Linkpost: New Vatican Encyclical on AI Governance
Pope Leo XIV has released a new, 42k-word encyclical laying out the Vatican’s position on many AI safety topics. You can read the full thing here, or read the Vatican’s press release here, or coverage in the NY Times, or perhaps consider having an LLM read the whole encyclical, then chatting about whatever specifics you’re interested in!
Below is a portion of the NY Times story on the event:
Leo’s declaration outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.
While emphasizing that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he wrote that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.”
Among other things, Leo called for:
government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I.
protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened
education to help students think critically about the technology
action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I.
safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons.
Above all he emphasized the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all human beings. “A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity,” he wrote. “This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace.”
The phrase “anthropological regression” struck me as resonant and “the kind of thing a Catholic theologian would say”.
I went a-Googling!
I found Jan Szmyd’s 2013 chapter from “Phenomenology of Space and Time Chapter” titled “Anthropological Regression in the Modern World Versus Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Metaphysics of Ontopoiesis of Life”.
I found a 2017 post by “hallymk1” on a group blog on anthropological regression and education futures claims that Anselm Jappe is the originator of the phrase and articulator of a particulat concept.
The relevant essay came out in 2012, and here I quote the fully paragraph where the phrase was coined in Anselm Jappe’s essay “Are free individuals the necessary prerequisites for a successful struggle for freedom?” (bold not in original):
I am struck by the way that Leo’s usage, and this usage due to Jappe, might actually be almost literally diametrically opposed?
Like it seems to be that if all humans lost their jobs, but got a magic box that would 3D print food, or clothes, or large snap-together parts for cars, or sex robots, or heroin, or any other thing they ask for then there would suddenly be very many “idle hands” and quite a bit of “the devil’s work” might happen… and in the aftermath, within a generation or three, I’m not very sure if I would expect the humans to still be literate and numerate and so on?
I would expect the new “post scarcity humans” living “post scarcity lives” to be full of passions, and confusions, and I would expect them to be much less rigorous or careful or planful or logical, because these mental states aren’t particularly pleasant, but are usually applied within a life because of the instrumentally useful results that they provide in a world where all wealth must be made or extracted by purposive human labor operating according to non-trivial human plans.
But I kind of feel like socialists hate that “protestant work ethic” mentality that “being a cog in a techno strategic wealth generating system” fosters and rewards? And I think they think this mindset does not stave off “anthropological regression” but actually is, itself, spiritually horrible and “the anthropological regression that has already occurred”!
It would be fascinating to see a debate about this stuff. I feel like there are probably “facts of the matter” about what the need to work does to the spiritual life of humans… and also I think there are non-trivial questions about the “deepest values” that say which changes the the main mental vibe of normal people are even “good” or “bad” based on people’s highest (theologically coherent and endorsed?) template for spiritual perfection and their theory of real world progress towards such spiritual perfection.
The relation between the work and human values is complicated.
For some kinds of work, I would say that they make you a better human in some sense. Cut down a tree and build a house? You learned: some physics, some planning, and you learned to appreciate other people’s hard work (i.e. you probably won’t be the kind of guy who paints graffiti on other people’s houses).
But the same is not true for being a used car salesman, or for working in a moral maze. Yes, you also develop some skills, just not those that I associate with being a good person.
What will the post-scarcity bullshit jobs be like? More like building the house, or more like surviving a moral maze? I don’t know—and no one does, because the whole thing is so arbitrary. I would probably also complain about the former, but I am horrified by the latter.
If a post-scarcity government told me that I am legally required to spend 8 hours a day doing a job, any job I choose… well, I might choose building the houses. At least I would learn something new!
Wait, why don’t I choose such job now? Well, it’s because of money. I get better paid doing what I am doing now; and also if I started doing something new that I have no experience at, I would only get paid as a beginner. I allow the money to navigate me to choose the jobs that I sometimes hate. And in some sense perhaps my suffering contributes to some greater good, as the gods of economy allocate the money towards useful things. (I am kidding of course. Crony capitalism does not work like that.)
But in a post-scarcity economy, this entire argument stops making sense. All jobs will be equally needless. Will some of them still be paid better than others? Who decides? Will the most horrifying bullshit moral-maze jobs be paid best? What happens if you fail to reach your KPIs?
Compared to that, a communist post-scarcity society that forces me to do 8 hours of manual work a day for ideological reasons, but allows me to choose the kind of job that sounds “meaningful” to me (it is useless either way, but at least I feel like I am learning something interesting) sounds like a paradise.
I wrote a little about the anticapitalist-flavored version of “anthropological regression” here, as a commentary on an essay about the philosophy of Nick Land: https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/meditations-on-machinic-desire/comment/249739678
Despite being a technocratic, capitalism-loving neoliberal when it comes to most of my mundane political opinions, I think the anticapitalists have a strong point here—with “anthropological regression” and other similar concepts, they are groping towards the idea(elaborated on in “meditations on machinic desire” essay) that the natural tendency of the universe is for things that are better at surviving and growing to come to dominate, and this process is not unique to biological evolution or competition among firms but is also ongoing in our cultures, our own minds, etc. Such that we have been deeply shaped by various optimization pressures all pointing closer and closer towards something like “pure replicators”. Although these optimization pressures have, to be sure, led to our existence and current prosperity, it also seems like following them all the way to their logical conclusion would take us to an abhorrent future devoid of all value. (This kind of stuff has been studied under the term “evolutionary futures”—outcomes where “due to competition between actors, the world develops in a direction that almost no one would have chosen”. See also Robin Hanson’s work, Meditations on Moloch, etc.)
But I also agree with your striking thought experiment about the magic 3D-printing box—a world totally devoid of any reason to think seriously or make any contact with reality, would probably end pretty badly for most people, at least from any remotely virtue-ethicsy point of view that views it as good for people to be rational, intelligent, responsible, wise, etc.
Hopefully there is some narrow path that we can find, that allows us to carry the various gifts-we-give-to-tomorrow (gifts that, clearly, we do not even fully understand—eg we don’t understand how exactly they arose, or which parts are most important, or which changes might make them better or worse) safely forward to future generations, without falling into the various scyllas and charybdises on either side.
The idea of “anthropological regression”, i.e. dehumanization, seems quite consistent with LW ideas like the fragility of value.
Tymieniecka, whose thought Szmyd opposes to regressive dehumanization, is an interesting personality in the history of Catholic intellectuals. She and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) were friends for several decades and both had their intellectual roots in phenomenology (AI comparison). Tymieniecka was the founder of a third-generation school of phenomenology (the generations being Husserl, then Ingarden the phenomenologist of art, then herself) in which creativity, rather than just intentionality, is the prototype for understanding life and consciousness. Maybe she was a Christian humanist but the outlook seems relevant for life in a transhumanist society of open-ended personal evolution.
So. I actually read the thing, or at least most of it. There were a couple of places where I felt that it could be significantly improved, in the sense that:
The encyclical complains about X and comes to conclusion Y.
But X is a strawmen.
And if it instead engaged with a steelman X’, the correct conclusion would still be Y.
In other words, there is a version of the document that is more true, while probably still being in line with what the church believes. And if one engages with the text, it seems reasonable to engage with such steelman instead.
Three examples, abbreviated and translated to Vojta-speak:
(1) “We can never formalise human values (X), therefore we should be careful about AI (Y).”
When you could just say:
”Formalising human values seems really hard, and we shouldn’t assume we will succeed at it anytime soon (X’), therefore we should be careful about AI (Y).”
(2) “AIs are stochastic parrots that have no moral weight while humans all matter infinitely and equally (X), therefore avoid doing stupid things regarding AI, displacing humans by AI, etc (Y).”
When you could just say:
”Most current AIs are probably stochastic parrots that have no moral weight, while humans definitely matter (X’), therefore avoid doing stupid things regarding AI, displacing humans by AI, etc (Y).”
(3) The section on transhumanism.
I couldn’t resist, and created a google doc that has the original version and my “improvements” as suggestions. Here.
(3) is indeed a bit convoluted, but this seems a plausible pattern match:
→→
(3) “Transhumanists want to completely eliminate all human limitations and suffering, which would extinguish our capacity for love, destroy our humanity, and lead to sacrificing the vulnerable for the sake of optimization (X), therefore we should reject attempts to surpass the human condition and keep technology human-centered (Y).”
When you could just say:
“Transhumanism aims to radically reduce suffering and expand our capabilities, but aggressively modifying the human condition risks destabilizing the deeply ingrained ways we currently experience compassion, equality, and human relationships (X’), therefore we should reject attempts to surpass the human condition and keep technology human-centered (Y).”
Much of it appears to be AI-written, according to Pangram.