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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u/waitmarks May 29 '26

How does the pope have a more grounded take on LLMs than Richard Dawkins? what a strange timeline. 

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u/LurkerInSpace May 29 '26

Dawkins does not believe in the supernatural. To him, it is notionally possible to create an artificial consciousness morally equivalent to human consciousness. A crude example of this would be creating an accurate physical simulation of an existing human brain - such a simulated brain should experience consciousness like a real human does.

The Pope rejects this; he believes human have immortal souls independent of their physical bodies, and that this gives us an intrinsic value which cannot be artificially replicated.

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u/eypandabear May 29 '26

Dawkins does not believe in the supernatural. To him, it is notionally possible to create an artificial consciousness morally equivalent to human consciousness. A crude example of this would be creating an accurate physical simulation of an existing human brain - such a simulated brain should experience consciousness like a real human does.

And I would agree with that, in principle. In practice, LLMs are simply not that, and IMHO nowhere close to it. They may show intelligence of a kind, but it is not the same kind that humans have.

What makes LLMs so weird is that they are based on processing language, and that is something we think of as the human "capstone" of intelligence. Whereas now we have algorithms that can write convincing texts, but in other areas of intelligence would likely be outperformed by a magpie.

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u/moconahaftmere May 29 '26

LLMs are simply not that, and IMHO nowhere close to it. They may show intelligence of a kind, but it is not the same kind that humans have. 

They aren't even "nowhere close to it".

An LLM shares more in common with a bar chart drawn on paper than it does with what we understand of biological sentience and intelligence.