Magnifica Humanitas

The point de départ for today's offering is this selection of quotes from Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclcal:

• “A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.” 
  
  

• “Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, the ideal subjects of such regimes are not so much  who are ideologically convinced, but rather “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
  
  

• “Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the “just war” theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.”
  
  

• “Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon…
  

  <AC-elision>
  This elision is made in the original selection. But I think the original reference to the mega-rich entrepre-nerds is worth repeating.
  

  ...phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today...

  He's a good man, our Leo. 

  </AC-elision>

  ...Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.”
  
  

• “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”

The selection was made by Alastair Campbell, who famously 'doesn't do God', which accounts for His (sic) absence from the chosen text. The encyclical itself (which Campbell recommended in a recent-ish The Rest Is Politics) contains 97 references to 'God' (not counting a further 2 in the contents). So this selection is quite impressive: I would be hard-pressed to choose so many God-free words from such a God-rich document

L'Envoi 

I know that AI and spellcheckers aren't the same thing, but giving the computer more initiative than it deserves is a temptation common to both. And it's at least possible that an AI agent generated this bit of spam and called on a spellchecker in the process:

You won't be surprised to learn that the mail with this header went straight to the bin, so I don't know whar largesse I've missed out on, but as with John Collier, who – I remember accusing (in my long distant clothes-buying days) of 'catering only for fat dwarves' – I don't think I've missed much

There's more to come on this subject, but that's enough for now.

b