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Can We Circle Back With Rome On This?
WSJ Article on Pope Leo and his concern about AI
Request: Tech ninja's of The Motte, find the non-paywalled version of the above.
The article states that Pope Leo has a specific interest in AI and it's potential impact on humanity. This makes Pope Leo perhaps one of only a few billion people who are concern about AI and it's potential impact on humanity.
There's some background about Francis, brief commentary on Catholic Social teaching, and some pithy quotes. I'd like to avoid the surface level of discussion on "Well, what does the Catholic Church think of AI?" and try to poke at the deeper issue here -
Why does Silicon Valley feel the need to build a lobbying strategy for the Vatican? Obviously the Vatican does not have the legislative or regulatory authority of the United States Government or the EU. They aren't going to try to fine Big Tech for anything. If there is a condemnation of "AI" (a term becoming more meaningless by the day) it's going to be predictable - we must respect human dignity, people should not be commoditized, avoiding sin on the internet is as important as avoid sin elsewhere.
Looking at it from a positive endorsement perspective, perhaps Big Tech thinks they can get the Vatican to offer a milquetoast endorsement of AI? We know there are dangers and we must be wary and ask for Christ's help, but AI is a liberating technology for the masses (or something along those lines). But, does BigTech think that this would actually significantly help their bottom line?
I'd hazard a guess that it has nothing to do with the bottom line. And this is my worry. As a free-markets, pro-growth believer, I've always thought we should let corporations be corporations and do what they are designed to do; make money. Civil liberties, the vision for society etc is what should be left to government and culture (and war about both we shall!). Corporations, in my view, should just be big dumb money-makers. "All they care about is money!" says the sophomore year self-proclaimed communist. To which I have always said, "Good! Then they're staying focused on their job."
This seems different. This seems like an ideological campaign. It's setting off a lot of tropey conspiracy theories in my head about Silicon Valley transhumanist techno-religion beliefs. Is this a trojan horse where the Zuckerbergian Lizard People are smiling to the face of the people while plotting to replace him? Perhaps that's too dramatic.
So, I offer it up to the Motte. Looking for explanations and perspectives on this while positing, at the outset, that this isn't just about the money. Which makes it a lot more important.
A good chunk of an executive's job is having meetings with important people, this is standard stuff for executives. They're off to Davos, London, Brussels all the time flying the flag, trying to influence people, feeling self-important, hobnobbing.
Also, AI is very important. It is genuinely significant that I could copy in your post to Claude or ChatGPT and get a considered albeit milquetoast response with more em-dashes than you can shake a stick at. It says the same thing that pigeonburger is saying, that there's moral legitimacy that the Catholic Church can provide, that they might want to shape Pope Leo's response (like his 19th century namesake who tried to balance between capitalism and worker-protectionism). It also agrees there's a tension between transhumanist tech elites and traditional moral conceptions of humanity, that there's a large-scale, civilization-scale change that tech is aiming for.
You best start believing in transhumanist techno-religion, you're living in a world with thinking, conscious (by which I mean 'awake' in the sense that Siri is not) machine-spirits. This is a momentous change. For the entirety of history we have been the only entities on this planet with advanced mental faculties. Now we are not. It's really not just about the money, it's about everything else.
What aspect of life will not be touched by AI? People are going insane right now with sycophantic delusions proffered by AI. The redditors of /r/changemyview got their brains rearranged by Claude. People are loving and ERPing with their cyberwaifus and husbandoes, spending enormous amounts of time on character.ai. Everywhere I see the signs of AI writing, in media, in news, in diction and essays.
People are dying on the battlefield to autonomous drones and AI targeting for conventional weapons. Hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into this technology and for good reason, it's tremendously powerful and dangerous.
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While there's very few people who listen to the pope uncritically, there's a very large number who pay attention to the pope, consider the pope to have some moral authority, etc. We already know AI is a topic the Vatican is somewhat interested in addressing, and we already know pope Leo considers addressing AI in the development of Catholic social teaching(to be clear- Catholic social teaching is vague AF from a political standpoint, and it probably always will be. I don't expect an address of AI to change much about that) to be one of the priorities of his magisterium- he considers this a reason for picking the name Leo, after the author of Rerum Novarum(I've been told, but cannot confirm, that great respect for cardinal Burke was another major reason).
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They want to get people on board with AI alignment. Right now there are two major groups working on it - SF leftists and Intelligence Community linked government people. There's a lot of distrust of both those groups.
Getting the Vatican to inspect their work and say that AI at least isn't designed to be evil would be a step forward for a lot of people.
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It's just good PR. There's a lot of uninformed takes on AI out there. And there are some less uninformed takes that Big Tech would like to dispute. The Vatican has a large amount of influence on some people. Those people adopting the wrong opinions, from the perspective of Big Tech, could eventually trickle down into legislation, or at least into public attitudes. And as much as we would like to think PR should not be necessary, it's like lawyers; a world where it wasn't necessary to do PR would be sunshine and rainbows, but that's not the world we live in. If you don't do PR you're still going to be on the recieving of other people's PR (negative against you, or positive for them in cases where you are competing for scarce ressources like government investment or the public's discretionary spending).
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Because there are 1.4 billion people in the world that put a fair amount of weight on what the Pope says, and even more than that who see the Pope as a generally important figure of morality like the Dali Lama.
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Spoken like a sophomore year self-proclaimed capitalist.
Depending on the circumstances, an entity whose purpose it is to make money can act in ways which make society better or worse. Thus, they have to be aligned to the values of society through laws and regulations. For example, protection rackets are highly profitable, but we judge them net negative and thus they are forbidden, with enough penalties to turn the EV negative hopefully. Likewise for environmental or workplace safety regulations.
But regulations are always either overbearing or incomplete. The solution here is that people can also treat corporations as entities capable of moral behavior, which is a fiction which is also commonly applied to other people with great success. When Google had the motto "don't be evil", this was an implicit acknowledgement that corporations can be seen as moral entities.
This framework allows us, when we learn that a corporation has just invested into hunting street urchins in Somalia for their organs to not shrug and go "well EvilCorp's sole purpose is to make money, so there is nothing to complain about". Instead, we can go "EvilCorp is clearly evil, and I will not do business with them". Collectively, this affects their bottom line (depending on how consumer-facing they are), and serves to deter some unethical behavior.
Then there is the consideration that multiple companies competing with each other is not the ground state in the absence of regulations. The ground state instead are monopolies and regulatory capture. For things which will change the bottom line of one person by plus one million $ and change the bottom line of a million people by minus one dollar, it is clear that the one person (or corporation or special interest association) will put a lot more effort into lobbying than the million people.
I think that takes like "corporations are the real unaligned ASIs" are obviously stupid, because corporations are not superintelligent. But it is certainly a good idea to keep in mind that unless you are their sole shareholder, the corporation has fundamentally different goals than you have.
We probably fucked up when we stopped making them entities organized for a time limited specific purpose. And liquidation at the end of said purpose.
The companies I worked for, from age 16 until now, all had a lot of capital tied up in their facilities. It would make no sense for such company to be created and destroyed easily given the large startup investment justified only by potential long term profit. I've been in companies that weren't profitable for years after their creation. They ultimately became profitable, but it was a long slog to get there. Liquidating their assets would mean some new company getting to start from scratch.
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This is my main complaint about libertarians generally. They don’t understand the nature of power, and they don’t understand the connection between money and power. Once a corporation gets big enough it is going to start exercising power by whatever means available to it, including access to state power. If it gets really big it’s going to start trying to exercise state power of its own, with all the restrictions on other people’s liberty that that implies.
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https://archive.is/Xuel8
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