upvote
There is an AI working group in one of the dicasteries that has produced two excellent publications:

Encountering Artificial Intelligence (https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/91230-encountering-art...)

Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/154545-reclaiming-huma...)

reply
I think I will read this while running my agents in parallel. Thank you, my friend.

The writing is genuinely excellent.

In tech communities, we often talk about how many times productivity will increase, or whether AI has consciousness. But in religious documents, the focus is often on how the problems of the vulnerable and the community will change.

That is interesting to me. The worldview is Western and religious, so it feels somewhat unfamiliar, but at the same time, it seems useful as a way to rediscover values that we may have forgotten.

reply
Catholic Social Teaching: 19th C origins. An alternate base to Marxism for social justice.
reply
> Catholic Social Teaching: 19th C origins. An alternate base to Marxism for social justice.

See specifically perhaps the encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) from 1891:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_social_teaching

Various others over the decades.

reply
Rerum Novarum was written by Leo XIII. When Robert Prevost took as his papal name Leo XIV, it was a clear signal of priorities, at least to those who are educated in church history and teaching. (There aren’t many names that carry a signal as clear as Leo. The only name that would have been in the same league might have been Francis II).
reply
Peter II also indicates something.
reply
Rerum Novarum is an absolute banger. I had the pleasure of discovering it thanks to the discourse surrounding Leo XIV choosing his papal name, and I'm really glad I did. Leo XIII had some really insightful things to say about the problems surrounding workers' rights.
reply
It should be said that, as in many other fields, it was effectively forced on the church by external development. Marx published The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and Das Kapital in 1867; it took more than a generation for the church to accept that workers' rights were a thing.

Even after that shift, the Catholic Church continued to be a fundamentally reactionary force in the realm of social policies, all the way through the second world war.

reply
A two millennia old institution rarely operates on the scale of decades. The workers’ rights movement may have become a pressing political issue then, but workers have been around for thousands of years. Most genuinely new ideas are actually terrible, so why not approach them cautiously? Given the terrible outcomes of the French Revolution and later the Bolshevik Revolution, the hesitancy seems justified.
reply
> […] it took more than a generation for the church to accept that workers' rights were a thing.

The care for workers was a thing long before Marx. Rerum novarum (¶20) quotes scripture on the topic:

> To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven. "Behold, the hire of the laborers... which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth; and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth."(6)

Jesus himself was a tradesman, often translated as "carpenter":

* https://uscatholic.org/articles/202205/was-jesus-a-carpenter...

Marx's caring for the downtrodden and weak is itself a Christian concept; in contrast, Nietzsche hated weakness and Christianity for its support of those that are (he was not a fan of the Sermon on the Mount).

reply
'Communitarianism'.
reply
It can be fruitful to consider the potential negative ramifications of one’s work for once. Especially so when the program is busy anyway.
reply
People love to wallow in the stereotype that the Catholic Church is old fashioned and anti-science. That's mostly propaganda leftover from 300 years ago.

Catholic nuns were instrumental in the development of computers. A Catholic priest is fundamental to the Big Bang Theory†. Dozens of craters on the moon were named by and for Catholic clergy who discovered them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître

reply
I follow a couple Jesuit brothers on Blue Sky who work at the Vatican Observatory. One of them was tapped to receive an award for another astronomer at a ceremony she couldn’t attend. Beforehand, he said that he would be doing this but couldn’t name the astronomer but said that it was someone well-known and I realized that the only contemporary astronomers I could name were either Jesuits or Neil DeGrasse Tyson. (I don’t remember the actual astronomer, but she was none of these).

Amongst scientific clergy, there’s also Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit who was part of the team which discovered the Peking Man fossils (although looking at the Wikipedia page, it appears his legacy is a bit more complicated than one can address in an HN comment).

reply
It’s said when they found the first uncomplicated Jesuit they made him Pope ;)
reply