The Week in AI
More responses to MH
Politico has piece on how Silicon Valley responded to Magnifica Humanitas, which is pretty much what you’d expect: “What does that idiot know about it? He should stay in his lane, whatever that is.”
But some get it:
“The point that all the religions have in common is a starting point of humanity first,” said Brad Smith, the vice chair and president of Microsoft. “Whereas the people in the tech sector sort of start from the other direction. They start with the technology they’re creating, and then they think about its impact on people second.”
So, yeah. That’s kind of problematic, don’t you think? Too many Americans can’t quite get their head around why it might be because, well, Techno-Capitalism = Freedom = American Greatness. Anybody who doesn’t understand that, according to people like Peter Thiel, is in the service of the Anti-Christ.
So following that logic, reactionary Catholics react pretty much as you’d expect —
“I think it’s a pretty weak document,” said Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and a former AI policy advisor in the Trump administration. “[It] essentially amounts to a deeply anti-American screed in favor of technocratic regulation of artificial intelligence; that’s just not what I needed from the Church.”
Thanks, Dean. You really do have a special insight into the spirit of the gospels and Catholic social teaching.
Jill Lepore in The New Yorker provides a thoughtful overview:
Little in the encyclical is surprising; its force lies in its being said all at once. The Pope, who is seventy and was born in Chicago, has been speaking about artificial intelligence since his election to the office, a year ago. “We are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human,” he said earlier this month. He took his papal name, Leo, in honor of the last Pope Leo, the thirteenth, because he expected to issue a statement of the scale and historical significance of that Pope’s 1891 encyclical, “Rerum Novarum” (“Of New Things”), an indictment of the profound economic inequality wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and a rejection equally of laissez-faire capitalism and of socialism in favor of collective bargaining and social justice. (Another Pope described “Rerum Novarum” as a papal Magna Carta.) Leo XIV signed “Magnifica Humanitas” on May 15th of this year, a hundred and thirty-five years to the day that Leo XIII issued “Rerum Novarum.” Many things are new. Many things are old. Leo XIII indicted robber barons; Leo XIV indicted tech moguls….
If those of us Americans who are Catholic are proud of this Pope, many of us are even prouder that the first American pontiff has taken on this vital matter, and at such a crucial moment. In much of American culture—and especially in the business and tech press—challenging the economic power and oligarchic rule of U.S.-based artificial-intelligence companies is an act tantamount to heresy. Pope Leo is not only willing but eager to dissent. Bless him.
Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic comes, if indirectly, closest to what I’ve been arguing, which is that if there were no pope, we’d have to invent one:
I am not arguing that one must be or become more religious to fully appreciate the challenge posed by the rise of AI—that would make me, a not especially observant Presbyterian, a hypocrite. But I do think that one must start from the premise that humans have some kind of universal nature or essence that must be safeguarded from technological encroachment. Otherwise, appreciating what large language models and their peddlers wish to take from us becomes too difficult. If secularists flinch at calling this taking—what Pope Leo calls Big Tech’s “dehumanizing ambition”—a sin, they’ll need to find another word for it.
They can’t, and that’s their problem. The secular Left has no consensus idea about what a human being is, and so that makes defending humanity, to say the least, a challenge for it. When people on the secular Left says this or that is immoral, I have no idea what they mean except that they find it aesthetically unpleasant or out of fashion, yukky or cringe.
As Harper says earlier in the article,
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the critics, living and dead, who capture my unease about the AI revolution—who discuss it with appropriate moral gravity—are or were Christians. They are or were people comfortable using words like sin. They include Catholic writers such as the social critic Ivan Illich and the philosophers Charles Taylor and Jennifer Frey, as well as the Orthodox Substacker Paul Kingsnorth, the Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman, and Pope Leo….
And the one with the biggest platform with the most moral gravitas is the last in that list.
We’ll see how this plays out. The interesting question for me is what the next step should be. I’d like to see some kind of gathering of global leaders to at the very least begin talking with one another about where things are going. Problem is, of course, that the biggest economy and military in the world is being run by a madman and his gang of crackpots and crooks.