Anthropic Cofounder Chris Olah's Remarks on Pope Leo XIV's "Magnifica Humanitas" (opens in new tab)

> The first is our duty to the global poor. There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at very large scale. If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions.

This guy doesn't understand what the global poor actually do for a living. They're not lawyers or paper-pushers, nor do they work in medical diagnostics. They're usually farmers. Sometimes they work in craft businesses, in fishing boats, or in various mercantile trades.

Nobody's even talking about how AI is going to displace that kind of labor, because it's hard to do, hard even to conceive, and it doesn't seem likely to happen in the near term. Lawyers and judges can already be automated, but a yeoman farmer?

> 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

I love how he's framing AI as some new and fascinating form of consciousness... when in fact it is a cold, calculating technology devoid of any empathy or care.

Chris Olah and other leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI, and others would do well to consider the principles of Social Doctrine spelled out in the encyclical. The question they should ask themselves is how their corporations advance those principles.

Olah argues that "if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives."

That sounds part hypocritical and part evasive; the responsibility starts with the people inside the incentives — with him.

> AI development is concentrated in a handful of wealthy nations. How can we ensure the gains of AI are shared globally? We do not have a mechanism for this. It is an unsolved problem

Kind of ironic given almost every AI lab except the one you started and work for actually done model releases to the public, some more "open" than others, but still something.

Look around at what other companies are doing, Qwen/Alibaba seems to have found a pragmatic middleground where they keep the most powerful model variant closed source and only API-accessible, while other models are being released openly to the public, to the entire world in fact, and when the next model release comes around, the previously undisclosed model has now been superseded.

I wonder if Chris ever copy-pasted his writing into Claude and asked something like "Please review this honestly and give me raw feedback, and challenge every claim that is weak", seems there are more "not really reflective of reality" points than just the above.

So flat compared to the pope’s work. And puts all the impetus on the church instead of taking responsibility.

I don't know about you but his remarks read like AI. I don't think he was taking it seriously.

Whole lotta em-dashes in that speech.

"How can we ensure the gains of AI are shared globally? We do not have a mechanism for this" Somebody inform Anthropic about open models and research.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind

I don’t mind the actual content here. But I do find it disturbing that a company soon to before a monopolistic force affecting all our lives may have deep ties or be influenced by one religion or the other. This isn’t the first such tie up with organized religion either. Anthropic and OpenAI also have done work with the interfaith alliance. See their “Faith - AI Covenant”:

https://iafsc.org/our-work/faith-ai-covenant

I hope we don’t see safetyism, which is already a problem (see age verification and social media moderation), evolve into some sort of religious moralization implemented through AI providers.

AI is a golem

LLMs are software. They take inputs and produce outputs. What humans choose to do with those inputs and outputs is up to us.

Getting the pope involved makes it all seem more mystical and magical than it is. And these remarks only further feed that delusion. Regardless of intent, it seems to just feed the AI marketing and hype.

What we NEED is an end to fantastical religions with historic track records of creating the suffering and hardships they now bemoan as imminent given that Prometheus' Fire is about to set their foundations of lies ablaze.

What we NEED are unapologetic technologists who don't dare Galileo to roll over in his grave as they prance around the rhetoric of dogmatic marketeers.

What we NEED is a war of worlds, the old and the new, the imagined systems of men and the logical systems that have elevated all mankind, between the ones trying to drag the iniquities of the past into the future and those willing to abandon the past for it.

What we NEED are leaders that actually give a damn about winning this world for what we can become, not assjackal executives trying for a bigger IPO than the last.

The only thing that makes Ai the opportunity of the millennium is its power to empower us to render Pope and CEO alike irrelevant. Ai allows us to create a future without either of them and it is only us who stand in the way of making that future real.