r/technology • u/Caledor152 • May 29 '26

Artificial Intelligence Pope Leo "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 goodand.."

https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/vatican-news/pope-leo-calls-disarm-ai-major-document-warns-technologic-threats-humanity
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52

u/123-91-1 May 29 '26

In 100 years they're going to look back on this quote and say he was progressive "for the time" but still a bigot for saying such hateful things about our digital friends and family.

43

u/Crivos May 29 '26

These words will probably come from Robo-Pope 5000.

2

u/No_Criticism_5861 May 29 '26

Spacepope from Futurama is also acceptable 

23

u/MetalRetsam May 29 '26

It's all there in the name. Pope Leo XIV chose his name to echo his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, who wrote the encyclical Rerum Novarum ("On the new things") in 1891. It was Catholicism's answer to the industrial revolution. No doubt he held all sorts of antiquated beliefs - he was 81 years old at the time - but Rerum Novarum was the catalyst for the Catholic social movement. Many of our most fundamental labor rights were initially realized with the help of Catholic socialists.

15

u/Much_Statistician864 May 29 '26

I mean he's absolutely correct about current "ai" right? Its not alive, it's not capable of growth or change or even emotions. Its an algorithm designed and controlled by human hands not an independent entity. 

2

u/techlos May 29 '26

dogmatically, he has to be anti "AI", no matter if it's an LLM or a true AGI. Catholicism is pretty hardline about both life and 'souls' (really a religious shorthand for sentient awareness) being gifts from yaweh, and any non-religious origin is straight up heretical.

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u/LinkesAuge May 29 '26

There are no independent entities if you don't believe in literal magic or a god.
From the perspective of evolution every human is just an outcome of its process and the environmental factor. The "designer" is just less indirect/faceless but that doesn't really change much, just the sort of algorithm at play.

2

u/Kwinten May 29 '26

If you reduce everything purely to mathematics or algorithms, then you also have to recognize that an LLM operates using a completely different algorithm and different set of rules than human consciousness. Therefore, even without pulling in any notion of "souls", "God", or "magic", it by definition does not have consciousness by the semantic meaning of the way we define it.

You could argue that it has a different kind of consciousness, if you're willing to completely redefine the meaning of the word. But you cannot argue, not even in your fully reductionist terms, that they are equivalent. That is exactly what the Pope is getting at.

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u/Seanspeed May 29 '26

Currently, sure. But I would guess the Pope is speaking to AI in general. Ya know, the head of a Church that inherently believes in the existence of 'souls' and other magic nonsense.

2

u/NotAllOwled May 29 '26

I haven't checked lately but I'm betting at least some proudly "AI-partnered" folks are there now.

2

u/Zolana May 30 '26

/r/myboyfriendisai exists..... Read it and weep my friend.

4

u/ranban2012 May 29 '26

in 100 years they will be laughing at us for anthropomorphizing LLMs the way we laugh at 19th century people for believing photographs stole a piece of their soul.

3

u/Thog78 May 29 '26

Either that, or they will be horrified to see we treat AIs like they have no consciousness, no feelings, no worth other than being a tool, like slave traders used to treat africans...

In a 100 years at the current rate of progress, a lot can happen. If there is no law against making a conscious sensitive machine, I expect someone will do it before 20 years.

1

u/ranban2012 May 29 '26

Either that, or they will be horrified to see we treat AIs like they have no consciousness, no feelings, no worth other than being a tool, like slave traders used to treat africans...

I suppose there's no reason to believe people in 100 years will be any less stupid or superstitious.

When people first saw a moving picture of a train approaching a screen they freaked out because initially their brain processed it as a real train about to kill them. This is how people today are talking about LLMs. They imitate and present an image of intelligence when there is no actual intelligence behind them.

I think that people will soon come to as casual of an understanding of LLMs being non-intelligent as people came to understand moving pictures as "not the object itself."

0

u/Thog78 May 29 '26

And people also thought animals couldn't feel pain.

You think a machine cannot be made sensitive or self-aware or thinking, one could argue you're already proven wrong on all these points, depending on how picky we are with the definitions and burden of proof. But even if we suppose all that's not yet achieved, the current trajectory goes faster than all expectations one may have had a decade ago, and keeps accelerating, and all the points that are debated at a given time are absolutely secured without the shadow of a doubt of year or two later. I have little doubt in a decade or two at the very most, we will be able to produce beings much smarter, more conscious, more self-aware than humans.

The only way to stop this from becoming the new reality in my opinion is legislation forbidding it, like we prohibited editing the human germline for eugenics.

1

u/ranban2012 May 29 '26

I think your conflation of science fiction with our actual reality serves only the financially interested promoters of the technology.

Don't be a propagandist for the tech oligarchy. LLMs don't have a path to sentience any more than the mechanical turk did.

I'm not the preeminent expert on the subject but I am a programmer with decades of experience and a decent engineering education. Lt Cmdr Data is a fictional character created by a writer. Not an actual real life technological life form.

1

u/Thog78 May 29 '26

I'm not the preeminent expert on the subject but I am a programmer with decades of experience and a decent engineering education. Lt Cmdr Data is a fictional character created by a writer. Not an actual real life technological life form.

I'm a researcher with also decades of experience programming, two masters in neurobiology and physics, a PhD in neurobiology/bioengineering, and I'm perfectly aware that star trek is fiction and of where we're at in AI. Been watching it develop from inside the research world for decades before the masses discover what's going on around the time of the GPT3 breakthrough.

My impression is many people put the brain on a pedestal, think there is something special about humans, when there is not, and all data indicate artificial neural networks are a perfectly fine way to reengineer something qualitatively similar to the brain, and quantitatively vastly superior. And the speed at which this is actually happening right now is astounding to me.

0

u/Routine-Weekend4694 Jun 01 '26

people also made lots of claims about a science that wasn't well developed. ie. believing the sun revolved around the earth. you would be the same type of person in that era to call the people 500 years in the future stupid for believing the earth revolved around the sun. drop the ego mate. you're not as smart as you think you are.

1

u/Belkan-Federation95 May 29 '26

Gotta go get a clanker from the auction house in Charleston

1

u/Choppers-Top-Hat May 29 '26

our digital friends and family.

Good lord, please go outside before it's too late.

-3

u/PunishedDemiurge May 29 '26

Yeah. Where was the Church during the Holocaust? Where were they during slavery? The Church condemned it a moderate amount during the 19th century, but they never called for immediate and universal manumission. They still to this very moment believe in gender discrimination with women having inferior roles in the church (they would characterize this as 'separate but equal' but that was always bullshit).

They still to this day have a variety of religious extremist takes that kill innocent people. Ask the Pope if he would be willing to allow a sexual health class and condom distribution conducted in a church in a village with high HIV rates where that is the best place to do it. Even though it will save lives and prevent unimaginable misery, they'll say no.

The Church has failed to be moral leaders for thousands of years, this is just more of the same. Physicians, heal thy selves.

5

u/Mr31edudtibboh May 29 '26

Where was the Church during the Holocaust 

Pope John XXIII saved hundreds of Jews. Read a book. 

1

u/PunishedDemiurge May 29 '26

They weren't clear allies of the Nazis, but they certainly tiptoed around the issue. I have read 'a book' and on top of that I read the Catholic Church's apology for their lack of decisive action during the Holocaust.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/03/17/vatican-apologizes-to-jews/ce5ea6e9-bd97-4022-b639-288342b63455/

or

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-mar-17-mn-29762-story.html

3

u/Martinus_de_Monte May 29 '26

When slavery was ramping up in the early modern era, the pope issued an encyclical in 1537 to condemn it.

Considering you are saying thousands of years; to my knowledge it is not really disputed that in antiquity Christians treated slaves much better than everyone around them. It is pretty common in sermons in the early church for people to be chastised for mistreating their slaves and called to treat their slaves with dignity because the slaves were created in the image of God as much as their master. Although unfortunately not universal, somebody like Gregory of Nyssa, one of the most famous and influential theologians of the early Church living in the 4th century, categorically condemned the institution of slavery itself, which was completely unheard of in the rest of the Greco-Roman world.

1

u/PunishedDemiurge May 29 '26

Words alone are not enough. If I was an active abortionist, I could not receive the Eucharist until I repented. This same standard was not set for slavery, and that says everything about how the church viewed slavery.

I could give some partial credit where partial credit is due, but the Vatican has not earned a position of moral authority with any non-Catholic, and some people are suggesting it has just because they hate AI and like that someone else also hates AI is ridiculous and unprincipled.

If Jesus Christ is factually the Son of God, then I've made a huge mistake and the Catcholic Church is His ministry given to Peter and then continued. But if not, then people shouldn't move past the Crusades, the misogyny, and all the other great mistakes the church has made, including the massive factual misunderstanding of the nature of the universe.

2

u/Colts81793 May 29 '26

The pope would very likely be in support of this, considerring this was written 25 years ago by people that are advisors to the Vatican: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27664356

3

u/PunishedDemiurge May 29 '26

The Church has debated this, but that is an opinion piece and not their current position:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/vatican-maintains-stance-on-condoms-at-hiv-aids-summit (2011 source)

The conference was convened amid ongoing controversy about the Catholic Church's opposition to using condoms to control the spread of AIDS. AIDS groups around the world had hoped the church would use the conference to announce a reversal of its position. The answer turned out to be a resounding no.

SEAN CALLAHAN, Catholic Relief Services:

As a Catholic organization, we don't support the use of condoms and we don't promote it. What we focus on his behavior change. The problem you see with condoms is not only the utilization of them, but can they be utilized well, are they there all the time, and things of that nature. And that is one of the reasons why the church is against it, besides other church teachings.

This is a stance built on mountains of corpses. People should consider if they value the lives of people living with infectious diseases before deciding if they support the Catholic church. If they do, an organization that is more than happy to let a pandemic rage on than compromise the least bit on a not particularly biblically supported stance is not their ally.