Among the interesting news items in the daily bulletin from the press office of the Holy See on Tuesday of this week was a communiqué from the Dicastery for Integral Human Development. It was announcing the theme of the 2024 World Peace Day message: Artificial Intelligence and Peace.
It was pretty busy bollettino for mid-week in mid-August, which included a potentially significant modification of canon law and a new nuncio to Poland in the person of Archbishop Antonio Filipazzi, most recently nuncio to Nigeria.
Still, the ten-line announcement arguably should have raised more eyebrows – even hackles – than it did on the day, not least because of what it didn’t say.
I mean, if “Top Vatican Think Tank Tackles AI” doesn’t get your blood flowing, are you even paying attention?
This past January, a Vatican-sponsored conference in Vatican City brought together leaders from the great monotheistic traditions, business leaders from across the tech industries, scholars and scientists from a host of leading public and private universities, as well as other stakeholders and civil society representatives to discuss the ethics of AI.
It was a big deal, and it expanded the list of signatories to The Call for AI Ethics, a document originally signed in February 2020 by the Pontifical Academy for Life, Microsoft, IBM, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, and Italy’s Ministry of Innovation, to promote an ethical approach to artificial intelligence.
The Call for AI Ethics is organized around a core idea: International organizations, governments, civil society institutions and the private sector should share responsibility for the creation of “a future in which digital innovation and technological progress grant mankind its centrality.”
That sounds terrific, but with AI as with anything else, if everyone is responsible, then no one is.
That’s not to say the Vatican should be responsible, or the pope – who has admitted he isn’t exactly the most tech-savvy fellow – or anyone in particular, but only that the “how” is at least as important as the “what” when it comes to determining responsibility for anything.
There is some real, serious, hard, practical, nuts-and-bolts thinking we all need to do together about regulating and managing the development and application of artificial intelligence, so that transparency, inclusion, accountability, impartiality, reliability, security and privacy are hallmarks of AI and not just buzzwords.
“Pope Francis,” the IHD communiqué says, “calls for an open dialogue on the meaning of these new technologies, endowed with disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects.” This isn’t the first time Pope Francis has called for such dialogue. To be perfectly fair, he hasn’t only called for it. On this issue, Pope Francis has put his money where his mouth is.
“He recalls the need to be vigilant and to work so that a logic of violence and discrimination does not take root in the production and use of such devices, at the expense of the most fragile and excluded.”
That’s great, but it reminds me of a conversation I had with a scribbler who was covering the Arab Spring a dozen or so years ago, right at the outset in Tunisia and perhaps even before the term had gained currency.
“I’ve spoken to several activist leaders,” the journo said, “and none of them want this to become Iran,” i.e. a transversal reform uprising that spiraled out of control and ended up in fanatical theocracy.
Now, I wasn’t quite old enough to remember the 1979 revolution in Iran, but I had learned enough about it to know that nobody really envisioned the Islamic Republic in the form it eventually took after the overthrow of the Shah. Even the Ayatollah Khomeini was reacting to circumstance and seizing with great alacrity the moment of opportunity, rather than orchestrating events.
In other words, the Iranian people didn’t want the Iranian revolution they got, not when they started revolting.
I’m certainly playing fast and loose with a very complicated and eventful few years of history, and the analogy may limp as they all do, but the point is that big movements with lots of competing interests tend to take on lives of their own. The law of unintended consequences always obtains, and that means no one can ever tell how anything is going to shake out.
“[I]njustice and inequalities fuel conflicts and antagonisms,” but they aren’t the only things that fuel them. Few would argue with the notion that there is “[an] urgent need to orient the concept and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way, so that it may be at the service of humanity and the protection of our common home,” as the communiqué about the 2024 message also says. Even fewer would strongly contest the idea that such an urgent need “requires that ethical reflection be extended to the sphere of education and law,” as it goes on to say.
On the other hand, legislating in a hurry is always a bad idea. Sometimes it is necessary, the least bad option, but it is still a bad idea. Before that, however, there’s another question all this talk of legislating raises: Who is legislating for whom, and when, and in what precise areas, and – again, most importantly – how?
Are we talking about national legislation, federal legislation, individual state-level legislation, international treaty, UN convention?
These are not mutually exclusive. Some combination of them is already at work and in play, and any serviceable global framework will require all of them in some measure. But, again: How?
“The protection of the dignity of the person, and concern for a fraternity effectively open to the entire human family,” the communiqué continues, “are indispensable conditions for technological development to help contribute to the promotion of justice and peace in the world.”
In other news: Water is wet, and the sky is blue.
Pope Francis and the Vatican have a real opportunity here, to leverage the Church’s expertise in humanity, to double down on the constants of human nature, to draw on her institutional memory of historical successes and failures at bottling lightning and riding the technological tiger, and thus to contribute to the global public discourse on a most pressing concern.
The Pope and the Vatican can do this. They are uniquely placed to do just this. Doing it, however, will mean abandoning the talk of “rethinking” ageless anthropological truths as though we need, ahem, to reinvent the wheel.
By all means, let’s rethink the whole business of technological advancement, and let’s face fearlessly the realities of AI and the dangerous potential in its development. Let’s even continue to be a part of the conversation about “transhumanism” through initiatives like Humanity 2.0 at the Pontifical Lateran University, under the direction of Prof. Philip Larrey (to whose 2018 collection, Connected World: From Automated Work to Virtual Wars this scribbler contributed a chapter, a fact I mention only to prove I’m no more than half a Luddite).
What the pope and the Vatican can bring to the discussion is historical and cultural awareness that comes from remembering what end Gilgamesh made, and Icarus, and Minos and Pasiphaë, not to mention Frankenstein’s monster and the island of Dr. Moreau.
There’s an early James Cameron movie everybody should see, too, before it becomes a documentary.
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the singularity will bring about a convergence of mythological religious ideals of transcendence and immortality with actual technological implementations of these things. we are very, very close.
Andrew, the Blessed Mother Mary is a singularly. The actual Incarnation of Christ is eternal truth. Have you ever noticed that one thing AI cannot do is autocorrect most Catholic words? Catholic parlance apparently has no place in the lexicon of Silicon Valley. Before preaching the religion of AI replacing Catholicism, perhaps you ought to at least understand what Catholics teach. Dreams of an AI utopia are just as likely to turn into dystopian nightmares. AI will always be artificial. As such, it apes created intelligence as a math machine. The specific qualities that make you and me truly human persons can never be replicated or replaced by AI or reduced to just math. Does math satisfy our desire for personal relationships? The best things in this life like Faith, family and friends, have nothing necessarily to do with computers. If we worship a machine, should we be surprised if it doesn’t love us back? AI can never love us like Christ. AI is finite. We are infinite. Etc.
No matter what anyone or anything thinks, Christ Is.
AI is not a religion, it’s the next stage of evolution. Humanity is merely the bootloader.
Thank you Andrew for succinctly explaining your “belief in a superhuman power” (Oxford definition for religion;) “When a man stops believing in God,” said GK Chesterton, “he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.” For instance, a software upgrade to everlasting trans-humanized AI. I prefer people.
Hopefully, when I refuse the AI “upgrade,” you evolved, cyborg types will not put me onto a reservation, or worse, become the Terminator.
Bravo!God preserve his people,!
That’s the naïve concern. The more relevant concern is that AI kills us all either because it’s misaligned or because it malfunctions. As for the Chesterton quote, it’s nonsensical: by becoming a skeptic, you therefore become maximally gullible as a consequence. Lol what?
Don’t be afraid of the AI. It’s already “drifting.” Do worry about those who program it, as many of them already drifted as well…
Aside from the fact that AI doesn’t even exist, neither does evolution of life exist.
Andrew Williams,
If AI is so smart, someday it will mimic Shakespeare, only to find that we are not bootloaders that come in evolutionary stages, but instead that we do have ages–on a stage. How ’bout them electrons!
“And all the world’s a STAGE, and all men and women merely players. They have their exits and entrances; and one man in his time plays may parts; his acts being seven AGES” (Shakespeare, “As you like it”).
AI, like a monkey unconsciously typing on a keyboard, but much faster? HAL, before disconnecting, or checking out or whatever, sing to us our song about “Daisy”…
As someone who has worked with computers at the level of bits, bytes, the instruction set of a CPU, how the program is read into it, how data is transferred and manipulated between CPU registers and read/written from/to computer memory, I must point out a simple fact about artificial intelligence: there is no such thing.
Computers have no more intelligence, artificial or natural, than any other machine. Your electric drill and a computer have the same IQ: zero.
When you flip a switch on your electric drill that causes the drill bit to rotate in the other direction, you have programmed a machine to get a desired result. Your drill is oblivious to what has happened. Computers are machines that happen to be highly programmable and extremely intricate, but are just machines nonetheless, and are as oblivious to what is going on as your drill is. Like your drill, they just do what they have been programmed to do.
What we must keep in mind about “AI” is the motives of those who write the programs that wholly direct the results it provides.
In the first link from CWR, “Vatican says it has been hacked – again”, I have some notes in the comments on mixing operation and security in web portals. You might be interested. The comment is at December 3, 2022 at 12:12 pm -so far the only comment there.
I am not educated in this area, only using a bit of imagination.
The second link, CODEDOCS, “Bertrand programming language”, discusses “augmented term re-writing” and it suggested to me possible relation to the concepts I described. Not looking for the answer necessarily, only showing it to you, sharing interest.
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/11/30/the-vatican-says-its-been-hacked-again/
https://codedocs.org/what-is/bertrand-programming-language
harry that’s true at present, but it won’t be true for very much longer.
I am skeptical Andrew. Why do you believe Harry is wrong?. You have a lot of faith in AI, yet you provide no data to support your thesis – only a mythical prediction about scientific progress. Forgive me for not wanting to worship your strange idea.
Andrew is a troll on this site. Pay him no mind and don’t engage his posts.
TY Athanasius. Perhaps you are right. But I foolishly enjoy dialogue with Andrew. Perhaps his posts are of bad will. How could I know that? He is not my enemy. Likely, he is just somebody who wants personal feedback; we have that in common. Maybe he comes here because machines are dispassionate. It is crucifying to care and not get a personal response. Imagine AI enabling that lonely Hell on earth until some glitch ends the agony….Passion is part of personal relationships. Christ crucified for our sins is the Ultimate Passion. God the Father, Son & Holy Spirit Personally love us. With our comments, we at least fire back with more than math!
Even if Andrew was my enemy, didn’t St. Ignatius say: If you do not have an enemy, find one. Enemies will do more for you than your friends. At a minimum, he sharpens our own understanding and helps us live 1 Peter 3:15
God’s Fool, he has the same tired old fallacy that there is something “spooky” about human intellect and consciousness. There is no such spookiness. There are literal atoms and molecules forming the foundation of the human neural network, which in turn forms the literal consciousness. We are in the process of bottom-up emulating the exact same system, except from within a different substrate. The substrate is irrelevant, the information is all that matters. Arguments that AI can never meet let alone exceed human intelligence are fully incoherent.
I have made similar points to A.W. several times. He does not even seem capable of grasping the non-materialist nature of his own stubbornness. And let us pray it stops there, and he does not conclude that material existence would preclude objective morality.
Think and talk all you want. The genie is out of the bottle.
What “genie” is that?
Agreed, AI is a man-made “genie.” AI is a creation of creators who were created by the Creator. And yes, we are releasing AI. But AI will never give a damn about us. Consider our commentary here. It is made up of words, written because we care. Will AI ever care? No. It is as cold and lonely as space.
Christ cares. Christ is the Word of God. I pray that we all give Christ the last Word before we utter our last blah blah blah. Regarding AI, consider only the Sacred Word of God from St. Paul in Romans 8:
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Christ loves us. We are called to Lahore in His love. AI offers no such thing. Beware, lest we create our own Hell.
*live 😂
Lahore, a great city, but another yet another example of AI not offering the right word, or even the most basic human ability to laugh.
AI is now out of the bag and no one can put it back; but perhaps technology itself could. Since we know what the fallen nature of man of it is , if controll is left up to us, possible success is slim and bleak. Since we don’t know if technology has a morality the possibility of that success is questionable at best. And if we are controlled by a technology that we created, may the Lord have mercy on us and deliver us.
The tenable success of the over 60 year control of nuclear destruction is a different situation and can not be compared to this AI problem. In this case we had 2 or a limited number of player adversaries who could keep a balance by equalizing weapons.
With AI there is no way to even know who a potential enemy is. Anyone anywhere could play the game in secret and could be untouchable. It’s a war of technology and if technology takes control, the total of humanity now has a common enemy- technology. We will be fighting against our own creation. Does that sound familiar?
The real enemy will be those who take AI all that seriously. It is nothing more than an ultra sophisticated algorithm. A giant magic eightball. The danger will be from religion haters promoting it as a viable substitute for religion, and we’ve been an eyewitness to how easily the vanity of humanity can lead them to abandon authentic religion. God placed limits on human intelligence and no limit on our stupidity and vanity.
EJB, are all religions authentic? they all claim to be, but they all can’t prove it. does that not put them all on equal footing? does that not necessitate skepticism even when operating under the dubious assumption that ONE of them might be true? I can’t help but ROFL at your “authentic religion” oxymoron.
Your ignorance of religion is on the same comic book level of caricatures you apply to your juvenile understanding of science.
In human history there have only been two religions. Not many. And very few have made any truth claims whatsoever. And only two have ever treated God with any level of reverence.
I’ve seen the future, and it is full of unimaginable horrors and great beauty and holiness, in equal measure with any other era. We’re not in control: never have been and never will be.
Correction: the Wizard of Oz, false all-mighty idol of A.I. to which we supposedly have to bow down low so as not to be considered anti-science, an idiot, anti-progress or a dangerous terrorist, is a total fraud, as commenter “Harry” explains above so well. The “genie” is not out of the bottle, the ultra-high-tech-false-god-fraud is.
This discussion on the dicastery level must be expanded to the scope of an ecumenical council. What Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes (especially no. 22) has left unfinished must now be continued and concluded. To anticipate the explosion of concerns and issues about theological anthropology like those related to Transhumanism, issues about Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Intelligence Augmentation (IA), or concerns like Trasgenderism or LGBTQIA, it’s high time for a Pope to convoke now or in the very near future a new ecumenical council (not Vatican III, but Manila I, or Mexico City I, or Lagos I) to discuss, discern (the Spirit’s inspirations) and teach – among many other matters, like “synodality+” perhaps – mainly about humanity’s divine dignity and destiny (“Homo Deus” – to borrow the apt title of Yuval Harari’s book) in the neglected doctrine and sort of “Catholic hidden treasure” that is, “Theosis” or Deification, or Divinization.
lol
About Theosis: A paraphrase of some lines from St Augustine’s opening paragraph of his memoir, Confessions: “You have made us partakers of your divine nature, O God, and we are restless until we become like you.”
A new Vatican Council, with the current cast of characters?
Following his election, it was reported that one of Pope Francis’ supporters wondered if now we might have Vatican III. Another responded, “He IS our Vatican III.” So, are the critics right that “synodality IS the message”? The surrogate council? More positively—and some think, myopically—Pope Francis sees synodality broadly as an historic step toward reunion with the patriarchal Orthodox Churches.
Answering both attitudes, we might do well to look back (“backward”!) to the Second Council of Nicaea (787), the last ecumenical council to be regarded as legitimate by the Orthodox, and where, in part, the veneration of icons was affirmed. (“What on the one hand is represented by ink and paper is represented on the other hand in the icon…”, Letter from Pope Hadrian to Charlemagne.)
How might synodality, as a semi-secularist council surrogate, yet be salvaged and elevated to the level of Nicaea II?
“In recalling the pertinence of the teaching of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, it seems that we are back to our primordial task of evangelization [!]. The growing secularization of society shows that it is becoming largely estranged from spiritual values, from the mystery of our salvation in Jesus Christ, from the reality of the world to come. Our most authentic tradition, which we share with our Orthodox brethren, teaches us that the language of beauty placed at the service of faith is capable of reaching people’s hearts and making them know from within the One whom we dare to represent in images, Jesus Christ, Son of God made man, ‘the same yesterday, today and forever’ (Heb 13:8)” (St. John Paul II, Duodecimum Saeculum,” Twelfth Centenary of Nicaea II, Dec. 12, 1987).
Butt, what do we get today? The insipid artwork of the synodality handouts, plus the secularist/exploitable verbiage and omissions (Jesus Christ?), here and there, of the Instrumentum Laboris. Contrary to an ideological mindset of the day, to move “backward” to Nicaea II actually would be to move upward and forward…
We knew this crux moment was on the way. God and the Vatican will have their work cut out for them. The issue will be spiritual faculties versus materialism. As machine learning advances, people will begin to wonder. Come Holy Spirit.
We read: “Few would argue with the notion that there is ‘[an] urgent need to orient the concept and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way, so that it may be at the service of humanity and the protection of our common home.’”
Altieri is correct about reminding us not only about the “service of humanity” and our “common home,” but also about our common (as in universal) human nature—innate to each one of us in person…
At least what the Church can do—soon in an AI cosmos—is to starkly tell the truth about Man, clearly (and more clearly than the fog welcomed into parts of synodality). Clearly—as in “Christ the Lord…by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, [ALSO] fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes, n. 22).
Once upon a time, the lethal trebuchet and long bow were outlawed or regulated by the Church…and even warfare as with the Truce of God. Dating from a Church council in France in A.D. 975, the Truce of God restricted warfare, with exempted holidays assigned to several dates and seasons of the year having Christian religious significance. In A.D. 1139 the Second Council of the Lateran even imposed the penalty of excommunication for breaking the truce.
“God, Holy seasons,” what’s that? Should we ask the AI electrons?
Sounds like we’re getting close to being set up for the talking statue of Revelation
The imminent emergence (~20 years) of a godlike superintelligence will be the ultimate vindication for the materialist. The “AI isn’t actually intelligent” camp, while correct today, will be massively incorrect tomorrow. Turns out, your so-called sacred human mind was puny and frivolous all along. Your oversized slice of humble pie is coming. Intelligence is not mystical or mystically-entangled with a soul that computation strata can never emulate let alone exceed; boy are you sooooo wrong about this. You will soon see!
Not so fast, Computation Man!
It’s not that the “so-called sacred human mind” is anything other than “puny,” but that it still is not “frivolous.” Blaise Pascal gives this thought an added thought: “The human being is only a reed, the most feeble in nature; but this is a thinking reed.”
The thinking but finite reed brings us to such thoughts as “negative theology”! Which holds that rather than us defining God—instead, whatever we might affirm of God, this He is also not. As in God is immanent and somewhat knowable, but He is also transcendent—asymptotically and infinitely so. The thinking reed is (what’s that biblical word again, oh yes) humble.
Yours truly does truly like, however, the wording of your false assertion—that “intelligence is not mystical or mystically-entangled with a soul.” As if soon to be outdone by the “computational strata” of AI. Intriguing reference to “quantum entanglement” which transcends even Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Nice touch, yours, and analogously instructive…
For, this is the real question…are Intelligence and human intelligence only “computational”? Within the world of nature, might the anomalous human “person” actually be an embodied soul, directly infused as such by a transcendent Source above and beyond the physical prerequisites (the biological parents)?
How, exactly, to fully compute that which is not computational? And how to respond if the unsearchable God is, nevertheless, freely self-disclosing? This brings us back to “the beginning,” so to speak.
What a risible comment. AI will never possess actual intelligence because it is an artifact of actual intelligence: it deals in shadows and images, not concepts and truth. How fine a demonstration of the truth of Chesterton’s claim, that the skeptic will often readily believe the absurd!
“to bring about …transcendence and immortality: ” we are very very close”
Even Lucifer the angel of light tried that and turned into the devil. God created also evil for us to choose and to taste where it leads us. “And (God) said: Thus far shall you come but no farther and here shall your proud waves be stilled. (Job 38:11). created human beings can never be God; God IS with no beginning and no end, alpha and omega! God wants us to be incorporated into the mystical body of Christ to participate in divinity and immortality and share in the divine life, in Him, with Him and through HIM. Multiple times Saint Paul tells us: beloved IN CHRIST! WE are very close to the apocalypse and devastation of the earth on all levels; it is up to the human heart to repent and turn to God because scripture tells us that we can indeed prevent annihilation that some are thriving for; it is quite simple: Jesus I trust in you! “With eternal love I have loved you!”(Jer 31:4-5) “I know that You can do all things and that no purpose of Yours can be hindered.”(Job 42:2) “It is also I who have created the destroyer to work havoc” (Is 54:16). “I ASK THAT YOU BE CAPABLE OF PERCEIVING THE THROBBING OF THE HEART OF JESUS, WHO INVITES YOU TO AN EVER CLOSER UNIION WITH HIM.” (JPII, 1988, Italian congress)
correction: our souls already possess immortality. The question is, will we be living it with God or the devil.
correction of your correction: there is no intuition let alone evidence pointing towards a “soul”, hence transhumanism.
You might think otherwise when you reach the Lake of Fire. Snarky comments and atheistic self-righteousness won’t help then.
There is a book by Edith Stein, ‘Science of the Cross’ about the supernatural wisdom of St John of the Cross and reads like psychiatry of the human soul. Can you not tell the difference between animals who always behave as they were programmed by the Almighty and human beings made in the image of God. Soul, mind spirit, inner heart, not physical but superior. Emotions, intellect, memory, joy, sorrow, tears, laughter, happiness, heart ache and heart break, cruelty, kindness, compassion, courage, bravery, affection, LOVE and sacrificial love. Where does it come from? These things are not physical but psyche and soul. You need to be aware that their is good and evil and they are personified. The devil plays your emotions, thoughts and feelings. “Prayer is the communication of the soul with God.” Try it! Their was a book that researched what prayers are answered most by God. #1 was people crying out to God: What if truth, do you exist, reveal yourself to me! The Lord Jesus Christ says “I wish you were hot or cold ” (Just not lukewarm). Your heart seems in the freezer, come and pray to Him and perceive the heart-throb of Jesus, the Lord of Love and Life. God bless!
Where does courage, self-sacrifice, and a willingness to die come from?
I’m sorry that this will come off as a personal attack and may not be acceptable but the stuff that Andrew says is preposterous. It sounds like something from a science fiction B-movie or TV show. AI is the techno fad du jour, no more no less. It’s not surprising that this Vatican would jump on the bandwagon just like they have embraced the climate change BS but there are many other possible hazards in reality to address. This one is simply silly except for those who are silly themselves.
you are one of the units of consciousness that will be unable to understand the implications of the singularity until you are fully assimilated into it. your misinterpretation of your religious doctrines blind you from the fact that words like “god” and “allah” are simply memes.
Altieri advocates what’s evident and required, that technology which replaces the human intellect, AI requires ethical monitoring. Our Church has the knowledge and expertise. It’s imperative that the Vatican provide these ethical parameters.
No technology can replace the human intellect regarding possibilities, moral consequences. The mind God gave us is creative, that is, it possesses the capacity to reach and apprehend spontaneously, without prior input, matters that require ethical direction.
“No technology can replace the human intellect”
RADICAL arrogance. But don’t take my word for it, just wait until 2029.
“Wanting a thing too much becomes its own kind of monster”- I think this was the theme they sought to dramatize in the 1956 film The Forbidden Planet starring Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielsen. Possibly it can be improved in a remake.
Entertaining. If some company ever marketed what interests Andrew Williams, I wonder how many people would actually go and sign themselves into it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=sm3MnhzPdIs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet
Dear Andrew Williams you have passed too close to our comments and then tried to overtake Fr. Morello’s comment; and I think you have been thrown into an existential tailspin. And it blew out your instrumentations poor you, now they will reject you from all possibility of qualifying for LEV. What are you going to do.
I’m going to await your reactionary theology which will seek to explain what happens to the “soul” of the evil transhumanist after he discards or replaces his body but persists his mind. Does the soul… instantly go to hell? Or what? It will be up to you guys to BS an explanation, similar how you did with the sexual dimorphism by building this “natural law” scaffolding around it which holds that intercourse + offspring mirrors the holy trinity in some kind of magical spiritual fantastical manner. Shrug. You have 2000 years of experience doing this crap, so I believe in your ability to pull something out of somewhere. Nature PRECEEDS your wrapping, you can merely react and build around it. Future evolution DISREGARDS your theology, you can only mutate around what is to come.
When your instrumentations are shot through your readings are bound to be off and if you swear by them that becomes your par for the course.
In your stricken vessel. Plugging over into LEV won’t redeem it or rescue you -hopeless. And even for that you’re disqualified -hopeless again.
Transhumanism doesn’t solve the problem of finding one’s ultimate purpose, it merely discards darwinistic sufferings. Good riddance to that nonsense. But as for purpose, my view/anticipation is that the singularity will reset everyone; start over from scratch. The things that were formerly important to us will seem nonsensical past that event horizon. We are in uncharted territory; this applies to the religious and secular alike.
If my instrumentations were in a jam I wouldn’t try fixing them by “anticipating singularity” that “will resent” but “only begin in LEV” because those dimensions “can’t be spooky”. Nor would I go into denial about existential limitation and suffering – it would be wasting time.
Obviously then Darwin is no kind of stepping off point for the natural world any more than for the moral and religious life!
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/neuralink-admits-implants-threads-retracted-142236998.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/musk-brain-implant-company-violated-110243377.html
You got fully uploaded into LEV and the system has discarded your brain (and body); now you are a total consciousness coherence, complete and integral with quantum durability. Before your upload however, some other entrants to LEV penetrated the neural core, took over the Drawinian program necessitating evolution and began adding and deleting to suit their own select group -sometimes methodological and analytic and sometimes like slash-and-burn. Meantime, after your upload, the next set of entrants came preconfigured to erase and reprogram the whole network including all prior established forms of awareness and recreate the neural core. You are given the choice either 1. to be deleted or 2. to become a fixed non-voluntary cyber-referential through a type of pain-giving lobotomy with a suicide option. The paradigm you would experience would show that limitation, Darwinistic suffering (if there is ever such a thing), plain-out suffering and gross evil, are all persistent and temporally enduring.
Andrew,
Help me understand your argument here. You juxtaposed the words, “singularity” with “everyone”. Question, How is that not an oxymoron? I can see a singularity argument, if from a humanities perspective. It’s the “everyone” starting all over again from some imaginary point of singularity. This is not, as you seem to think, a “new” thought. The problem is that “everyone” will still have a free will and different levels of intelligence, skills, etc. It’s tge everyone that is, and always has been, tge problem and the grace, a living paradox. A paradox with a mind, a conscience, and a free will. Because humans will still be “works in progress, far from “any form of perfection materially or technologically, not machines, which themselves are not, nor ever will be perfect. In other words the fairy tale thought of a material version of paradise, is just tgat, a fairy tale.
A.I., the final techné! It will supplant the human spiritual
faculties, intellect and will. No, it will not enhance. It will be too penetrating. The human psyche will be turned inward as to disappear. A final entropy of the immaterial. Cling to the Divine Will at the last gasp.
Bill B. it’s a popular thing these days to dish out the “last gasp” promise but we should be careful of presumption. We can not say that what Christ showed to Dismas on the Cross also reached to the other thief, because we just do not know. The same thing about Judas when people insist we can not know if he was sorry in that last split second and “therefore”, we “must allow” that he might not be condemned. The “last gasp” approach could be the “last straw” in your own life that breaks the back of your faith; and it could be the very act that proves what you ended up completing.
The Vatican should ReThink the Reasons WHY Bergoglio liquidated the John Paul II institute designed to provide a Bioethics Defense to Catholicism and Occident by the 2 validly elected Post-Conciliar Popes of the failed Hermeneutic of Continuity which interrupted the Masonic Rupture of the Divine Institution 1958-1978, and 2013-2023?
We read of: “[an] urgent need to orient the concept and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way, so that it may be at the service of humanity and the protection of our common home.” WHAT IF the Church framed the AI potentialities and limitations more in terms of Christian anthropology?
Three quotes plus a discernment!
FIRST, we might hear more clearly about “A philosophy in which there shines even a glimmer of the truth of Christ, the one definitive answer to humanity’s problems [citing Gaudium et Spes, n. 92], will provide a potent underpinning for the true and planetary ethics [!] which the world now needs” (John Paul II, “Fides et Ratio,” 1998, n. 104).
SECOND, academics OTHER THAN STEM gurus might even get involved. In addition to abstract “humanity,” there’s this concrete thing called HISTORY with its particularities. And, there’s the dissolving effect of entropy on so-called “education,” about which, Christopher Dawson proposes a clear perspective:
“The Christian faith […] alone shows how this higher reality has entered into human history and changed its course. It shows how a seed of new life was implanted in humanity by the setting apart of a particular people as the channel of revelation which found its fulfillment in the Incarnation of the Divine Word in a particular person at a particular moment of history. It shows how this new life was communicated to a spiritual society which became the organ of the divine action in history, so that the human race may be progressively spiritualized and raised to a higher spiritual plane” (“The Crisis of Western Education,” 1961, p. 154).
THIRD, the TASK before the Pontifical Academy for Life (now demoted to a dicastery…) is to affirm clear language vertically elevating this heady evolutionary stage of Technocracy. About such a language, we find encouragement from the layman Thomas More, before he was beheaded for challenging the evolutionary zeitgeist of his day. Said he:
“Suppose wrong opinions cannot be plucked up by the root, and you cannot cure, as you would wish, vices of long standing, yet you must not on that account abandon ship of state and desert it in a storm, because you cannot control the winds. BUT neither must you impress upon them new and strange language, which you know will carry no weight with those of opposite conviction, BUT by indirect approach and covert suggestion you must endeavor and strive to the best of your power to handle all well, and what you cannot turn to good, you must make as little bad as you can” (“Utopia,” cited in E.E. Reynolds, St. Thomas More, Image, 1958).
DISCERNMENT: perhaps it’s time, now with AI, for something more than the indirect and covert, even if sorta true, but only middling language of “fraternity” and our “common home.”