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...)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).