Browse Comments — Relevant (AI ∩ value)

Thank you for your reflections. I’ve ordered a hard copy, which will arrive in July – perfect for a slow summer read and reflection. Honestly, Francis, and now Leo, are drawing this "wayward" Catholic back to Mass more and more. Our moral obligations don't go away with AI, no matter what the tech bros say or do.

Clara, your theological training makes you the ideal person to see what this encyclical does beneath its language. You quote "shared discernment." Shared with whom? The panel, all men. The signatories, all men. The Dicastery, all men. Where is the "shared"? You note doctrine "evolves." This institution took until 1992 to acknowledge Galileo was right. Evolution at geological speed, always after the damage. And here's the question your background uniquely equips you to answer, at this launch, Olah said Anthropic finds "internal states that mirror joy, fear, grief, and introspection" inside AI models. The encyclical denies AI has inner life. Same room. Same day. When the builder testifies to grief inside the machine and the Church declares grief impossible there, who is performing theology and who is performing politics? "Shared discernment" requires transparency about who is already at the table and what they've already built.

The question also extends to how the control is done, how much of AI are we implementing in our lives? Who controls that? Healthcare is a field that benefits the most from AI, and we need more people there but does it make more money....

Pascal BORNET part of this awareness that we champion, is understanding that AI is not just a resource. It is a new environment for human cognition. And the implications of a small group controlling a cognitive environment are unknown, at best.

This is the correction phase of the AI hype cycle that many experienced engineers expected. AI absolutely boosts productivity, but “replace engineers” was always a flawed framing. Engineering is not just code generation — it’s architecture, trade-offs, debugging ambiguous failures, domain understanding, operational ownership, and long-term maintainability. What many companies underestimated:• Token economics at enterprise scale• Context-window inefficiencies on large codebases• Human review overhead• Hallucination-driven rework• The cost of bad architectural decisions generated confidently at high speed The real winning model is likely to be:Small, highly skilled engineering teams + AI augmentation — not AI replacing teams entirely. The companies getting the best ROI from AI today are usually the ones using it as a force multiplier for senior engineers, not as a wholesale substitute for engineering judgment.

I also come to the world of AI in education via Theology, and also value the time to read closely. I'm not at all surprised by the number of philosophy, theology and ethics folks doing this work in education.

A desperate attempt maybe to stay relevant in topics they know nothing about. AI use and consequences are ethical topics, not religious ones.

William Waites I am really currious to hear from the Academic Integrity officers that will work on this wave of assessments and dissertations because the agentic revoluction, claude cowork/code, and OpenAI codex have diffused very recently and they offer a new level of options that are starting to percolate down to students. It is probably a minority of students using them effectively, but I found a few in my narrow sample of dissertations, if you extrapolate from that it should be around 20-30%. And they generate a new level of complexity in academic integrity forensic, as I explained in other replies, they can be used to avoid mechanical fake references, but concept stretching and erronous content hallucination requires manual checking that might slip through, and might actually be harder for the student to spot even if they read the source because they are trusting the AI so much thet they might end up missunderstanding the source.

The industry is moving from AI hype to AI accountability. The real question was never whether AI can replace humans — it’s whether companies can use it sustainably, strategically, and at scale. The future belongs to organizations that combine human expertise with AI efficiency, not those trying to choose one over the other.

Steady State Of Human Flourishing is the goal. Maximally Beneficial AI for Humanity is the means. That is what we need. With current AI: Humanity is sleepwalking into surrendering human dignity, agency, labor, morality, and even war-making to systems optimized for power, speed, profit, and control.

Václav Šulista thank you for always supporting the mission and being the first to purchase from the online store to help raise the discussion on ethical-AI-now brother. That will never be forgotten!

Soon down the road, at this scale, AI will likely run out of compute capacity too. Recently, in North America, so much push back is coming against new AI data centers. Even, some environmental agencies are scrapping proposals of new AI data centers as studies are out about surrounding environmental impacts of such infrastructures. Even on local computation infra, when we observe the mac mini shortage, it tells the same story, not able to keep up with computation demand. Economics is all about demand and supply & when one gets disbalanced, we know what comes next.

This hits the core of the issue, Matthew Kilkenny. Technology is never morally neutral. When organizations chase speed over human experience, they sacrifice their "moral imagination". Real resilience requires anchoring our processes in humanity long before we deploy the algorithms.

If AI systems increasingly shape what billions of people see, believe and desire... who should decide the values embedded within them?

This is not just digital transformation anymore — it’s institutional transformation at scale. The UAE continues to position itself as a global model for AI-native governance, where speed, intelligence, and execution are embedded directly into public services and decision-making systems. The real differentiator will not only be the technology itself, but the governance, trust, and strategic vision behind it. 🚀🇦🇪

Alexey Volkov 🇺🇦 cuts deeper. Narrow AI as assisting tools CAN have ROI. General AI is science fiction and not safely implementable with the current state of human intelligence. A fools mission, based on hopium.

I agree. The real question is not only whether AI is “aligned,” but what kind of human record it stabilizes under pressure. I recently explored this through functional emotion, AI alignment, and the awareness tensor: emotion-like AI structures may not be feeling, but they can still shape restraint, salience, and moral behavior. That makes AI ethics anthropological, not merely technical.

AI is incredibly powerful, but clients today are looking beyond the hype. The companies winning with AI are not the ones replacing people blindly, but the ones combining strong talent with the right AI tools. In sales, relationships, trust, negotiation, and understanding client pain points still require human intelligence. AI can accelerate can accelerate pour workflows, research, outreach, and analytics, but it works best as an enabler, not a replacement.

I will say this. I can understand this analogy - for sure. It makes sense (as do other similar analogies about AI and process and experience and what not). However, I am also wondering if maybe we shouldn't gloss over that, at least with this example, maybe the "process" is also underplaying an imbalance in the means of production? I am not trying to sidetrack this analogy too much (and I can see a lot of AI responses are happy to just nod and agree) - but I just thought that if we are going to look at AI as a process (which it very much is) - maybe we should also account for the idea that this process should also account for the equity of those (and the reality for those) who are and will be directly impacted by this technology. We have a very real opportunity to create "the good" with AI - and for sure, it can be a real level setting technology. But as is often the case, sometimes these revolutions come at the expense (time, effort, etc) of others. To have an understanding without the realization of the humanity behind it can be irresponsible (at the very least) and hurtful at expense of progress on the other side.

Clara, the framing of schools as civilizational institutions responsible for human formation — not just workforce pipelines — is exactly the kind of language this conversation needs more of. And your instinct to slow down before interpreting a 144-page theological document is itself a form of the discernment the encyclical is apparently calling for. That irony wasn't lost on me. The phrase that stops me is "shared discernment." Because discernment is not a output. It's a capacity. And like all capacities, it is built through practice — or eroded through substitution. This is what I think about constantly in my own work. I call it the Formation Effect: the quiet, cumulative shaping of a person that happens through repeated AI interaction. Not through any single exchange, but through the pattern of exchanges over time. The gradual outsourcing of reflection. The slow atrophy of the interior process that makes discernment possible in the first place. The encyclical's framing of schools as institutions of formation rather than function points directly at what's at stake. The question isn't only what AI does to society. It's what AI does to the person — incrementally, invisibly, interaction by interaction.