[tptacek]

I think you're not reading it in the spirit it's intended. There's a section towards the end (Chapter 5, I think) that is full of policy prescriptions. But most of the encyclical isn't "about" AI, it's "about" Catholicism, and is using AI as a lens to talk about principles the church has been building up over a century. In that sense the document is less concerned with frontier models and disinformation than it is with establishing Catholic social doctrine --- subsidiarity, solidarity, the common good, etc.

As far as the church is concerned, AI as an issue will come and go, but the ordering and prioritization of human relationships is timeless, and is the important issue. The subtext of the whole thing is that if you get the principles right, the tech policy will fall into place.

You can argue with those principles, but at that point you really are just arguing with Catholicism itself, which is fine, but is besides the point.

(I'm not engaging with or disputing your takes on policy, only with your comment as a critique of the encyclical itself.)

[mike_hearn]

Perhaps, but I think that's a bit generous. Let's look at Chapter 3, titled "TECHNOLOGY AND DOMINANCE. THE GRANDEUR OF HUMANITY IN LIGHT OF THE PROMISES OF AI."

This whole section is clearly about AI and social policy. It makes occasional Biblical references but if you strip those out it sounds like any Democrat podcast. If random people were given these quotes stripped of context, how many would guess it was the Pope?

For example: > What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating

That's a demand for AI regulation.

Then take the paragraph that starts with:

> In many cases within the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power does not rest with States, but with major economic and technological actors [snip]

The whole paragraph has nothing to do with Catholicism. It could have been written by the EU Commission and you'd never know. In it he appears to argue for the nationalization of AI labs, using standard progressivist claims.

Later the Pope argues once again for the nationalization of not just AI labs but all intellectual property held by the computing industry, using an argument I'm not afraid to condemn as theologically specious. In "The principle of the universal destination of goods" he says first that things like earth and water are given by God and thus everyone has a "right" to use them as they wish. From a theological perspective this is reasonable, albeit not from an economic perspective. But then he argues that patents, algorithms, datacenters and digital platforms are exactly the same as soil and water, and thus everyone should have them for free. That's nonsense. The religious justification for the first is that God made planet Earth, but He obviously didn't invent the transformer algorithm so why would the same logic apply?

All this is just standard left wing politics. The only theological justification I could find in the first part of this chapter is that some other recent Pope agrees with him.

I don't have any problem with Catholics or Catholicism. In fact I've written a whole essay arguing that AI raises issues only religion can deal with:

https://blog.plan99.net/the-looming-ai-consciousness-train-w...

Religion has something to contribute when it comes to pondering questions like, what is AI? Does it deserve compassion and feelings, does it have consciousness and free will, or is it just a machine? Does the creation of it make us challengers to God or would He have approved of us making creatures in our own image? But the Pope doesn't engage with those topics. Instead we get advocacy for government power. The world has enough of such politics already.

[kergonath]

> if you strip those out it sounds like any Democrat podcast

The fact that the bloody Pope sounds like what appears to be a left-wing party in the US' Overton window should be a big kick in the arse. In most of the rest of the west, these are classical conservative values, and indeed more aligned with the gospel than anything coming from the Republican Party these days. As a leftist, I find Magnifica Humanitas to be interesting, because it's a view point that is rooted in a rich history and profound thinking. But that's not a socialist doctrine at all. Its situation is very close to Rerum Novarum: it was more social than what the capitalist magnates wanted, but it was really far from things like communism or revolutionary socialism. Leo XIV does not hide his admiration for Leo XIII, and he sees many similarities with the state of the society they live in. On that, I think I agree with him.

[tptacek]

The bloody pope believes a lot of things that would set a DSA person's hair on fire, and I don't just mean about reproductive freedom.

[tptacek]

So, I'm not sure about your religious background but conversing about this will get tedious very quickly if I have to hedge everything I'm saying, so from the jump let me just say I respect your writing on HN and I assume you're not Catholic, and you can correct me if I'm making any broken assumptions about you.

Also, just to get this out of the way: I said "Chapter 5" was the section full of policy prescriptions, but that was from memory, and, as you've noted, it's "Chapter 3". I agree there's a run in this where he gets pretty prescriptive! But I still think "policy document" is the wrong way to ready this.

Leo goes way out of his way, in the tradition of all Catholic popes over the last century, to ground what he's saying in a long through-line of doctrine. So in both your quotes, about the need for regulation: it's not really about policy.

I think Leo is first espousing a normie view (neither especially "left" nor especially libertarian) about regulation and risk, and then using it as an object lesson about the Catholic principle of Participation. Catholicism is big on ordering and prioritizing relationships between humans. We are supposed to be making decisions together for the Common Good, and we are supposed to recognize that decision-making happens (must happen) at different levels, from the state to local communities to families (this is Subsidiarity).

I flinched at the intellectual property bit too. But the point he's making in context is clear; it's Catholic and Christian doctrine going all the way back to Genesis. The literal named principle "Universal destination of goods" goes back to Vatican 2. The "codification" of these principles happened under Benedict XVI, not my favorite pope (I'm much more to the left than you are) and obviously no squish.

I think you're reading too much American politics into this, for what it's worth. Leo XIV took his name from Leo XIII, who in the late 19th century wrote Rerum Novarum, which was was in part a reaction to Marxist/Socialist thought and totalizing class conflict, recognizes the importance of worker welfare and the dignity of labor, but very specifically does not reject private property (private property is a necessary precondition for the agency of the family unit, which is central to Catholic doctrine). If we dig in I think we'll quickly find a lot of ideas that a doctrinaire leftist would recoil from!

But my big point is that people are all excited to read the Vatican's AI policy document, and the Vatican is uninterested in publishing AI policy; what it wants to do is continue to indoctrinate Catholics on the core tenets of Catholic social doctrine: Subsidiarity, Solidarity, The Common Good, Human Dignity.

[mike_hearn]

Thanks. I respect Christianity and feel it has a lot to contribute to the topic of AI, even if not like this, but I'm not a Catholic.

I haven't read the other chapters so will take you at your word about what they say and the Christian agenda in them.

It's tempting to describe the sort of politics in chapter three as US politics because that's roughly where it kicked off first, but there's nothing US specific about it. Leftism has always been a very globally consistent set of beliefs. We wouldn't describe communism as British politics, for example, even though Marx developed his beliefs while living in London and wrote in a British context (Das Kapital is full of references to Parliament and living conditions in 19th century Britain).

What I'd really like to see from the Vatican is engagement with the question of consciousness, and why AI should or should not be considered something with rights. I think a lot of people view this question as obvious but when I studied it, I ended feeling that it's neither obvious nor something that can be answered from first principles. A bit like animal rights, a principled answer essentially requires some kind of religious grounding.