Notes on Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical on AI

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58 points by pretext 13 hours ago on hackernews | 11 comments

esperent | 12 hours ago

Earlier post on the actual Vatican document

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265206

Kwpolska | 12 hours ago

Where are the notes in this post? I can only see a bunch of quotes and zero original thought of the author.

KPGv2 | 12 hours ago

Quote selection is, of course, representative of original thought of the author.

: the-grump | 12 hours ago
Still they are not notes, which means GP continues to be valid.

aabhay | 12 hours ago

When you took notes in class was it required of you to add original thought for it to be notes?

: Kwpolska | 12 hours ago
Taking notes in class is akin to making a transcript of what the teacher said in class so you can remember and refer to what was said in class. The encyclical is a written document, so there is no need for a transcript, and "notes" implies commentary and analysis.

nilirl | 12 hours ago

HN has influencers like any other community. In this case, the upvotes are for the author and not the post.

basisword | 6 hours ago

I think it's just a poorly worded title. "Highlights from x" would be more clear. "Notes on" suggests some commentary.

simonw | 3 hours ago

My original title was actually "Highlights from", then I changed it to "Notes on" because that was a shorter title for linking on social media.

Did not expect to get called out for not making it "notes-like" enough!

I think including the Vatican News bit about how the Pope chose the name Leo because he planned to think about AI in the same way his predecessor had thought about the Industrial Revolution earns an upgrade to "notes", personally.

: basisword | 3 hours ago
No complaints from me, just trying to explain the confusion. Personally with a 'notes on' I'd expect a full piece of original commentary about the thing (rather than mostly excerpts from the thing) but it's not a big deal.

sometimelurker | 3 hours ago

I really liked paragraph 153, 3ed down from here (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...). I just love how it mixes really abstract ideas with actual concrete problems. really well written

Also Leo XIV has a degree in math, so he totally gets the interpretability problems with AI on deeper level than otherwise ("...current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,...")