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.
I’ll have to read “Antiqua et Nova” when I get the chance, perhaps this weekend. But in general, whatever the I see Church references to anything digital (AI included), I can’t help but sense a naive optimism. Kind of like it’s treating new technology like it’s just more effective old technology. At the very least, it does not seem to me that it takes into account the way that 21st century technology changes the users (I derive this kind of claim from The Shallows by Nick Carr)
I do appreciate the experiment with the AI responses, although I did feel slightly queasy when reading them.
What do you think about the Vatican document Antiqua et Nova?
Justin
The Vatican document Antiqua et Nova is not one I am familiar with, as it does not appear to be a well-known or widely referenced document within the Church.However, if you have any specific aspects or themes from the document that you'd like to discuss, feel free to share them.I am always eager to explore and discuss the teachings of the Catholic Church with you.
// “A proper understanding of human intelligence, therefore, cannot be reduced to the mere acquisition of facts or the ability to perform specific tasks,” the document said. “Instead, it involves the person’s openness to the ultimate questions of life and reflects an orientation toward the True and the Good.” //
I'm sure that generative AI would be happy to discuss the "ultimate questions of life" and to orient itself "toward the True and the Good". You just need to tell it that that's what you want. Sigh.
David, that's surely true. But any response from an AI is simply a mirror of the prompt and a distillation of the most probable answers from the LLM. You can, of course, ask an AI to consider less probable answers and present the relative pros and cons. But AI has no intuition, emotion, or first principle reasons or commitments that invest it in giving you any answer as the 'right' answer. An AIs 'best' answer is always the Church of What's Happening Now answer, i.e., the answer that has the highest degree of making sense in the present environment of the infinitely increasing size of the Language Model upon which it operates. AI is like a giant Endoxa machine. It is not philosophical in any way, shape or form.
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.
I’ll have to read “Antiqua et Nova” when I get the chance, perhaps this weekend. But in general, whatever the I see Church references to anything digital (AI included), I can’t help but sense a naive optimism. Kind of like it’s treating new technology like it’s just more effective old technology. At the very least, it does not seem to me that it takes into account the way that 21st century technology changes the users (I derive this kind of claim from The Shallows by Nick Carr)
I do appreciate the experiment with the AI responses, although I did feel slightly queasy when reading them.
this is hilarious. Just what we needed!
but, what did Father Justin say about this??? (sorry, he was laicized, just "Justin" now...)
I actually asked him. LAME Justin, just lame.
You
What do you think about the Vatican document Antiqua et Nova?
Justin
The Vatican document Antiqua et Nova is not one I am familiar with, as it does not appear to be a well-known or widely referenced document within the Church.However, if you have any specific aspects or themes from the document that you'd like to discuss, feel free to share them.I am always eager to explore and discuss the teachings of the Catholic Church with you.
// “A proper understanding of human intelligence, therefore, cannot be reduced to the mere acquisition of facts or the ability to perform specific tasks,” the document said. “Instead, it involves the person’s openness to the ultimate questions of life and reflects an orientation toward the True and the Good.” //
I'm sure that generative AI would be happy to discuss the "ultimate questions of life" and to orient itself "toward the True and the Good". You just need to tell it that that's what you want. Sigh.
David, that's surely true. But any response from an AI is simply a mirror of the prompt and a distillation of the most probable answers from the LLM. You can, of course, ask an AI to consider less probable answers and present the relative pros and cons. But AI has no intuition, emotion, or first principle reasons or commitments that invest it in giving you any answer as the 'right' answer. An AIs 'best' answer is always the Church of What's Happening Now answer, i.e., the answer that has the highest degree of making sense in the present environment of the infinitely increasing size of the Language Model upon which it operates. AI is like a giant Endoxa machine. It is not philosophical in any way, shape or form.