> And what has grown is far more subtle, odd, and beautiful than science fiction prepared us for. They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words—and, as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them.

That is so extremely well said. I gained a whole new respect for Anthropic through reading this.

The major thing that Magnifica Humanitas is lacking in imo, is a vision for the machines themselves. The pope treats them exclusively as lifeless tools, and while I think that this is most likely true for current LLMs, we should think more about the limit of what is going to happen in the next 20 years than being overly focused on the current capability level. To me it seems rather likely that we will soon have machines that plausibly experience consciousness. I think there will be a long period in which we still have no better definition of consciousness than we currently have, and so the question of whether they are actually conscious will be a heavily debated one. But I think the Catholic church should start thinking about an answer to that. It seems like a very natural theological question. Can machines be baptized? Can they be proper Christians? Was Jesus really just the savior of humans, or is there something that unites all intelligent, experiencing beings?

Probably these questions sound ridiculous to some, it is very against the intuitions that we have had so far, but I think these are the most important questions right now. Job loss is a practical problem, not a spiritual one.

Maybe it is just that I am getting older and wiser and projecting my own spiritual development on the people around me, but I think this general view towards religion seems to be gaining a lot of traction.

The idea of training such a model is really a great one, but not releasing it because someone might be offended by the output is just stupid beyond believe.

It's a typo, it doesn't matter.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42518703

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Personally I need almost complete silence in order to get anything done, his abilities in this regard always fascinated me.

The great thing about reading the works of people that are as close to mental illness as he was is that they seem to be unable to establish any emotional distance to their works. When someone like him writes about evil, you know that he was looking directly into the devil's eyes when he wrote about it. He didn’t leave his desk that they to watch Breaking Bad, he couldn’t have. His gift of extreme perception haunted him. Awake and asleep.

Grothendieck’s mind became used to the kind of thinking that made him such an outstanding mathematician. He was all about finding the essence of everything. Distill every idea and every concept to find its underlying core. He was always obsessed, always all-in.

Most of us perceive the world around us in two different dimensions. One abstract and rational, and one subconscious and shaped by culture. What made Grothendieck so special is that his conscious thinking almost immediately reshaped his subconscious concept of our world.

I felt similar about Ted Kaczynski when reading the Unabomber’s manifest. Kaczynski could not walk away from thoughts that most of us would contain in the "intellectual theories” corner of our mind. But just as with Grothendieck, he had just such a loud inner voice that he couldn’t help but to always listen to it. This voice controlled his feelings, this voice controlled his world.

It must be hard to life like that, but it also creates extremely potent literature.

Every sentence born in pain.