It’ll be interesting to see how the various cults adopt this technology. They certainly have plenty of money to acquire the hardware. The Vatican has fairly advanced computing infrastructure from what I understand as well: https://cerncourier.com/a/quantum-gravity-in-the-vatican/
The Behind The Bastards podcast was speculating about Scientology creating an AI chat phone app trained on L. Ron Hubbard's prolific output so you could chat with The Founder on your phone whenever you wanted.
I doubt they'd do it though. AI Chat is too unpredictable for a cult that wants to tell each adherent exactly what to do in every part of their lives. Hubbard's writings are also likely to be wildly inconsistent and they wouldn't be able to be sure the AI would pick the 'correct' party of his writings to regurgitate.
On the other hand, releasing an app they _said_ was a way to privately chat with an AI Hubbard persona but was actually live chat with thousands of unpaid indentured followers trained to detect and report thoughtcrimes... that sounds right up their alley.
The Catholic Church was the center of European scholarship and science for most of the past two millennia, roughly through the mid-1800s.
Modern genetics was invented by Augustinian friar and abbot Gregor Mendel (1822-1884).
Where do you think the robes worn at university graduations come from?
Supporting scholarship has always been central to its mission. The difference is that 1850 was around when other establishments had enough resources to pass it. You might say that the Vatican might have "plenty of money to acquire the hardware," but they can't come close to competing with Google Research or OpenAI (especially when so many other things are part of its mission).
> You might say that the Vatican might have “plenty of money to acquire the hardware,” but they can’t come close to competing with Google Research or OpenAI (especially when so many other things are part of its mission).
If AI research was a real priority and the Church prioritized it by not only Vatican institutions but the large number of Catholic universities, etc., I’m not sure that’s true. But its unlikely to be such a priority: its an interesting technology, sure, and likely to get some attention, but its not centrally what the Church is about.
EDIT: More relevantly to the subject here, though, the Catholic Church has been deeply engaged with questions regarding the use and role of AI; the Pontifical Academy for Life organized the “RenAIssance: For a Human-centric Artificial Intelligence” congress which produced the Rome Call for AI ethics [0] (as well as an earlier 2019 conference on AI ethics), and the Vatican subsequently established the RenAIssance Foundation [1] to carry the mission of that call forward.
I doubt they'd do it though. AI Chat is too unpredictable for a cult that wants to tell each adherent exactly what to do in every part of their lives. Hubbard's writings are also likely to be wildly inconsistent and they wouldn't be able to be sure the AI would pick the 'correct' party of his writings to regurgitate.
On the other hand, releasing an app they _said_ was a way to privately chat with an AI Hubbard persona but was actually live chat with thousands of unpaid indentured followers trained to detect and report thoughtcrimes... that sounds right up their alley.