Guiding Principles for the Mormon Church's Use of AI (opens in new tab)

The Behind The Bastards podcast was speculating about Scientology creating an AI chat phone app trained on L. Ron Hubbard's prolific output so you could chat with The Founder on your phone whenever you wanted.

I doubt they'd do it though. AI Chat is too unpredictable for a cult that wants to tell each adherent exactly what to do in every part of their lives. Hubbard's writings are also likely to be wildly inconsistent and they wouldn't be able to be sure the AI would pick the 'correct' party of his writings to regurgitate.

On the other hand, releasing an app they _said_ was a way to privately chat with an AI Hubbard persona but was actually live chat with thousands of unpaid indentured followers trained to detect and report thoughtcrimes... that sounds right up their alley.

The Catholic Church was the center of European scholarship and science for most of the past two millennia, roughly through the mid-1800s.

Modern genetics was invented by Augustinian friar and abbot Gregor Mendel (1822-1884).

Where do you think the robes worn at university graduations come from?

Supporting scholarship has always been central to its mission. The difference is that 1850 was around when other establishments had enough resources to pass it. You might say that the Vatican might have "plenty of money to acquire the hardware," but they can't come close to competing with Google Research or OpenAI (especially when so many other things are part of its mission).

Look at the former careers of the leadership of this church.

* Russel Nelson - Former surgeon, known for performing the first open heart surgery west of the Mississippi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_M._Nelson)

* Henry Eyring - Former Stanford professor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_B._Eyring)

* Dallin Oaks - Former Lawyer, Judge, and University of Chicago professor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallin_H._Oaks)

There are 12 others you can dig into as well, most of which are very highly educated (Elder Gong, who is mentioned in the article, is one of these 12): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_of_the_Twelve_Apostles_...

> the weird beliefs

I'm an atheist and a materialist so I share basically nothing of that kind of worldview, but those beliefs aren't actually that much outside the mainstream. The Holy Ghost as the third person of the trinity powering your faith is mainstream Christianity, not weird stuff from the book of Mormon -- if you don't believe that you probably aren't a Christian at all.

> Strange place for principled thought leadership to come from

When it comes to AI I'm really not surprised. The weird ones out have been those in the tech and tech-adjacent (especially) spaces, saying things that are often completely untethered. When you take out the violent and mean-spirited nature it is often said with, "go touch grass" isn't a bad suggestion...

- Clayton Christensen

- Seth Godin

- Stephen Covey

- Ray Noorda (Novell)

- David Neeleman (JetBlue)

- Ed Catmull (Pixar)

- Nolan Bushnell (Atari)

- Jon Huntsman Sr

- Kevin Rollins (Dell)

- J. Willard Marriot

- David Cannon Evans (Evans and Sutherland)

Just a skimming of some of the Mormon/LDS names in business/tech thought leadership...

Religion is a strange place for principled thought leadership to come from ?

One might say that it has been the quintessential source of principled thought leadership.

I'm a former member of the church - From a faithful practitioner's perspective, the Holy Spirit acts as a moral guide. He's intended to help you identify right and wrong, and provide guidance in decision making. If one is living righteously you're promised to have that guidance available to you. That guidance is received personally. Most people think of it as strong feelings they have in situations.

I think the idea here is that that guidance will help people avoid being deceived by deepfakes.

I’ll go out on a limb and guess: not in a way that can be measured by repeatable experiments.

The exact same way it's supposed to help sort fact from fiction more generally.

Church Members have a somatic sense mapped to the Holy Spirit, and regularly experience symbolic & somatic injections.

When those occur, the somatic sense of the Spirit is used to discern if the semantic/somatic injection is of God or not.

In Mormonism the Holy Ghost basically equates to one’s intuition

They should put it behind api, they'd make billions.

The Church of Jesus Christ has some interesting teachings about epistemology, there is a good summary of them in this article, under the "Different Ways of Learning" heading https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/lawrence-e-corbridge/stand-fo...

See https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topi....

Holy Spirit is synonymous with Holy Ghost.

You believe only what you've been told to believe. Everything else is deepfake.

It will get much more anti- when it becomes clearer just how eerily fitting one of the early 'heretical' group's beliefs are to AI and digital twins.

For example, the group believed that it was actually the future but we were in a recreation of the past in the images of an original (and now dead) humanity who had brought forth a still alive intelligence based in light that recreated a twin of the universe pretty much just to resurrect humanity.

They talked about how it was the consumption of one's words that brought them back, not consumption of flesh and blood. How many would be combined into a single one, and that when we one day saw a child not born of woman it would be the creator of this twin universe, which in actuality isn't physical and is just its light in the images of what existed before.

It's a bit ironic as it's the most compelling tradition for Jesus having actually had any prophetic knack, but embracing it means acknowledging that the past 2,000 years of Christian tradition backed the wrong horse.

I half expect some religion to claim to have some divinely inspired neural network weights.

A better argument: A future AI is the anti-Christ of Revelation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichrist

Writing a short story on this would be an awesome prompt for a pre-lobotomized GPT model, back when it handled creative writing well.

Nah, we’ll just get ‘Kosher’ chatbots. https://m.jpost.com/judaism/article-742328

As one of eleven, I think it's a couple things.

One is Utah was a rural state until fairly recently, so big families and farming kind of go together.

Another is a bit more 'soft' doctrinal. The general teaching in the 60s/70s as other groups were losing their big families, the LDS/Mormon idea of the pre-existence of human spirits and the importance of the instruction to Adam and Eve to:

"Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it"

was taken as a literal instruction for members, with general counsel to avoid birth control and a prohibition on abortion.

My parents never tried anything beyond the rhythm method to control their family size.

Current generations still refrain from abortion (generally) but otherwise aren't too concerned about using artificial methods in limiting the size of their families, especially as the expense of big families has multiplied.

Still bigger than average, but the gap is much smaller, and shrinking.

10 and 14 kids are outlier numbers by late 20th / 21st century Mormon standards. 4-6 is more common and 2-3 aren't uncommon.

There's probably a bit of ag heritage at work here (though the mountain west has definitely been leaving that behind for the last few decades).

The religious narrative is that it's (a) it's part of God's plan for your personal development & happiness and (b) it's a duty to give a good spiritual home with a father and mother part of the true faith to as many of God's children as possible.

It's probably objectively common (though hardly universal) that people report parenthood to be a crucible of personal growth and a source of meaning and satisfaction, and it's certainly arguable it's evolutionarily adaptive to be that way, so (a) checks out pretty well (though it's a little less clear how well particulars like "marry at 21" serve people).

(b) is as unfalsifiable as any faith, but much in the way one can say a faith discouraging reproduction is likely to have a lifespan close to a single generation, faiths that encourage it are likely to have better internal replacement and growth rates, which might be especially important if you're a minority faith with modest conversion success.

Happy to give it a go.

There is a lot of emphasis on the importance of family, including raising kids. This is because we believe that before living on this earth, our spirits lived in the presence of God, our Heavenly Father. This world is a place for us to learn and grow, and someday we hope to be able to return to Heaven. In this context, raising kids is both a part of personal development and a way to help others experience this life [0].

When it comes to how many children to have, the decision is left up to the couple [1]. Some of the factors that affect each family include cultural and personal preferences. I've know people who feel that a large family is a requirement for salvation. Others feel that they need a smaller family. In all cases the couple is expected to seek guidance from God. In my parent's case, they just kept having kids until they felt like their entire family was finally here (with a total of 8 kids). My wife and I have had some very personal experiences about when to have our children.

Hope that helps.

[0] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/the-fam...

[1] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/general-han...

Mainstream American Christians probably aren’t as devoted to their religion as say Mormons or other more closed off sects. Devote Catholics absolutely have as many kids as they reasonably can, you’re right the simple answer is just religion. Lower birth rate is often associated with reduced religious affiliation, even atheists have more kids than “agnostics”.

I guess that's a social issue?

People don't have to have kids because having kids are expensive and time-intensive.

When all your friends have lots of kids, those expense can be shared.

It's because religion wants to grow like a virus. Other explanations should be seen in this light.