From The New York Times:
Of all the reactions to Pope Leo’s manifesto on artificial intelligence, from its liberal humanist appreciators to its digital-consciousness-believing critics, one of the most notable is the disappointment of the A.I. skeptics who think the pope didn’t go nearly far enough. Writing in Compact magazine, Princeton’s Greg Conti responds to the pope’s description of the perils of the age of artificial intelligence by asking, “Must we have such an age declared already?” Could a pope not, instead, call for “an age of resistance to A.I.?” In The Hedgehog Review, the cultural critic Anton Barba-Kay comments that approaching A.I. as a “valuable tool that requires vigilance,” in Leo’s words, is like saying that “cocaine can be a valuable drug that should be snorted with a pinch of salt.”
My own reaction to the papal intervention had something in common with these critics. I thought Leo could have gone deeper into the sheer strangeness of artificial intelligence, the nature of its challenge to human exceptionalism, the reason it breeds so many messianic impulses and apocalyptic fears.