The Pope and Jonathan Haidt

Two Current Things

The Pope on AI

As the WSJ reports,

Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision” and said that the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors must be countered.

I’ll say this for the pope: he can read the room, at least the left side of it.

I think I mentioned that when I was in Austin, my wife and I attended a few concerts. The left-leaning audience cheered whenever a performer said something negative about President Trump or ICE. But they reserved their most ecstatic cheering and whooping for denunciations of AI.

Zvi Mowshowitz writes,

I do agree with the Pope’s most basic point on AI, which is that AI can be what we make of it. That we can steer this technology, determine how it is developed and used, and this can determine whether we get a good or not so good future. We cannot purely leave this to market incentives and strategic pressures. Yes, very much so.

But

…Pope Leo subscribes to a view of economics and a System of the World that I believe are simply wrong about what actions and systems cause what consequences, subscribing to what is effectively an institutionalist, European technocrat, left-wing social justice socialist labor-centered perspective, especially with treating the role of the economy as creating and protecting ‘good jobs.’

…Leo both is using so many of the talking points of the European technocrats, and also has deeply absorbed their worldview, except with a more left-wing economic bent.

In a subsequent post, the Zvi recants.

What I now believe I centrally misunderstood is that I interpreted this as a call to action, to use law and regulation to make this happen, because obviously that is the way you would actually engineer such outcomes. The Pope, I am told, instead really does think you can just ask the people to individually choose to not follow incentives. There is a section below with more on this.

Two remarks. First, I am glad that I schedule my posts in advance, so that I had time to edit this post to include Zvi’s revised thinking. Second, I don’t think it matters what the Pope really meant, or what Zvi now think the Pope really meant. Influential people will make the same “mistake” that Zvi did initially. That is, the Eurocrats and fellow-travelers will pocket the Pope’s encyclical as an endorsement of bureaucratic regulation of AI.

With computer technology, those who can, create. Those who can’t, regulate. Europeans are the leading regulators of tech, and you can thank them for the pop-ups that you get asking you whether or not you accept cookies. To me, those epitomize the wasteful, ineffectual policies that the regulators come up with.

The left leans heavily on “we.” That is why I cringed when I read the Zvi saying “we can steer this technology.”

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.

Jonathan Haidt at NYU

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 remember several years ago when he gave a talk at Cato’s “Sphere Summit,” a conference for high school civics teachers. I thought he gave a fine talk. Next day, I was speaking at the conference to a small breakout group about my Three Languages of Politics. I started out by saying that I was going to be repeating much of Haidt’s talk. One of the teachers loudly said, “I hope not!” I gave up trying to give my presentation, and I just asked the teachers to tell me what bothered them. I forget what it was that triggered them, but it was something that offended progressives.

Recently, Haidt was invited to address the graduates at NYU. Once again, he comes across to me as reasonable and left of center. He advised the students to reclaim their attention from The Screens and The Algorithms.

Not that he was well received. Greg Lukianoff writes,

students objected to a speaker, people argued about it, some booed during the speech, and others defended him. It didn’t lead to a sustained disruption of Jon’s remarks, so great. …

The more troubling part was why NYU’s student government leaders called on the university to disinvite Jon in the run-up to commencement. “Students are astonished by the university’s inability to leverage its vast network and unique connections to secure a speaker whose scholarship and global contributions more accurately reflect the values and diversity of its graduates,” their statement read.

Haidt and Lukianoff believe that students should be strong enough to listen to opposing points of view. The offended students felt insulted. The notion that “refusing to listen to another point of view represents weakness” is itself a point of view that they believe they should disqualify someone from speaking to them.

When it comes to these Current Things, I side with The Zvi and with Lukianoff.

substacks referenced above: @

AI #170: Lack of Executive Order

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What Jonathan Haidt actually said at NYU — and what The Coddling of the American Mind actually argued

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RTMH: Pope Leo's Magnifica Humanitas on AI