Browse Comments — Clean (de-noised)

Clara thank you for putting back the church in the middle of the village - a French expression : remettre l’église au milieu du village. No one has indeed has had the time to carefully read the entire document, understand it and digest it. Obviously this is not written by the pope himself. I wonder who is behind this and for how long have they been working on such document to be published.

This document deserves deep reading. Thanks for the link Clara Hawking

There is a new reality that we as humans need to learn how to deploy. Evolving technologies can improve the quality of human life at a population level. To reduce human suffering and improve how we live and interact both locally and globally. For example, once we accept that the tech can drive our vehicles better than humans, we stop people from dying senselessly and save (redirect) billions of dollars currently lost to property damage, insurance and legal costs. Once we realize that real time data can reinvent our health care system from remedial to preventative, again we save lives, reduce suffering and save so much cost we can provide health care to all. Our challenge is to realize that if we don't apply the technologies for good others will use them for evil and the risk is that they will have power over those who cannot (or don't) use the tech. I think many see AI as the "Sky Net" from the Terminator movie but in the end, it is just software that can be used for good or evil. If we don't ingrain morals and ethics into our overall behavior (at a population) then evil will take over whether its analog or digital. Perhaps our leaders need to be more focused on instilling morals/ethic and enforcing the law.

Clara Hawking This really resonates. In an always on age of AI, there’s a pressure to understand everything immediately to skim, summarize, conclude and move on. But that urgency is part of the problem. Attention is being pulled forward faster than our capacity to truly reflect. What stood out to me in your post is the idea of discernment as a process. That feels like the core human skill we’re at risk of losing If these systems are reshaping truth, education, and agency then our ability to slow down, sit with complexity, and choose where to place our attention becomes essential. Not just for governance but for staying human inside the system itself. Attention is everything.

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.

You are asking "how did anyone read a complex 144-page document and publish an informed analysis in just a few hours?". Clearly most did not, they fed the document to their favorite LLM and printed the slop that came out. I will look forward to your considered human-generated conclusions.

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.

Clara Hawking Don Kilburg, Ph.D. I thought his section on human rights was rather good. Worth a read in full.

When I was a child our parish priest had a monopoly on interpreting the Pope's writings

Clara, I’m curious how you think institutions can practically preserve that kind of humane reflection as AI systems scale so quickly, while geopolitical tensions, sometimes shaped by misinterpreted religions and religious influence, continue to rise.

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.

Thanks. I read a really good comment by swedish academic Virginia Dignum in Umeå University:

Fredrik Holmberg Will definitely read it. She is great. Thank you for the link.

Wanda Barquin Thank you for the link. I have been thinking a great deal about that partnership today, and watching reactions around the world. Still putting my thoughts together.

I began by reading it slowly, but eventually needed help working through the whole document while keeping the central thesis in mind. This is an important guide regardless of our choices in faith. So I set out to build Encyclical Map to help me comprehend. Hope this helps a little. Link | Magnifica . Cartu . App |

Thank you for using the term discernment and the proper framing of the roles of schools not merely as only educational centers. And you are right. The document will require re-reading several times in line with what Richard Feynman the famous physicist, also expressed about how to acquire knowledge by rereading to be able to fully grasp what you are acquiring in the learning process and be able to use it and communicate this to others.

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.

Proverbs 8 in the Bible, which relates to AI, has been forgotten or ignored.

The quickest also tended to be the least accurate.

So the irony here, as I suspect you know, is that those summaries, interpretations, and analyses are probably 90% AI generated. And I'm guessing those juicing the algorithms (Bezos? Altman? Thiel?) are probably not happy with Pope Leo, so I'd guess there are probably aspersions being cast among those analyses.