alt Hacker NewsI'm an atheist, but most of what I have heard from popes in recent years seems like sound and possibly needed advice.
Also, even though I feel AI and robotics are very important for progressing humanity, I think that much of the world has long since lost a proper sense of intrinsic human value. It's really gone from overt exploitation to slightly more mild exploitation where we pretend the system is really merit based.
And as AI and robotics remove the need for human labor, I hope that someone like the pope can convince people that we should value human beings inherently and more fairly. Inexpensive labor and intelligence should make this feasible.
I hope the speech isn't something dumb like "remember only humans have souls" because I think that's really premature and pretty obvious that AIs are not people at this point.
The really convincing and somewhat deeper simulations of humans are probably only a few years down the line though.
Which comes back to the Rovelli dualism article that was on the front page before. I think we should not be in a hurry to try to duplicate humans in depth (such as imitating emotions, pain, stream of consciousness, self-preservation, etc). It's just completely unnecessary to go that far to get useful AI, and obviously unethical to subject a real human emulation to slavery.
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Human value has rarely existed. Pre-industrial world didn't have much human value. Your were a lord or a serf. There was not much in between. A lord's life had value, a serf's value was nothing.
Post-industrial world needed human capital. Hence, the need for human value. If you notice most of this "need" has arisen out of then need for industrial expansion.
Post-AI will be interesting. Will we go back to pre-industrial or get something better.
> I'm an atheist, but most of what I have heard from popes in recent years seems like sound and possibly needed advice.
This is a bad sign. I'm an atheist too, but I don't think religions should appeal to outsiders.
The idea is that by relaxing norms, he wants to gain more members. But it doesn't actually go that way. It alienates the core, and the people for whom compromises are made don't want to join anyway.
You can see this with the number of members for Unitarian churches (declining) vs Amish (growing).
It's the same with Gamergate. Games which chase inclusivity often fail, because the very people they appeal to don't actually want to play video games.
When it’s necessary for the pope to tell the orange one to calm down about wiping out a civilisation, you know things are bad.
yeah I'm not impressed. Its not like the worlds religions have consistently held the moral high ground.
That catholic church has a long and sordid history of protecting its own.
A cursory look at the fall of extreme poverty across the world, over the last few decades, is enough to refute the idea that the world is largely based on exploitation.
Unfortunately some approximation of a human emulation (a slice of it) comes out of emulating Common Crawl. They do have neurons for emotions because those are necessary to predict next token.
Whether that implies anything about subjective experience... I think that question is unknowable by definition. Either substrate matters (in which case things have to be made of carbon for some reason?), or it doesn't (in which case... God only knows what that implies. Windows XP might have subjective experience).