Seeing that "Antiqua and Nova" comes from Cardinal Fernandez, the guy who gave us Fiducia Supplicans, my expectations were well below zero. So I was not disappointed.
Apart from all the vacuous blather about technology serving human welfare, there are numerous debatable statements. Para 84 was a gem. "Current AI programs have been known t…
Seeing that "Antiqua and Nova" comes from Cardinal Fernandez, the guy who gave us Fiducia Supplicans, my expectations were well below zero. So I was not disappointed.
Apart from all the vacuous blather about technology serving human welfare, there are numerous debatable statements. Para 84 was a gem. "Current AI programs have been known to provide biased or fabricated information". As if politicians and religious leaders have not been doing this since the dawn of history. Was a bot or Pope Francis who assured us that Islam is a Religion of Peace? (Evangelii Gaudium, para 253). Was it ChatGPT or Pope Francis who declared that all religions are gifts from God?
Para 70 is an absolute cracker: "the goal should not be that technological progress increasingly replaces human work, for that would be detrimental to humanity". Mea maxima culpa. This morning I crawled out of bed, headed for the kitchen and made my morning tea. I did not draw the water from a nearby well or the river, which is only 200 yards away. And I did not chop the wood to boil the water. I suspect that the tea may have come to England by a huge container ship rather than a human scale hand built wind driven clipper.
"If AI is used to replace human workers rather than complement them"... Sadly, next time I go anywhere by train the driver may be conveying 400 people in air conditioned comfort and very high safety. Plainly he is doing at least 50 horse coach drivers out of a job. And he is depriving his passengers of the chance to view God's scenery at 15 mph.
The Vatican yet again denounces the evil technocratic paradigm, which seems to be a particular bete noir for Pope Francis: "the presumption that societal problems can be solved through technology". Let the Holy Father try to solve modern problems (like feeding 8 billion people) without technology. It will keep him out of our consciousness, artificial or otherwise.
That's rather a difficult problem to set Pope Francis in the last paragraph. Maybe he could just set a good example by extracting a sedia gestatoria from the Vatican store cupboard and using it instead of a wheelchair - it was carried by twelve men.
Yes, the sedia gestatoria would be a great reversal of the technological replacement of humans. The modern wheelchair was a threefold example of technological progress.
1. Everest and Jennings pioneered a folding wheelchair to replace the massively heavy non folding old ones.
2. It worked well in conjunction with the rapid adoption of the motor car - you could fold it inside a trunk.
3. Everest and Jennings mass produced their wheelchairs.
From my one experience of pushing a wheelchair in Rome, the sedia would not last long. We tried carrying wheelchair users down into the catacombs on one hot day and it nearly killed us.
You know, I'm not usually in the habit of defending what Cardinal Fernandéz writes, but I'll make an exception here. The point isn't that "all technology is bad." I think the point is that we should be wary of what AI proponents themselves -- e.g., OpenAI's Sam Altman -- say publicly. To wit: The rapid spread of artificial general intelligence is likely to massively reconfigure human society within a single generation. Think in terms of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
That transition will not be free and (they hope) it will be sudden and dramatic. Many humans will pay the price. THAT is the issue, not whether modern trains are more efficient than stagecoaches. In the past, technological progress was felt in one sector at a time and spread slowly enough that our socioeconomic environment could adapt.
But if AGI suddenly appears? All bets are off. I don't think, therefore, that it's unreasonable for the Vatican to draw a line in the sand, even if Our Robotic Overlords toast that sand into glass a few years hence.
Technological progress spread slowly in the past? Look at the Industrial Revolution in England and the caraclysmic impact on huge numbers of ordinary people. My hometown, Reading, and many others were stagecoach points. Until the Great Western Railway arrived (ripping the beautiful scenery on a massive scale) and wiped out the stagecoach business. And introducing the possibility of many new businesses.
So Reading had the biggest cookie factory in the world with huge railway sidings to spread the delicious goods all over the world. And that cookie factory has been long wiped away. And Microsoft and many other huge hitechs are in town....until they are wiped out.
Yes, relative to today, the spread of technology was exceptionally slow. Any anthropologist will tell you that. It is undoubtedly true that certain communities that hitched their wagons (so to speak) to one specific technology or industry, felt the effects of technological change in more devastating fashion than in communities that had diversified. But that is not the same thing as saying that technology moved fast through that town.
I'm not sure that the "evil technocratic paradigm" is a "particular bete noir" for Pope Francis. We see a sustained critique of it in Benedict XVI's Spe Salvi, especially in paragraph 22 onwards. The critique in both popes isn't against technology per se, but against a particular paradigm of technological progress.
Seeing that "Antiqua and Nova" comes from Cardinal Fernandez, the guy who gave us Fiducia Supplicans, my expectations were well below zero. So I was not disappointed.
Apart from all the vacuous blather about technology serving human welfare, there are numerous debatable statements. Para 84 was a gem. "Current AI programs have been known to provide biased or fabricated information". As if politicians and religious leaders have not been doing this since the dawn of history. Was a bot or Pope Francis who assured us that Islam is a Religion of Peace? (Evangelii Gaudium, para 253). Was it ChatGPT or Pope Francis who declared that all religions are gifts from God?
Para 70 is an absolute cracker: "the goal should not be that technological progress increasingly replaces human work, for that would be detrimental to humanity". Mea maxima culpa. This morning I crawled out of bed, headed for the kitchen and made my morning tea. I did not draw the water from a nearby well or the river, which is only 200 yards away. And I did not chop the wood to boil the water. I suspect that the tea may have come to England by a huge container ship rather than a human scale hand built wind driven clipper.
"If AI is used to replace human workers rather than complement them"... Sadly, next time I go anywhere by train the driver may be conveying 400 people in air conditioned comfort and very high safety. Plainly he is doing at least 50 horse coach drivers out of a job. And he is depriving his passengers of the chance to view God's scenery at 15 mph.
The Vatican yet again denounces the evil technocratic paradigm, which seems to be a particular bete noir for Pope Francis: "the presumption that societal problems can be solved through technology". Let the Holy Father try to solve modern problems (like feeding 8 billion people) without technology. It will keep him out of our consciousness, artificial or otherwise.
Excellent points. Thanks
That's rather a difficult problem to set Pope Francis in the last paragraph. Maybe he could just set a good example by extracting a sedia gestatoria from the Vatican store cupboard and using it instead of a wheelchair - it was carried by twelve men.
Yes, the sedia gestatoria would be a great reversal of the technological replacement of humans. The modern wheelchair was a threefold example of technological progress.
1. Everest and Jennings pioneered a folding wheelchair to replace the massively heavy non folding old ones.
2. It worked well in conjunction with the rapid adoption of the motor car - you could fold it inside a trunk.
3. Everest and Jennings mass produced their wheelchairs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everest_and_Jennings
From my one experience of pushing a wheelchair in Rome, the sedia would not last long. We tried carrying wheelchair users down into the catacombs on one hot day and it nearly killed us.
You know, I'm not usually in the habit of defending what Cardinal Fernandéz writes, but I'll make an exception here. The point isn't that "all technology is bad." I think the point is that we should be wary of what AI proponents themselves -- e.g., OpenAI's Sam Altman -- say publicly. To wit: The rapid spread of artificial general intelligence is likely to massively reconfigure human society within a single generation. Think in terms of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
That transition will not be free and (they hope) it will be sudden and dramatic. Many humans will pay the price. THAT is the issue, not whether modern trains are more efficient than stagecoaches. In the past, technological progress was felt in one sector at a time and spread slowly enough that our socioeconomic environment could adapt.
But if AGI suddenly appears? All bets are off. I don't think, therefore, that it's unreasonable for the Vatican to draw a line in the sand, even if Our Robotic Overlords toast that sand into glass a few years hence.
Technological progress spread slowly in the past? Look at the Industrial Revolution in England and the caraclysmic impact on huge numbers of ordinary people. My hometown, Reading, and many others were stagecoach points. Until the Great Western Railway arrived (ripping the beautiful scenery on a massive scale) and wiped out the stagecoach business. And introducing the possibility of many new businesses.
So Reading had the biggest cookie factory in the world with huge railway sidings to spread the delicious goods all over the world. And that cookie factory has been long wiped away. And Microsoft and many other huge hitechs are in town....until they are wiped out.
Yes, relative to today, the spread of technology was exceptionally slow. Any anthropologist will tell you that. It is undoubtedly true that certain communities that hitched their wagons (so to speak) to one specific technology or industry, felt the effects of technological change in more devastating fashion than in communities that had diversified. But that is not the same thing as saying that technology moved fast through that town.
I'm not sure that the "evil technocratic paradigm" is a "particular bete noir" for Pope Francis. We see a sustained critique of it in Benedict XVI's Spe Salvi, especially in paragraph 22 onwards. The critique in both popes isn't against technology per se, but against a particular paradigm of technological progress.