Spiritual vocabulary has increasingly appeared in secular AI leadership, with CEOs, VCs, and researchers speaking about crises of meaning, dignity of work, ethics of creating consciousness, and definitions of personhood. Some statements are sincere, some are marketing, and much comes from people receiving attention beyond their competence while discussing topics that unsettle them. A new papal encyclical frames AI as a pivotal choice for humanity, presenting two paths: building a new Tower of Babel or creating a city where God and humanity dwell together. The encyclical reaffirms church social doctrine with updated rhetoric for AI, drawing on earlier teaching about industrial revolution consequences, including changed labor relations, wealth concentration, mass poverty, and moral decline.
"One strange feature of the last few years of AI discourse has been spiritual vocabulary creeping into the speech of secular leaders. CEOs, VCs, and researchers have become comfortable holding forth on technology crises of meaning, the dignity of work, the possibility and ethics of trying to instantiate new consciousness, or what it means to be a person at all. Some of this is earnest. Some is marketing. Most of the time, it's the result of ill-equipped guys getting a bit more attention than they need to talk about a subject that's driving a lot of them sort of insane."
"“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice,” writes Pope Leo XIV in the first encyclical of his tenure, titled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. “Either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”"
"Pope Leo sets out to do two main things here. The first is to walk through and reaffirm much of the church's social doctrine, with rhetorical updates for the age of AI. He reaches back to the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which Pope Leo XIII, from whom Leo XIV took inspiration for his chosen name, turned the church's attention to the consequences of the industrial revolution of the time. “The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable, in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvellous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; the increased self reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; as also, finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy,” the elder Leo wrote at the time."
#ai-ethics #religion-and-society #church-social-doctrine #labor-and-dignity #personhood-and-consciousness
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