is the least of my concerns. The only big concern is employment. Like, if AI creates more jobs than it destroys, sure, go ahead, do it now.

If the cure for the loneliness epidemic is community, through which interpersonal bonds are required, I suppose it is fine if we allow folks to opt out of community and human connection and use chatbots as they would heroin or meth; maxing out dopamine within their tolerances until death. Free will, self determination, and all that. But, we should also be mindful of the second order effects of such policy (the future ending up some combination of internet gaming cafes where people occasionally play so long they die, and "Ready Player One").

Yeah I agree with that, basically genuine choice for all.

BTW I just don't want "deep" bonds, but some sort of bonds is always good. Not sure how "deep" he meant though.

may I ask why?

As I get older and see these things play out, I agree less and less. There's a physical toll on your health that gets paid for living a lifestyle like this. Society pays part of the cost of this (at the very least anyone on the same health insurance plan).

I feel icky saying this but we should make a strong effort as a society to stamp out anti-social behaviors. Addictions are very high on that list.

You might think that you can engage this way without being a burden to others, but you can't.

> I feel icky saying this but we should make a strong effort as a society to stamp out anti-social behaviors. Addictions are very high on that list.

GLP-1s can help stamp out addiction, but people are going to be people. You can provide them support, but you cannot prevent chronic, determined self harm and destruction. I speak from personal experience.

https://recursiveadaptation.com/p/the-growing-scientific-cas...

I mean experiencing LLM "intimacy" of any sort is just getting to roleplay as a billionare tech CEO isn't it? It's why they're so proud of it, as far as they're concerned, they've perfectly reproduced the real people they encounter: breathless sycophants utterly tripping over themselves to tell them how fucking smart they are for whatever banal shit they've farted out most recently and tell them every idea they have is god working through them to bestow his gifts to mankind.

And for the same reason: they want their fucking money.

I'm not trying to judge you but it doesn't seem normal to not want to have deep bonds with any other humans. The only people I can think of who don't have deep bonds and even largely avoid forced bonds like family are very unwell (for various reasons). I think AI relationships would only send these people deeper down a dark path that they will struggle to ever get out of.

A commenter saying they don't want deep interpersonal bonds being downvoted is a sad rejection. ferguess_k - I hope you're well and living the life you want to live.

Agree. I may not agree with the post but I will support their ability to post such things.

Thanks! I'm fine. Still a big far from the life I want to live, but getting there, eventually.

> Some people probably don't want that "deep interpersonal bonds" though. I know I don't want. I know some people who don't say they don't want but act in every way that they don't want.

It's not my position to tell someone what to want. But the evolutionary firmware your body runs on is tuned for interpersonal bonds. If you want to go against that, nobody will stop you, but it strikes me as needless suffering in a world that already has a considerable amount.

I imagine this goes beyond what most people think of when they think of "intimacy" (sex, relationships) and includes all kinds of emotional closeness and friendships. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I've noticed a decline in people's willingness to engage with other people since the covid pandemic. If we start replacing interpersonal relationships with chatbots, we're headed for dark times.

Intimacy in that sense is a euphemism. It's not primary meaning of the word: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intimacy

One of the by-products of the sycophancy issues, is that LLMs are infinitely patient. They’ll listen to your bullshit forever, and won’t call it out, or walk away.

I can certainly see folks getting so used to it, that they then measure all their IRL relationships by that. They could decide that “you’re not my friend,” because you don’t want to listen to them whine endlessly about their ex.

> One of the by-products of the sycophancy issues, is that LLMs are infinitely patient. They’ll listen to your bullshit forever, and won’t call it out, or walk away.

So, just like professional therapists then?

No. Therapists are supposed to call it out, and interrupt rabbitholes.

From what I’ve seen of LLMs, it’s the opposite.

In theory, sure. In practice therapists don't, because that patient won't be back.

All therapists give some some variation of "your problem is $SOMETHING_POSITIVE".

Never "your problem is you're too selfish" because those patients don't go back.

It's always "your problem is you're too willing to help" or "you give too much of yourself" or other similar such BS.

Good therapists don't. I know quite a few of them. They are pretty good at guiding you into seeing what an ass you are, but they make it seem like your own discovery, so the sting isn't as bad.

No, any therapist worth their salt will absolutely call you out for bullshit, even if they try to couch it in gentle terms.

> So, just like professional therapists then?

I know there's other responses saying the same thing, but this needs underscoring: good therapists won't put up with this forever. They should use techniques to guide your mind away from keeping you trapped. It's a slow progress with very nonlinear progression. But for those it helps, things can improve.

Eventually you realize you (and perhaps a higher power) freed yourself from your mental bondage. They showed you the path, and walked alongside you, but they weren't the ones making the changes.

I think we kind of get this effect already with online discourse in general. People spin up and burn off nyms, and interact online in a manner they could never pull off IRL where people remember conversations/experiences. Which in turn makes them retreat further online, further warping their idea of normal conversation.

Removing anthropomorphism from LLM's seems like a really great idea with zero downside. Not just because people starting "relationships" with AI is going to harm society but I imagine people are also more willing to trust misinformation from an anthropomorphic AI.

Is that even possible while still training on 'things written by humans' (and not expressly for training purposes) though?

It doesn't have to be perfect. A hypothetical law could be phrased something like "not allowed to intentionally influence the user into thinking the llm is a human", which sure, is up to judges at the end, but it also gives a clear indication of things to avoid doing intentionally.

I feel like you could do it via the system prompt quite easily (but maybe that's my lack of knowledge showing).

Removing anthropomorphism from LLM's seems like a really great idea with zero downside.

Step 1: Stop giving them human or human-like names.

Claude, Siri, Gemini, etc.

I swear I'm about to get dumped by my wife for Claude. He gives her all the answers she wants, whereas I only give her the ones she needs.

Yeah. Maybe HAL9000 would be better :-)

Hey T1000, give me a good apple pie recipe, make sure to include pears instead of apples.

I already see dystopian ads for friend.com, "someone who listens, responds, and supports you" but it's actually an AI necklace device, and you'll see people marking them up too given how unnerving it is to call an AI a "friend."

https://old.reddit.com/r/Greenpoint/comments/1nmk49r/dystopi...

Well before it was the pedo priest with the same dialogue.

So maybe an improvement.

Good friend of the Church, Nietzsche predicted dystopia long ago but it never plays out the way people think. The chimp troupe is highly unpredictable. One day it props up Hitlers. Next day it kills him.

> So maybe an improvement

Definitely not an improvement to be friends with corporate-owned machines versus being friends with God

The Catholic Church should probably not talk about "intimacy" at all, given their track record. As much as I am not a big fan of AI/LLMs, I would love it if AI took the Church's job away.

> I appreciate that coinage, "artificial intimacy," and want to explore the implications of it more.

I've been looking for this phrase for years.

It describes the phenomenon perfectly, even accounting for the diminishing of emotional/mental/physical closeness that occurs.

Religions, especially but not limited to Catholic, are what screams "artificial intimacy" to me.

From the language the Church uses ("Jesus loves you.") to the practices the Church does (confession to a priest).

The most charitable take I can make from this is that religious leaders genuinely believe what they claim to believe so they don't think it's "artificial." There are a lot of less charitable takes I could make, but I'd stop here.

Don’t worry, some “AI” adepts have already managed to make a religion out of it, so classical religions aren’t required any more. In the end it doesn’t matter that much what you’re using to outsource your thinking and your judgement.

They scream artificial intimacy to you because you have only the most superficial notion of what these things are and never sought to understand them.

If you did try to understand basic Christian theology, you'd likely still disagree but would be less confused.

This too is a charitable take; no snark meant.

I’ll bite. I’ve been reading about the first two hundred years of christianity for the past couple of years. Here’s my canned take that I got tired of retyping:

Jesus is an ahistorical figure who was originally crucified in the firmament above the earth. Notice no mention of an earthly ministry in the Pailine epistles; Paul is arguing for salvation from a heavenly figure. In his letters, Jesus is still to be revealed, rather than returning. Only decades later did the stories about a human man get written.

The Didache was most likely part of the letter written by the "pillars in Jerusalem" (James the Just, Peter, and John) after their meeting with Paul. This was the meeting to discuss the matter of preaching to gentiles and whether circumcision ought to be required for christian converts. It contains many of the tenets later ascribed to Jesus, but doesn't associate him with teaching them.

The reason the earthly story was embraced by the church was to stop people like Paul from having visions of Christ that the church couldn’t control. By pointing to a real guy on earth, they could control the message. Otherwise, any yokel on the street could teach that Jesus revealed new teachings and the church risked being undermined.

Marcion was probably the first to create a collection of writings associated with christianity: he collected some of Paul's letters and had his own gospel. It was thought that he had a shortened version of Luke (as testified by Eusebius and Tertullian). Marcion, however, claimed that his gospel had been "judaized"; this suggests that his shorter version was the original gospel before others modified it.

Acts was written as a direct response to Marcion’s scripture. It was written to harmonize Paul’s high-jacking of the religion by making he and Peter appear to be in alignment when actually he was at odds with the leaders in Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem pillars (James, Peter, John), were strict adherents of Judaism, whereas Paul taught that Jesus made the Law / Torah unnecessary. They were almost certainly Essenes, one of the three flavors of Judaism at the time (the other two were the Pharisees and Sadducees mentioned in the new testament). John the Baptist was clearly also an Essene. He's said to wear camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and honey. His practice of baptism also aligns with daily ritual water immersion believed to be a core practice of the Essenes.

This is a very long way of saying that Jesus first appeared in visions and spoke to the early leaders without walking on earth. It's a fringe belief about which I was quite skeptical, but damn if the evidence doesn't line up. See Robert Price, Earl Doherty, and Elbe Spurling for more info. Elbe's online book is free and contains a huge amount of historical information about the region at the.

——

So, I’ll ask you this: which of us has spent more time earnestly trying to understand the faith? I know I read more actual research (as opposed to dogma) than most USA christians, especially evangelicals.

This is fascinating.

But how did the Church's claim that it was a real guy on Earth stop anyone from claiming visions of Christ?

edit: I'm not sure we're talking about the same things here. Your claims are all from a history/historicity point of view, but you ask me about faith, and claim to reject dogma.

edit 2: The OP was criticizing the claim that Jesus loves you (Claim 1) and criticizing Reconciliation. You took a historicity approach that included disputing Jesus's existence, that's one way to address Claim 1, but other than that I'm still not sure we're talking about the same thing.

There's an old heresy, Docetism, that would agree with your take on Jesus not having lived, but even they wouldn't reject the claim that "Jesus loves you".

Docetism says he didn’t suffer on the cross. There’s a bit about him laughing at the crucifiers. I don’t remember the whole text, but it doesn’t say “love” to me. It doesn’t say he didn’t live. It says he wasn’t human. You can find this searching about Gnosticism.

The irony of priests being concerned with people developing emotional attachments to beings that don't consciously exist...

It seems pretty clear that LLMs will create another cleavage between the upper and lower classes. 200 years ago if you were rich you were overweight, and everyone else was skinny. These days it's reversed. You need a combination of money and impulse control to avoid being overweight. Right now, if you're scrolling on your phone constantly vs. reading, working out, doing chores, etc., you probably fall somewhere between the middle and the bottom of the bell curve for impulse control. The privileged few among us (I am not one of them) don't struggle with avoiding these addictions.

And finally, LLMs. They certainly _could_ be used to help individuals bootstrap and quickly gain a basic competence in a new topic, and allow those individuals to reach greater expertise more quickly. But _a lot_ of people will just offload their thinking to the LLMs and actually erode their skills. Is this strictly inevitable from a conceptual standpoint? No. But practically speaking a lot of people will fall into this trap, which enlightened technologists will scratch their heads. "I don't understand why people say LLMs make you dumber, I've used them to advance my career and expand my knowledge, etc. Sounds like you guys just don't like progress."

> everyone else was skinny

Malnourished. The word you were looking for is malnourished. Junk food is a problem but the abundance of food didn't somehow cause "cleavage between upper and lower classes."

Depends on when in the past, but fair enough. I'm not saying "the past was better" but that our overabundance of calories presents a novel problem (ie, the need for money & impulse control to avoid obesity, heart disease, etc) that didn't previously exist, and now pretty clearly marks class boundaries.

In 1970 Americans already had an abundance of calories available, but they didn't yet have an obesity epidemic. One big difference is that in 1970 a typical person could afford 4000 calories of food a day, but most people still ate food cooked or assembled from basic ingredients at home. It's possible but less likely for someone to prepare and eat 4000 calories a day worth of homemade fried chicken, cookies, mashed potatoes, etc.

Americans today can afford to eat 4000 calories worth of food and it's already optimized for palatability and convenience. It's relatively easy to eat 4000 calories of Doritos, microwave burritos, and boxed cookies. There's advertising to remind you of its existence and researchers dedicated to optimizing the delight of eating these products (increasing the odds of overeating just because it's pleasurable and frictionless).

The transition from "abundance" to "abundance multiplied by advertising and product optimization" drove obesity more than simple availability of calories, IMO. I see a parallel with digital information. There was more than enough information on the Web to spend all day looking at it even before social networks were common. But that "home cooked" experience wasn't engineered for engagement time, so companies that optimized products for engagement were, in practice, a lot better at getting people to look at digital information for many hours per day.

People also smoked cigarettes in the 70s

Cigarettes are an appetite suppressant. Easier to control your calorie intake if you aren't feeling hunger pangs often

Not all the time and not across all populations. Even many poor people had adequate nourishment a lot of their lives. The real problem they faced was the precarity of their situation, since I think we can agree that even a short period without adequate nourishment is a critical problem.

Famine, war rationing, economic depression and the widespread use of tobacco and methamphetamine diet pills was why Americans were historically skinny.

> The privileged few among us (I am not one of them) don't struggle with avoiding these addictions.

Counterpoint, the richest man in the world is clearly addicted to being on twitter and posts at all hours of the day. More generally I don't see why the richest wouldn't be addicted to social media like the rest of us – after all they have a lot more free time and disposable income

A single data point doesn't change the bell curve.

The richest people in SV send their children to schools that are deliberately devoid of, or carefully restrictive of, technology. This is do they can learn to think, not follow.

[citation needed]

As far as I can tell, rich kids are just as addicted to phones/etc as anyone else.

[citation needed]

Six seconds of DuckDuckGo:

https://parkervillesteiner.wa.edu.au/2022/08/08/hello-world/

https://archive.ph/mzxtZ

Just because they send them to a school without cell phones doesn't mean they're not hopelessly addicted to them

Agreed, and I think Musk is an outlier. I think a bigger counterpoint for me would be "to what degree does wealth intersect with impulse control." I'd be shocked if there wee not a strong association, but it's also not going to be strictly linear. The might be diminishing returns at the poles, as well. The very low ends of impulse control look like "this guy blew grass clippings at my car so I shot him."

An outlier?

Nadella lives in an AI generated cocoon of psuedo-information, if his words are to be believed. Zuckerberg thinks he's Caesar and has become Dominican, post metaverse, for some reason. Bezos has become a Miami club promotor with phallic rockets. Thiel rants about the coming Anti Christ in seminars and keeps trying to create 'libertarian' cities (that he would own). Altman talks about the coming age of the Dyson sphere. The immortal vampire guy goes to sleep at 4pm or something insane.

The highest echelon of wealth allows you to follow every possible impulse in a 'disciplined' way at any given moment.

"this guy blew grass clippings at my car so I " purchased every home around me for a mile and constructed a private compound free from the interference of lesser mortals, then bankrupted the guy that dented my car?

>Zuckerberg thinks he's Caesar and has become Dominican, post metaverse, for some reason. Bezos has become a Miami club promotor with phallic rockets. Thiel rants about the coming Anti Christ in seminars and keeps trying to create 'libertarian' cities (that he would own). Altman talks about the coming age of the Dyson sphere.

Well yes they're all nuts, but do any of these quirks suggest poor impulse control?

n=1 --> the exception of the rule :-D

> the richest man in the world is clearly addicted to being on twitter and posts at all hours of the day.

I think that's more likely related to how little they actually sleep, and trying to fill their waking hours, more than it is related to an addiction. It seems to be a pattern with these people that only need 4-5 hours a day of sleep.

addiction isn't necessarily a class issue, but of course someone of Musk's stature has many more options than to be dragged back to fighting with twitter users online. Including professional help if it is a serious addiction.

He's also getting noticeably fatter.

Consumer tech tilts toward those with poor impulse control because that ensures survival for the creators of said tech. Eventually, it becomes less of a means to an end, and more of an end in and of itself. This is a problem because it reinforces addiction.

I'd argue the iPhone crossed that line at some point within the past five years, though, admittedly, it is the iPhone + social media services working together. I doubt Jobs would have approved the gaudy, Myspace-aesthetic-level Messages backgrounds that iOS 26 was proud to launch with.

> Wilson rejected the idea of mass joblessness due to AI as "a very silly fear because human desires and human wants are infinite, and therefore, we always find new things for people to do."

While I'm highly skeptical that the current iteration of LLM tech will lead to mass joblessness, the reasoning above is flawed. If it costs less to employ a bot than to employ a human, then the price of human labor will fall until it reaches equilibrium with the bot. And if that equilibrium price happens to be below what it takes to keep a human alive, then it doesn't matter if "human wants are infinite" because it would be cheaper to fulfill those wants without paying a human.

Yeah, we’ll see what happens, but one of the interesting things about the book sapiens, is it highlights that there are plenty of paradigm shifting events in human history that change our basic assumptions.

“Life is suffering” meant something very different when the Buddha first said it to now. The idea that “the only constant is change” is a relatively modern creation(or at least the significance of it), so this idea that economics is going to keep working the way it always has - at least feels like it’s going to change if we get more advanced AI.

What if you want is to keep a human alive. How can that cost less than keeping a human alive?

Great question that will unfortunately be ignored by GP, as it happens usually.

I don't think anyone pushing AI really cares about keeping humans alive

AI is a fundamentally antisocial anti-human technology

The assertion that we are refuting is this: "human wants are infinite, and therefore, we always find new things for people to do". The context here is specifically about employment, human labor, and the spectre of joblessness. What you're describing is not a labor market, it's charity. And indeed, one peaceful, idyllic solution to mass unemployment that gets trotted out is something like UBI, where you pay people to simply keep them alive, without expecting anything in return. But that's not at all what's being discussed here; instead, what the OP is asserting is the usual yarn that technological advances will not decrease human employment, but at a certain point this simply stops being the case, and that point will be reached if or when the price of artificial labor falls below a critical level. In short: at the limit of technological advancement, you can either prioritize a market economy, or you can prioritize keeping people alive; you cannot have both.

I'm more concerned that the above reasoning is flawed just because it's untrue.

I don't know any yacht owning people but the few people I know with boats are very happy with it's size. The people looking for a football field on water are _limited_. Human desires are limited and if that limit can be achieved without the collective efforts of all humans then under our capitalistic model somebody is going to starve.

While I agree that the replacement of humans with AI would lead to joblessness, I think you'll see far sooner mass joblessness as a human with better technology can replace 50+ other humans (like containership engineer vs sailship crew).

The original article is far more informative imho: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/266761/catholic-univ...

I am one of the people who was on the panel. As always, it's a very lossy process when a journalist is summarizing another journalist summarizing a 90 minute discussion. Happy to expand in the comments here on any of the issues that got brought up.

You stated that “the conversation about where the technology is going and what we’re going to do with it is happening among people who do not care … what any Christian church has to say on the topic.”

As a Catholic myself, I wonder what the church should say/do with regards to technology like this and would like to know where you stand on it. Personally I think that further public discussions need to be held on the morality of potential implementations of AI (I’m thinking ahead by decades once LLMs can really make a dent in the workforce) but question the effectiveness of the Church participating in discussions like that.

For every person that uses AI to learn, there are one or more people that use it to avoid learning. The gap between people exacerbates. Some people are driven by curiosity, but they are the minority. The effect of AI is that the productivity of the few is multiplied by a higher number than the productivity of everyone else, from my anecdotal experience.

You could say the same about technology in general WRT physical capability. Most people use technology to avoid exercise, but some people use science and technology to exercise even better, achieving levels of strength that weren't possible in previous centuries.

Misuse of AI is mass stupidity. The problem is that people don't understand how these things work, and the technology has been oversold (as nearly every new tech is) as something more powerful and more trustworthy than it actually is.

AI is incredibly useful. I'm already getting a ton of use out of it. But you have to treat it like an untrustworthy source, or at least have a "trust but verify" attitude. You also have to understand that it is not sentient, doesn't "care" about you, and is just a hugely powerful autocomplete engine. Any sense of intimacy or understanding you have with it is an illusion.

In engineering I treat it like a junior intern that is very fast, has memorized a huge amount of info, but makes mistakes and has to be hand-held and anything they produce must be examined and tested.

> In engineering I treat it like a junior intern that is very fast, has memorized a huge amount of info, but makes mistakes and has to be hand-held and anything they produce must be examined and tested

So you spend your own experienced dev time chasing down a high volume of junior dev mistakes instead of writing high quality experienced dev code?

Sorting through large amounts of junior intern code does not seem like a valuable use of an experienced dev's time.

I use it where it saves time and don't use it where it doesn't, and have learned over time where those places tend to be. As AI gets better it'll get useful in more places.

Like any dev tool you have to play with it.

Are there places where it reliably saves time, though? Unlike most software tools, LLMs are stochastic, right?

In my experience they reliably waste much more time than they save

Boilerplate, glue code, first pass explaining of third party code, first pass documentation, rubber duck debugging where the rubber duck talks back, research assistant or alternative to web search, etc.

It won’t do your thinking for you or write difficult stuff.

Not one comment in this thread mentions exorcism. I was floored by information that those are still real and practising and even holding conferences. So I went to read the Catholic church's explanation on the topic [0] and yes, demonic possession is rare but it exists in their worldview. What exactly are those exorcists doing - more to the point why would you need 1000 of them? It's 2025 and we're talking demons in the same breath as AI.

[0] https://catholicus.eu/en/the-exorcists-of-the-vatican-realit...

In these times I'm finding myself more drawn to reading and trying to understand christian views on a number of modern issues.

Does anyone know where to find more? Where are the modern christian scholars? Are there christian publications easily available? In the universities I found those sources are available, but only in the specific context of studying religion but much less so as another voice on the subject at hand.

First Things[0] is one of my favorite magazines. It has perspectives I rarely see anywhere else, and generally well articulated and argued for (provided you accept Christian first-principles).

New Polity Podcast[1] also regularly features smart conversations.

[0] https://firstthings.com/

[1] https://newpolity.com/podcasts

Thanks! I'm used to looking at an argument and understanding that it comes with a set of presuppositions that must be accepted for the argument to follow (my academic background is in philosophy). I suppose the position I find myself in is at least toying with those presuppositions. I am finding the arguments that stem from them to be valuable and I can adopt the first principles while thinking about it and I'll leave the question of whether they themselves are right or worth holding for another moment.

Some of my favorites recently for intellectually engaging Christian thinking are "The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God" podcast (first season is the best), and the book "Reasonable Faith" by William Lane Craig.

Interesting looking book, but it seems a bit too meta for what I'm looking for. I'm not really looking for an argument for Christianity, but rather arguments from Christianity on modernity. Or did I not understand the role of that book?

I recommend Paul Kingsnorth.

Insightful analysis of the modern world and the Christian response to it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3hMSZqatHI

He also has a new book out, Against the Machine, which has good reviews, but I haven't read yet.

We have a subscription to Plough magazine. It has Christian scholars writing articles/commentary, but isn't restricted to them.

Recent article entitled "Your Friends Are Not In Your Phone" was fantastic: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/technology/your-friend...

"Another voice on the subject at hand" is definitely available - but simply searching "{Christian, Catholic} {[SUBJECT MATTER], [KIND OF MATERIAL]" will often unearth some good starting points. E. g. "Christian social periodical" will eventually lead you to https://firstthings.com/ (as an example).

Some suggestions for a variety of subjects:

* Fr. Stanley Jaki on Physics and the philosophy of science - I am working through https://www.abebooks.com/9780895267498/God-Cosmologists-Jaki...

* Philosophy in general, Peter Kreeft (I recommend "Jesus Shock", it's amazing how "used" to Christ we've become, and this book does a good job of pointing out just how different the reactions to him are) and Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue) are both good "recent" authors.

* Bioethics and philosophy https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Bioethics-Limits-Scie... (I will freely admit to bias here, but this is easy to read, clear, and to the point)

* Particularly interesting in the moment: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-limits-...

From the Roman Catholic point of view, there's a variety of answers.

For super up-to-date happenings, you can go to Vatican News[1]. (A great example in the first article, "Holy See urges moratorium on autonomous weapons at UN debate on AI".)

For weightier, more timeless writings that address the issues of the current day, but are meant to be read indefinitely, the Papal Encyclicals[2] are the look. Rerum Novarum is a good one to start with.

I'd be skeptical of any persuasive writings by lay-persons (i.e. not priests or nuns). It's like the difference between a lawyer's opinion and a judge's ruling. They can be fantastic scholars, but they don't speak for the church.

1: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city.html 2: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/

> Wilson rejected the idea of mass joblessness due to AI as "a very silly fear because human desires and human wants are infinite, and therefore, we always find new things for people to do."

What are companies going to pay these now-dumber people to do, once they've automated away the jobs the smarter versions of these people did? Will the AI be able to perform the original jobs but unable to perform the jobs achievable by these now-dumber people?

Are we a better-off society if a net dumber population is doing a manual labor job that the robotics companies haven't solved yet?

> What are companies going to pay these now-dumber people to do, once they've automated away the jobs the smarter versions of these people did?

Kill each other, in some ways.

Placate them by any means. History has provided the answers.

So I guess it's good for the church ?

So if the Trump supporters fall in behind this, would that make them the "Orange Catholics"? ...and they'll be right there in time for the Butlerian Jihad as society battles it out with AI.

The phrase "artificial intimacy" really sticks with me. If machines can simulate emotional engagement good enough and past a certain threshold, many users will treat AI more as real people. This might happen consciously or unconsciously.

That illusion of closeness could have the potential to warp how we relate to REAL people. Over time, if your "listener" never judges you or walks away, you might measure real human bonds against an unfair standard.

I think this will be the inevitable outcome. I wrote a post [1] about this a few months back explaining how (I think) the long shot of AI adoption is an extreme dumbing down to the point where humans no longer know how to organically build or maintain what they need without AI.

[1] https://ryanglover.net/blog/chauffeur-knowledge-and-the-impe...

Overabundance of calories and fast food led to an obesity epidemic and now nearly half the youth at risk of type 2 diabetes.

However, it also led to the counter reaction of cross fit and extreme fitness by a small percentage.

The same will happen with AI. Most people will become smooth brains when they don’t have to exercise thought and a small fraction will use it to push the bounds of what humans are capable of.

Most people spreading the gospel of AI don't even seem to remember the kinds of feats that humans are capable of. They want to sell you back your own potential at a markup, so it's not good for them if you believe in your own potential and won't give it away

Good luck holding together a society in which large swaths of the population find themselves useless and starving.

I can see this outcome, however... there's a lot more nuance to worry about here. The small percentage, even now, can still get good food. And even grow their own crop.

We're already losing physical books, and data online will slowly become more and more circumspect. That is, AI training on AI, with more and more nonsense blogs, will make simple accuracy of any data very rare.

A strong mind may have the capacity to not be taint by AI too much, but what if it cannot get anything non-AI tainted to feed it? What if there are no teachers of any caliber left, for they are all smooth-brains as you say?

What if society is run AI itself, and no one understands anything at all?

That incredible mind may make some progress, but will lack the solid foundation you and I have had.

Using AI effectively is a skill. As more people acquire it, it gets more useful.

My problem with the "Using AI is a skill" mentality is that it sure doesn't feel like one

It reminds me of people who think slot machines have some element of skill involved. If you pull the lever juuuust right it will be a jackpot....

I would argue it is both massively stupid and massively wasteful. We are so good we can lose/lose.

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