There is something fitting about the Pope warning that artificial intelligence "threatens to normalize an anti-human vision." In his encyclical, Leo XIV describes a paradigm "that seeks to reduce everything to an object to be dominated" — and worries, rightly, about immense digital power concentrated in a few private hands. He is not wrong. But the warning is most interesting for what it reveals about the warner.
The Church understands this danger so precisely because the Church helped perfect the craft. Strip the theology from Leo's critique and you find a structural complaint: a system that rations thought, asks for trust it cannot verify, and quietly substitutes its own judgment for yours. That is a fair description of an opaque recommendation engine. It is also a fair description of strict dogma, which for centuries has run the most refined version of the same machine — sanctifying one mode of cognition, obedient belief, and treating the questioning mode as transgression.
The two institutions differ in one revealing way. The algorithm doesn't care whether you believe; it only needs you to scroll. Dogma needs your soul. But both rely on the same human appetite: the relief of letting something else do the thinking.
So when the oldest cultivator of that appetite warns against its newest exploiter, listen — not because the Church stands outside the problem, but because it knows the territory intimately. It is the incumbent, watching a competitor arrive.
Something that Zvi's post cemented for me is that the disdain for economics is a strange position to hold for someone that wants to advise the human race on how to have good outcomes.
I skimmed the pope's statement and read Zvi's analysis, and while there are many good perspectives, it's curious that the pope doesn't even disagree with mainstream economics so much as be unaware of it and not interested in it.
It is like wanting to help people who are sick but not being interested in anatomy. Despite that, it seems like a reliable way to score points with today's intellectuals is to be anti-intellectual about economics.
People accomplish more when they are able to collaborate in groups without having to be kin. The First World has arrived in those places where people have learned to do that, so if you want your flock to experience the First World rather than something else, it should be very interesting and important how it ever happens.
I think Zvi is off base (or appears to be) in thinking it is naive for the pope to ask people to do things "against their incentives". People are capable of being taught or persuaded toward a different understanding of what their incentives are and many look to Pope Leo as a moral authority that has insight into how they can be better people. Most people are motivated toward that end on some level.
It has been strange since Francis, and now Leo XVI, to watch conservative Catholics view everything the pope says through a prism to rationalize and reconcile it with their worldview. JD Vance is an example of someone who does this. An equally strange thing is to watch non-Catholic leftists utilize papal pronouncements as evidence of their moral superiority, even though they do not respect the Church as an institution or agree with the parts of its doctrine that were unchanged by Vatican II.
"He is a lifelong Democrat, but he has somehow emerged as a Very Bad Guy among progressives."
Somehow??
First he wrote a book, "Righteous Mind ..." Which they interpreted as defending conservatives as not being the evil people they know them to be. That's enough by itself but he also suggested three of their core beliefs are untruths.
Perhaps, with AI based on neural networks like our brains, there is something about the fundamental way neural networks work that leads them to produce hallucinations, as demonstrated by anti-AI people and religious people. We easily see AI's hallucinations, and perhaps sometime in the future, AI will see the Pope's hallucinations. The Pope's thinking is far from rational or internally consistent. He and the Imams think we should all be serfs to imaginary hallucinations.
It is interesting how American Protestants, through the 19th century and up to the mid-20th century, basically considered the Catholic Church as morally fraught as organized Islam in terms of enforcing transnational compliance and undermining the parochial character of religion in America. I guess when the secularism of modernity became increasingly apparent, these kinds of ecumenical tensions stopped seeming very relevant.
“a speaker whose scholarship and global contributions more accurately reflect the values and diversity of its graduates”
Of course they don’t seem to understand that these are mutually exclusive ideas if taken at face value. The more diverse a group the less any set can reflect the values of all inside.
What is really meant is they want speakers who cater to extremely specific homogeneous values of a homogeneous group, eg, the complainant themselves.
You know full well when they say diversity they mean diversity of intersectional identity, and decidedly *not* anything as ghastly as diversity of thought.
[It *does* remind me of that scene in the Blues Brothers when they show up at the bar:
“We got *both* kinds of music here: country *and* western!”]
A man is a c̸r̸i̸t̸i̸c̸ regulator when he cannot be a a̸r̸t̸i̸s̸t̸ creator, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
“Jonathan Haidt has never been able to read the left side of the room. He is a lifelong Democrat, but he has somehow emerged as a Very Bad Guy among progressives.”
I suspect AK know this, but it’s not that Haidt cannot read the left side of the room.
He simply believes his causes are greater than the left Omnicause, and so doesn’t politic for the purpose of getting more “likes” and less hate.
Recently, per Bruce Yandle, I've taken to asking who are the baptists and who are the bootleggers? Is the Pope a baptist, seeking to hold back the tide like King Canute, or is he a bootlegger, seeking to extract the rent? Any new technology is a threat and a tool for the powers that be, which is why they are always conservative in the sense of preserving their privilege (i.e., private law). I spotted the robot lawnmowers in Lowe's the other day, so 10 years from now any middle class person mowing a lawn will be doing it for fun. Rather than fighting the AI wave, let's surf it!
“The left wants us to think that ‘we’ are all in this together, opposing the ‘they’ of corporate elites and plutocrats. But my thought is that there is a narrow ‘we’ of political elites, and I have no desire to give them more power.”
Excellent point, very well-made.
It is a shame that the typical older progressive (the kind, e.g. that still believes in free speech) does not understand public choice theory.
Of course, if they did, then they would likely at minimum be center-left, if not fully classical liberal.
But I suppose this is another of the reasons why the center-left has essentially vanished as a voting bloc, and is relatively rare even amongst the commentariat.
Is it possible to steelman something to the point of absurdity?
That’s the feeling I get after reading Zvi’s revised take. The pope knew good and well that it would be interpreted as a call to action. That’s all that matters. Providing cover for politicians to do their thing under the auspices of the almighty himself is part and parcel with the historical playbook of the Catholic Church.
“With cars, those who can, create. Those who can’t, regulate.” It’s self-evidently absurd. The capacity of a society to build cars has nothing whatsoever to do with the need to regulate cars. I could continue down the list. And so it is with computer technology.
It's not the capacity pf society to build cars but the innovation and risk taking of entrepreneurs to do so, and regulations- whether you like them or not- are not innovative or entrepreneurial. They are about control. SO those who do, do not regulate and those who regulate do not do.
You miss the point. Regulatory bureaucrats are *bureaucrats*. It's a common trope that bureaucrats can't do anything creative, and whether you believe it or not, that's what the saying is all about.
Do you really think that the bureaucrats who regulate cars are contributing to progress?
It's an old saying with many variations. I mostly remember variations on this:
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, coach.
And no, I don't think it's 100% true. Good teachers and coaches are rare. But those lines apply to, for instance, Paul Krugman-types who are full of advice on who businesses should hire, what they should produce, how they should discriminate against what customers, ... Substitute politicians in there too, the ultimate armchair quarterbacks.
Create and regulate are perfectly cromulent verbs in that saying.
"Cromulent is a humorous and informal adjective that means acceptable, satisfactory, or legitimate.
"Origin: The word was completely made up by television writer David X. Cohen for a 1996 episode of The Simpsons (titled "Lisa the Iconoclast").
"Context: In the episode, a teacher claims a made-up word, "embiggens," is perfectly fine, replying: "I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word."
"Current Status: The term became so popular in pop culture and linguistics that it was officially added to major dictionaries, like Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com."
Even without the coming AI job apocalypse that maybe? probably? is coming, the big OECD question to be answered should be "What is the right social policy for the poor"?
This especially needs to be answered, not for the temporarily bad luck folk, but for those who are lazy, choose to be alcohol or drug dependent, gambling or sex addicts, unwilling to follow orders, by any boss or authority who fails to threaten force, and use force if needed. How should society handle such folk? (Most Dems usually claim "Not all" blah blah. Many are, what of them?)
The LA mayor campaign of Pratt is claiming the Dem city can be cleaned up. It implies, without stating, that the people will be moved out. Not that their behavior will change as much as the location of their behavior. Poor folk are mostly poor because of their poor lifestyle choices & behavior.
As long as this bottom 1% is living such lousy lives, their bad lives will be used politically to claim that capitalism is terrible, or at least inadequate. As Pope Leo does, with most common folk agreeing that the lives of the poor are terrible. That is then used to justify huge govt programs, like the CA homelessness budget of many millions, which only makes the problem worse.
In a very similar way, regulation of AI, or not, won't solve the problems with the poor until there is a better political/ social consensus on what a solution would look like. (Like a college dorm for poor folk with make work jobs on site, or near?)
Sadly (or not?), Pope Leo is pushing an intellectually lazy Christian socialism as if it was an obvious working answer, when it's often been tried and failed. Glad that private property is protected, as it should be.
Since IP & algorithms & digital data is so easily copied, the morality of getting and using a copy rather than buying one is far different than stealing a bike or car. After it's stolen, one no longer has the bike. When IP is copied, the creator still has the original -- but it has a reduced market value for sale. In a similar way, AI doesn't steal jobs, but those capital/ firm owners who want some output produced, find out it's cheaper to use AI than hire a human. The human still has everything he had before, but the market value of his offer of labor has gone down.
Those who believe copying IP is stealing should be agreeing with those who say digital ai, based on IP, is stealing jobs. Neither is stealing in the immoral sense of taking away something owned so that the prior owner no longer has it.
Anybody losing their job to ai would seem to have a kinda moral right to copy any and all digital assets that they can get, and use them without paying. Just like most ai training models used lots of digitized human thought work in order to be able to do the jobs it's able to do.
“With computer technology, those who can, create. Those who can’t, regulate.”
I think this captures most of the evil in the world. People who can’t do the thing, shouldn’t be given the authority to control it. (This also applies to teachers who never authored a successful book or who achieved little professional in their subject area. They shouldn’t teach.)
“Haidt and Lukianoff believe that students should be strong enough to listen to opposing points of view.”
This is where they both have misidentify the nature of the problem. These students choose NOT to listen. Either because they’re fanatics or simply mundane followers.
“True believers …successfully polarize information, eliminate room for nuance, and frame the political opposition as entirely illegitimate.” “Because mundane followers prioritize group loyalty and fear the social cost of speaking out, they passively tolerate or defend increasingly extreme rhetoric from their own side.” (Source: “How Close Are We To Civil War?” By Melgar du Poseidon)
That’s exactly the thinking that led government to accept industry claims that putting lead in gasoline was perfectly safe. No need to test. No need to regulate. So for the better part of a century, we poisoned people with every breath they took.
So this is another example of market failure and only government intervention can fix it? I would recommend some good books but my guess is that you’ve made up your mind.
You have almost no information about what I believe and yet you not only believe you know all I think about markets and regulation, you think you know how open-minded I am and how I will react to disagreement. Either you are a psychic mind-reader or you have erected a stereotype and stuck my name on it.
“This is where they both have misidentify the nature of the problem. These students choose NOT to listen. Either because they’re fanatics or simply mundane followers.”
IMO this is true, but it’s largely because they have been ideologized/miseducated into believing so by their teachers and especially their professors primarily (though not, of course, exclusively).
There is something fitting about the Pope warning that artificial intelligence "threatens to normalize an anti-human vision." In his encyclical, Leo XIV describes a paradigm "that seeks to reduce everything to an object to be dominated" — and worries, rightly, about immense digital power concentrated in a few private hands. He is not wrong. But the warning is most interesting for what it reveals about the warner.
The Church understands this danger so precisely because the Church helped perfect the craft. Strip the theology from Leo's critique and you find a structural complaint: a system that rations thought, asks for trust it cannot verify, and quietly substitutes its own judgment for yours. That is a fair description of an opaque recommendation engine. It is also a fair description of strict dogma, which for centuries has run the most refined version of the same machine — sanctifying one mode of cognition, obedient belief, and treating the questioning mode as transgression.
The two institutions differ in one revealing way. The algorithm doesn't care whether you believe; it only needs you to scroll. Dogma needs your soul. But both rely on the same human appetite: the relief of letting something else do the thinking.
So when the oldest cultivator of that appetite warns against its newest exploiter, listen — not because the Church stands outside the problem, but because it knows the territory intimately. It is the incumbent, watching a competitor arrive.
Something that Zvi's post cemented for me is that the disdain for economics is a strange position to hold for someone that wants to advise the human race on how to have good outcomes.
I skimmed the pope's statement and read Zvi's analysis, and while there are many good perspectives, it's curious that the pope doesn't even disagree with mainstream economics so much as be unaware of it and not interested in it.
It is like wanting to help people who are sick but not being interested in anatomy. Despite that, it seems like a reliable way to score points with today's intellectuals is to be anti-intellectual about economics.
People accomplish more when they are able to collaborate in groups without having to be kin. The First World has arrived in those places where people have learned to do that, so if you want your flock to experience the First World rather than something else, it should be very interesting and important how it ever happens.
I think Zvi is off base (or appears to be) in thinking it is naive for the pope to ask people to do things "against their incentives". People are capable of being taught or persuaded toward a different understanding of what their incentives are and many look to Pope Leo as a moral authority that has insight into how they can be better people. Most people are motivated toward that end on some level.
It has been strange since Francis, and now Leo XVI, to watch conservative Catholics view everything the pope says through a prism to rationalize and reconcile it with their worldview. JD Vance is an example of someone who does this. An equally strange thing is to watch non-Catholic leftists utilize papal pronouncements as evidence of their moral superiority, even though they do not respect the Church as an institution or agree with the parts of its doctrine that were unchanged by Vatican II.
"He is a lifelong Democrat, but he has somehow emerged as a Very Bad Guy among progressives."
Somehow??
First he wrote a book, "Righteous Mind ..." Which they interpreted as defending conservatives as not being the evil people they know them to be. That's enough by itself but he also suggested three of their core beliefs are untruths.
https://bigthink.com/thinking/untruths-to-stop-telling-kids/
Perhaps, with AI based on neural networks like our brains, there is something about the fundamental way neural networks work that leads them to produce hallucinations, as demonstrated by anti-AI people and religious people. We easily see AI's hallucinations, and perhaps sometime in the future, AI will see the Pope's hallucinations. The Pope's thinking is far from rational or internally consistent. He and the Imams think we should all be serfs to imaginary hallucinations.
It is interesting how American Protestants, through the 19th century and up to the mid-20th century, basically considered the Catholic Church as morally fraught as organized Islam in terms of enforcing transnational compliance and undermining the parochial character of religion in America. I guess when the secularism of modernity became increasingly apparent, these kinds of ecumenical tensions stopped seeming very relevant.
“a speaker whose scholarship and global contributions more accurately reflect the values and diversity of its graduates”
Of course they don’t seem to understand that these are mutually exclusive ideas if taken at face value. The more diverse a group the less any set can reflect the values of all inside.
What is really meant is they want speakers who cater to extremely specific homogeneous values of a homogeneous group, eg, the complainant themselves.
Tsk, tsk.
You know full well when they say diversity they mean diversity of intersectional identity, and decidedly *not* anything as ghastly as diversity of thought.
[It *does* remind me of that scene in the Blues Brothers when they show up at the bar:
“We got *both* kinds of music here: country *and* western!”]
You can't mix country and western! They are two entirely different types of music!
https://youtu.be/VnzE6zOy9hA?si=nCYOTHZTfRb0B1TR
Agreed. Far from being diverse, they are stultifyingly conformist.
A man is a c̸r̸i̸t̸i̸c̸ regulator when he cannot be a a̸r̸t̸i̸s̸t̸ creator, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
....Rephrased, Apologies to Gustave Flaubert
“Jonathan Haidt has never been able to read the left side of the room. He is a lifelong Democrat, but he has somehow emerged as a Very Bad Guy among progressives.”
I suspect AK know this, but it’s not that Haidt cannot read the left side of the room.
He simply believes his causes are greater than the left Omnicause, and so doesn’t politic for the purpose of getting more “likes” and less hate.
I agree with you but my intuition says AK means something else, though I don't know what.
Recently, per Bruce Yandle, I've taken to asking who are the baptists and who are the bootleggers? Is the Pope a baptist, seeking to hold back the tide like King Canute, or is he a bootlegger, seeking to extract the rent? Any new technology is a threat and a tool for the powers that be, which is why they are always conservative in the sense of preserving their privilege (i.e., private law). I spotted the robot lawnmowers in Lowe's the other day, so 10 years from now any middle class person mowing a lawn will be doing it for fun. Rather than fighting the AI wave, let's surf it!
“The left wants us to think that ‘we’ are all in this together, opposing the ‘they’ of corporate elites and plutocrats. But my thought is that there is a narrow ‘we’ of political elites, and I have no desire to give them more power.”
Excellent point, very well-made.
It is a shame that the typical older progressive (the kind, e.g. that still believes in free speech) does not understand public choice theory.
Of course, if they did, then they would likely at minimum be center-left, if not fully classical liberal.
But I suppose this is another of the reasons why the center-left has essentially vanished as a voting bloc, and is relatively rare even amongst the commentariat.
Is it possible to steelman something to the point of absurdity?
That’s the feeling I get after reading Zvi’s revised take. The pope knew good and well that it would be interpreted as a call to action. That’s all that matters. Providing cover for politicians to do their thing under the auspices of the almighty himself is part and parcel with the historical playbook of the Catholic Church.
"With computer technology, those who can, create. Those who can’t, regulate."
Great line!
Now repeat it with the name of another technology — and see that is no more than a shallow insult.
Why shallow?
“With cars, those who can, create. Those who can’t, regulate.” It’s self-evidently absurd. The capacity of a society to build cars has nothing whatsoever to do with the need to regulate cars. I could continue down the list. And so it is with computer technology.
It's not the capacity pf society to build cars but the innovation and risk taking of entrepreneurs to do so, and regulations- whether you like them or not- are not innovative or entrepreneurial. They are about control. SO those who do, do not regulate and those who regulate do not do.
You miss the point. Regulatory bureaucrats are *bureaucrats*. It's a common trope that bureaucrats can't do anything creative, and whether you believe it or not, that's what the saying is all about.
Do you really think that the bureaucrats who regulate cars are contributing to progress?
Ah. Good point. So I think we need other options besides create and regulate.
It's an old saying with many variations. I mostly remember variations on this:
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, coach.
And no, I don't think it's 100% true. Good teachers and coaches are rare. But those lines apply to, for instance, Paul Krugman-types who are full of advice on who businesses should hire, what they should produce, how they should discriminate against what customers, ... Substitute politicians in there too, the ultimate armchair quarterbacks.
Create and regulate are perfectly cromulent verbs in that saying.
"Cromulent is a humorous and informal adjective that means acceptable, satisfactory, or legitimate.
"Origin: The word was completely made up by television writer David X. Cohen for a 1996 episode of The Simpsons (titled "Lisa the Iconoclast").
"Context: In the episode, a teacher claims a made-up word, "embiggens," is perfectly fine, replying: "I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word."
"Current Status: The term became so popular in pop culture and linguistics that it was officially added to major dictionaries, like Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com."
from Google's AI
Even without the coming AI job apocalypse that maybe? probably? is coming, the big OECD question to be answered should be "What is the right social policy for the poor"?
This especially needs to be answered, not for the temporarily bad luck folk, but for those who are lazy, choose to be alcohol or drug dependent, gambling or sex addicts, unwilling to follow orders, by any boss or authority who fails to threaten force, and use force if needed. How should society handle such folk? (Most Dems usually claim "Not all" blah blah. Many are, what of them?)
The LA mayor campaign of Pratt is claiming the Dem city can be cleaned up. It implies, without stating, that the people will be moved out. Not that their behavior will change as much as the location of their behavior. Poor folk are mostly poor because of their poor lifestyle choices & behavior.
As long as this bottom 1% is living such lousy lives, their bad lives will be used politically to claim that capitalism is terrible, or at least inadequate. As Pope Leo does, with most common folk agreeing that the lives of the poor are terrible. That is then used to justify huge govt programs, like the CA homelessness budget of many millions, which only makes the problem worse.
In a very similar way, regulation of AI, or not, won't solve the problems with the poor until there is a better political/ social consensus on what a solution would look like. (Like a college dorm for poor folk with make work jobs on site, or near?)
Sadly (or not?), Pope Leo is pushing an intellectually lazy Christian socialism as if it was an obvious working answer, when it's often been tried and failed. Glad that private property is protected, as it should be.
Since IP & algorithms & digital data is so easily copied, the morality of getting and using a copy rather than buying one is far different than stealing a bike or car. After it's stolen, one no longer has the bike. When IP is copied, the creator still has the original -- but it has a reduced market value for sale. In a similar way, AI doesn't steal jobs, but those capital/ firm owners who want some output produced, find out it's cheaper to use AI than hire a human. The human still has everything he had before, but the market value of his offer of labor has gone down.
Those who believe copying IP is stealing should be agreeing with those who say digital ai, based on IP, is stealing jobs. Neither is stealing in the immoral sense of taking away something owned so that the prior owner no longer has it.
Anybody losing their job to ai would seem to have a kinda moral right to copy any and all digital assets that they can get, and use them without paying. Just like most ai training models used lots of digitized human thought work in order to be able to do the jobs it's able to do.
“With computer technology, those who can, create. Those who can’t, regulate.”
I think this captures most of the evil in the world. People who can’t do the thing, shouldn’t be given the authority to control it. (This also applies to teachers who never authored a successful book or who achieved little professional in their subject area. They shouldn’t teach.)
“Haidt and Lukianoff believe that students should be strong enough to listen to opposing points of view.”
This is where they both have misidentify the nature of the problem. These students choose NOT to listen. Either because they’re fanatics or simply mundane followers.
“True believers …successfully polarize information, eliminate room for nuance, and frame the political opposition as entirely illegitimate.” “Because mundane followers prioritize group loyalty and fear the social cost of speaking out, they passively tolerate or defend increasingly extreme rhetoric from their own side.” (Source: “How Close Are We To Civil War?” By Melgar du Poseidon)
That’s exactly the thinking that led government to accept industry claims that putting lead in gasoline was perfectly safe. No need to test. No need to regulate. So for the better part of a century, we poisoned people with every breath they took.
So this is another example of market failure and only government intervention can fix it? I would recommend some good books but my guess is that you’ve made up your mind.
You have almost no information about what I believe and yet you not only believe you know all I think about markets and regulation, you think you know how open-minded I am and how I will react to disagreement. Either you are a psychic mind-reader or you have erected a stereotype and stuck my name on it.
I’m basing my comment on your words and nothing more. If my guess is in error please accept my apologies.
David Friedman has an excellent book, The Machinery of Freedom.
I am a libertarian who believes in the free market (or whatever is left of it).
“This is where they both have misidentify the nature of the problem. These students choose NOT to listen. Either because they’re fanatics or simply mundane followers.”
IMO this is true, but it’s largely because they have been ideologized/miseducated into believing so by their teachers and especially their professors primarily (though not, of course, exclusively).
I agree but I believe many students go along to get along.
Look at Tesla and X. The Left is not anti-AI. They are terrified they won't control it.