[HN Gopher] Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dig...
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Pope Leo XIV: "AI poses new challenges re: human dignity, justice
and labour"
Author : 90s_dev
Score : 52 points
Date : 2025-05-10 19:20 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vatican.va)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vatican.va)
| andrewmutz wrote:
| If you want to understand the likely effects of AI on human
| material welfare, don't look to religious leaders or computer
| scientists for answers. Look to the people who study this topic
| professionally: economists.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Leo XIV is not merely talking about human material welfare.
| vFunct wrote:
| Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable and
| resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's
| benefit. It's just what people do. They don't sit around doing
| nothing because AI took their job- they'll figure out something
| else, to fill a new hole in the economy.
|
| Moore's law applies to people's productivity as well, not just
| transistors on a chip.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable
| and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's
| benefit. It's just what people do.
|
| It's not "just what people do" in some kind of simple,
| automatic, no-conscious-action-required sense, it's a difficult
| process that often requires violent conflict between those
| empowered by the new development and those they exploit (that
| was _certainly_ the case after the Industrial Revolution), a
| major part of which is people _looking for and publicly calling
| out the problems_.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| > Should be obvious that whatever AI does, people are capable
| and resilient enough to naturally respond to it for everyone's
| benefit
|
| I can't imagine how you believe this when everything says
| otherwise. Climate change, the oligarchs hoarding all the
| wealth, the collapsed middle class, widespread hunger and
| homelessness, the many wars, and genocides. Generally,
| everything points to the fact that people will not respond to
| changes in technology for the benefit of everybody.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The submission title comes from one sentence near the end, here's
| the paragraph containing it:
|
| > Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to
| take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but
| mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum
| Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first
| great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to
| everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to
| another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of
| artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence
| of human dignity, justice and labour.
|
| The encyclical he references, Rerum Novarum, can be found here
| [0] and is much more interesting since it's more than just a
| single sentence.
|
| [0] https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-
| xiii/en/encyclicals/docum...
| WillAdams wrote:
| Another on it is:
|
| https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...
|
| which was discussed here at:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42877709
| cgio wrote:
| I hope this Pope does not go with a similar approach. This
| encyclical, in the face of challenges of the Industrial
| Revolution, focuses almost explicitly on how socialism is
| unnatural (note that he does not even try to call it
| unchristian). The argumentation hinges on an appeal to emotion
| with the iconography of the poor father who worked years for a
| small parcel of land. The solution proposed is let the rich get
| richer, let's just ask them to be fair, with some intervention
| from the church, which is ipse dixit just to protect a
| convenient and isolated principle of natural order.
| jawns wrote:
| The relevant quote:
|
| > In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of
| her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution
| and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that
| pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and
| labor.
|
| I don't think he's suggesting that AI is inherently bad, but that
| (like any tool) it can be abused by those with wealth and power
| in a way that violates human dignity.
|
| In fact, one of the problems the previous Pope Leo warned about
| in "Rerum Novarum" was not just the intentional abuse of power
| through technological advances but the unintentional negative
| consequences of treating industry as a good in itself, rather
| than a domain that is in service to human interests.
|
| For those who are interested in how this social teaching informed
| economic systems, check out the concept of distributism,
| popularized by Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton.
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| But what does Ja Rule think?
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