With that out of the way, the Pope is right. Knowledge should be used for the benefit of humanity and I don't think any of the big AI companies have our best interests in mind.
You can still follow a religion while rightfully thinking that the organization representing it to be corrupt (and how could it be otherwise, as it's made from mortal sinners?).
But you either believe that St.Peter and its descendants in Rome have been tasked by god to spread (and interpret) its word or you don't.
It's fine if you don't (I don't my self, I'm an atheist), but I don't get why can't you be a catholic if you believe and also find the organization flawed.
Plus personal and social experiences are often catalysts for changing one’s beliefs. It happens so often there’s a term for it: “crisis of faith”
My point is that once you see a sort of contradiction between words and action, it may make one deeply reflect on it.
What you do is your business, but you understand the fallacy, yes? One does not belong to the Church for the priests. And btw, if you want to be consistent, you should dissociate yourself from all institutions, because statistically, the rate of abuse in the Church (estimated by John Jay to be around 4%) is representative or less than the rates in all other religious or secular institutions. Public schools are notoriously bad in this regard, but you wouldn't know it, given the obsessive coverage of the Church to the exclusion of everyone else.
(I, of course, condemn all such sexual abuse, and I am critical of those who failed to deal with the issue properly. There is indeed a sense in which abuse by a priest carries much more gravity, and this is the position of the Church itself. Sexual abuse also peaked during the heyday of the sexual revolution, roughly during the 1960s-1980s. It wasn't a pedophilia scandal, as around 80% of victims were post-pubescent male teenagers. It was a homosexual ephebophilia scandal. Still terrible, but it does shift understanding of the nature and source of the problem significantly.)
> I am aware of the Catholic Church's long and often sordid history.
Sure, if you simply accept the ignorant tropes, ideological propaganda, and black legends circulating in a culture hostile to the institution since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, then maybe you'll be left with a dramatically dark picture that you describe as "sordid". But this is historically illiterate and intellectually immature.
I feel like this pseudo-defence hidden in the middle of your few paragraphs tells the reader what they really ought to know. Making that distinction is enough to question your nature to be allowed around vulnerable people.
Honestly pretty unreal to come face to face with someone from a history book.
Still, I agree with the pope this once.
They did a lot to make the middle ages more tolerable. After that, maybe they overstayed their welcome.
Child Protection: Companies must not be allowed to exploit children or undermine their wellbeing with AI interactions creating emotional attachment or leverage
I think it entirely consistent with many of the supporters of this statement that this leaves open the opportunity for the church to do it with AI, or indeed companies and the church to do it by other means.
In the first case, I claim that it has and that it does. I'm not sure how you can credibly claim otherwise. Only ideologically informed animosity could distort one's views here. If you know the mission of the Church, then I see no issue. Do members of the Church fail? Of course. Everyone does, and indeed this is captured best in the Christian acknowledgment that everyone is a sinner, without exception. Everyone falls short.
In the second case, I don't know what the implication is. Is it that the Church is one of the "powerful few" and therefore evil? The first question you must ask is what your notion of "power" here is. The second, whether the Church is actually powerful according to that definition. The third, whether you are falsely linking being one of the "powerful few" with being evil. The problem, after all, is not with power, but with the way power is used. In an ideal world, all power would be exercised morally, and all authority would have commensurate power.
I would say this: the Church has authority. Whether it has power depends on your definition of power and the particular historical epoch. It is not reduced to a simple boolean.
It's best to avoid cheap jabs that rely on boring and unthinking tropes that appeal to widespread prejudices rather than to informed reason.
This is not true at all.
And the claim about mission of the church and mission of the ai being the same is absurd. Or ai being authority. Like, the rest of that comment does not apply to ai at all.
(Axiom: B has done X.)
A (to B): You have done X, and you should not have done so.
C: I note here that certain prior actions of A could also reasonably be characterized as X.
D (to C): Ah, here you commit the fallacy of "tu quoque".
This argument is not sound. It misunderstands the fallacy. (To be clear: Wikipedia describes the fallacy accurately; it's just that it's rare in practice, and very often falsely accused.)
Everyone should uphold the standards to which they hold others (and I consider it an obvious moral failing not to do so). The fallacy only applies where C either continues on to argue that B has, somehow, not actually done X (because A did); or, at least, clearly has the purpose of distracting from the fact that B has done X.
But there is nothing fallacious about simply pointing out that A does not live up to A's own implied standards. There is nothing fallacious about the implication that A is therefore being either i) dishonest about the anti-X belief, or ii) simply hypocritical. (To be fair, we don't know, from the given information, which of those is the case; but I think it's fair to say that neither is "fair dealing" and that A is thus a legitimate target of criticism regardless.)
It is also not fallacious for C to use this as a jumping-off point to argue that X is in fact okay to do, although of course this requires further support.
