Antiqua et Nova: Note on the relationship between AI and human intelligence

It is well thought out. The "AI Magna Carta" is a stretch, though.

Some good insights:

60. Anthropomorphizing AI also poses specific challenges for the development of children, potentially encouraging them to develop patterns of interaction that treat human relationships in a transactional manner, as one would relate to a chatbot. Such habits could lead young people to see teachers as mere dispensers of information rather than as mentors who guide and nurture their intellectual and moral growth. Genuine relationships, rooted in empathy and a steadfast commitment to the good of the other, are essential and irreplaceable in fostering the full development of the human person.

That's a good one. Teacher time is a scarce resource, but the chatbot is always there, and undemanding if not asked anything.

Kids who grow up talking mostly to AIs may have that kind of relationship with the world. Historically, kids who grew up with servants around sometimes defaulted to that kind of transactional relationship. Now that can scale up. Amusingly, asking Google's AI about "bringing up children with servants" produced an excellent summary of the topic.

Years ago, the French Catholic author Georges Bernanos warned that “the danger is not in the multiplication of machines, but in the ever-increasing number of men accustomed from their childhood to desire only what machines can give.”

That's an argument against too much screen time for kids.

Reminds me of Inter Mirifica.

https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_coun...

These are notable because they are not tweets or op-eds, one in thousands produced daily to keep you hooked to a source of information.

Rather these are published once by the church as part of their core mission and in response to the events themselves once. There is not necessarily a huge conversation here, although of course there might be conversation that lead to the letter and conversations that arise from the letter, but the center, core of the message from the church is very clear and static. It is long yes, but you only need to read it once and you'll be up to date with the church for years. You don't need to turn the news on everynight or keep your twitter feed clean and stay hooked every 20 minutes.

One may or may not appreciate the religious aspect, but the Vatican has always been a hub for “refined thinkers.” And when it comes to establishing an (initial) point of discussion on such an ethically significant topic, I believe that the amount of thought distilled into this page has been considerable.

Mamma mia. Yes, I totally agree with what you wrote: this is a landmark, profound, historic (and very courageous) document.

I generally agree that the particular "rationalist" fear of AGI-autonomy are silly but your statement here, "the disastrous letter that effectively knee-capped American AI all while...", seems quite implausible. The same thing that makes the letter shallow is what means it's signers aren't going to hesitate for a second when they see an opportunity for profit.

It is a rehashing of the same stalled philosophical debates that are already tired. They didn't present any scientific evidence for biological necessity for intelligence, nor did they assert their religious authority. It is completely pointless.

> it always feels paradoxical when leaders wax poetic about the mystery of God and then say 'so here is what God thinks you should do.' How could they know?

Perhaps we were told it:

> "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He [Jesus] said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

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

Which is taken from the Torah. See also:

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

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

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

The leaders are probably just reiterating/reminding people.

> How could they know?

I can’t speak for any religious leader but in terms of Catholic leadership: because in many matters God spoke through the Prophets and then He came down and told us directly which is preserved in Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition (2 Thessalonians 2:15-17), and the Holy Spirit guides the Church (John 14:26) and does so through the prime ministerial office of the Pope the successor of Peter (Mathew 16:13-19) and through the Bishops the successors of the Apostles (Acts 1:12-26)(Acts 15)

AI term if fine, no need to muddy the waters even more. There is the first word - Artificial in past and current world means subpar, fake, imitation that often breaks apart when you get closer and you should never expect to match original in quality nor experience.

Artificial plants, artificial meat, artificial light, and so on. Nothing great there, just cheaper, tolerable, often low quality, don't expect that much etc.

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Yeah! Perhaps a bit naively, as a Highly Opinionated Person (HOP) on this topic I was ready for this to have something controversial to say about the nature of intelligence.

It's not out of the ordinary for even Anglosphere philosophers to fall into a kind of essentiallism about intelligence, but I think the treatment of it here is extremely careful and thoughtful, at least on first glace.

I suppose I would challenge the following, which I've also sometimes heard from philosophers:

>However, even as AI processes and simulates certain expressions of intelligence, it remains fundamentally confined to a logical-mathematical framework, which imposes inherent limitations. Human intelligence, in contrast, develops organically throughout the person’s physical and psychological growth, shaped by a myriad of lived experiences in the flesh. Although advanced AI systems can “learn” through processes such as machine learning, this sort of training is fundamentally different from the developmental growth of human intelligence, which is shaped by embodied experiences, including sensory input, emotional responses, social interactions, and the unique context of each moment. These elements shape and form individuals within their personal history.In contrast, AI, lacking a physical body, relies on computational reasoning and learning based on vast datasets that include recorded human experiences and knowledge.

I have heard this claim frequently, that intelligence is "embodied" in a way that computers overlook, but if that turns out to be critical, well, who is to say that something like this "embodied" context can't also be modeled computationally? Or that it isn't already equivalent to something out there in the vector space that machines already utilize? People are constantly rotating through essentialist concepts that supposedly reflect an intangible "human element" that shifts the conversation onto non-computational grounds, which turn out to simply reproduce the errors of every previous variation of intelligence essentialism.

My favorite familiar example is baseball, where people say human umpires create a "human element" by changing the strike zone situationally (e.g. tighten the strike zone if it's 0-2 in a big situation, widen the strike zone if it's an 3-0 count), completely forgetting that you could have machines call those more accurately too, if you really wanted to.

Anyway, I have my usual bones to pick but overall I think a very thoughtful treatment that I wouldn't say is borne of layperson confusions that frequently dog these convos.

>people coming from very different perspectives

Care to elaborate? Which people and which perspectives? It's a bit unclear to me.

> However, it is not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself---which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work.

Doesn't that describe all religion? I mean, you're telling me that the infinite creator of the universe cares about the prayers, the suffering, the aspirations, and the sexual habits of a bunch of finite beings? The hubris! It seems obvious to me that the gods of all religions are designed by human minds to be receptive to human interests, otherwise nobody would bother worshipping them. In other words, we have always been worshipping ourselves. At least there is reason to think that AI could, at least in theory, be what we expect God to be.

This just give me an idea for a Scifi short story, where a industrial society worships a just and fair god, that is nothing more than a lost AI driven probe, from a more advanced civilization a few parsec away...

Well, this sounds like it could(will) be in the Orange Catholic Bible!

I can't wait to find out when the Butlerian Jihad starts.

My own reflection on this idolatry has been along the lines of how readily some people are at negating their own and humanity in general’s fundamental agency. Having AGI, SAI, etc. is completely meaningless if we as our own agents are not there to value it. In a sense, people preaching the coming dominance of AI are suicidal or homicidal, since they are pursuing their own demise by technical means.

While I agree with the thrust against deification and idolatry - these characterizations border on naive and myopic:

"remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity" and "AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life"

We just don't know yet. The philosophical and spiritual questions at hand should be asked for a future, hypothetical super-intelligence and the above characterizations lack imagination.

I agree with most of it, but saying that holism doesn't exist is weird.

Also, humans have definitely created things that are better, at least in some aspects, than humans.

Cars are faster than humans.

Even AI-specific, AI chess engines are a lot stronger than any human alive, even then all humans combined.

> Idolatry is always the worship of something into which man has put his own creative powers, and to which he now submits, instead of experiencing himself in his creative act.

-- Erich Fromm, https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch05.h...

Singularitarianism [1] is a very real phenomenon, if a bit niche. I have seen some people online put genuine faith in AGI existing soon and solving essentially everything that is wrong on Earth and in their lives. I don't think this is harmful because it may be "idolatry", but rather because, like real religion, it is often a substitute for actually improving one's situation or fighting for a better world.

The idea of building a God is enticing [2], but I am not religious and prefer not to put faith in such things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularitarianism

[2] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Numidium

this writing posted today by the Vatican shows modern scholarship and it appears, humility with respect to past Church attitudes about tech. Since just about everyone agrees that terrible mistakes were made in the distant past, and this writing shows active learning about how to approach new situations, the parent comment seems like immature and illogical mud-slinging, bringing up six hundred years old failures that are news to almost no one.

> But there's nothing about AI in general that limits it to learning only from prior data

Maybe not, but I don't think this is exactly what the piece said here: "AI, lacking a physical body, relies on computational reasoning and learning based on vast datasets that include recorded human experiences and knowledge."

Do you think AI will soon get a physical body, and experience "sensory input, emotional responses, social interactions, and the unique context of each moment"?

When the time comes where there's robots with independent batteries and that learn and think without an internet connection, we will worry about it then.

But the current cycle is not about that type of intelligence or life at all, it's strictly about mathematical simulation of intelligence on multitenant systems with shared information and thought-processes alternated through time( training,reinforcement, labelling, inference, 3rd party microservices).

I understand it is possible we will see a jump to a completely different type of AI, but we need to be very clear that this is not what's going on right now.

It was reaching for a great point about how intelligence requires comparison and scaffolding, and how we are nurturing the future, but then it fell into the Chinese Room trap.

> We're probably still far from passing Steve Wozniak's Coffee Test

Do you think? At this point I have the impression it's just a problem of dexterity and speed. Understanding, planning and navigation seem basically solved.

> nothing about AI in general that limits it to learning only from prior data

this has to be refined to make a reasonable statement.. as stated, cannot agree on the expansive word "nothing"

Technology works well for decentralized religions, like Protestantism and Judaism, where there is no overarching authority on scripture, or where there are multiple entities competing for believers' attention that the majority choose to focus on scientific dogma instead.

Once there's a central authority at risk from technology eroding at their base, they will be undermined. Like Catholicism, Islam, the Orthodox Church, etc. all of which were practically sidelined when print and media became more prevalent.

Interestingly all 3 of the above examples maintain strict conditions that their respective holy books must not be translated into the local languages.

Humans create AIs but humans also create other humans, through conception. And yet we do not say that humans were created by humans. Could we not say that AIs were created by God, by making the patterns of intelligence evident in Nature and letting other intelligences unravel them?

As you say, AIs also reflect the image of the Creator (through having intelligence). Maybe AIs can also reflect on the nature of Truth and connect with God, and thus a have a soul.

That's a great episode, but the question of whether anything has a soul is ill defined.

Until someone can come up with a rigorous definition of what a soul is, the question itself has no meaning.

I cannot not respond to this comment. Forgive me if I seem short in tone.

Maybe we should be helping people develop richer inner lives instead of pouring billions of dollars into something that may or may not pan out in the future. I assert it'd be vastly cheaper, would raise GDP overall, and improve well-being. Where we're at collectively right now is...not great, and I think people correctly perceive that their problems, which are real and significant, are theirs alone to suffer with, while the world chases the current white whale.