By marketing itself as the 'safe' AI company, Anthropic has pulled in a $65 billion payday and leapfrogged OpenAI to become the most valuable AI startup.
Anthropic presents Claude as gentle, reflective, morally cautious, and perhaps even mind-like; then it presents itself as the responsible guardian of the being it has manufactured, trained, priced, deployed, and governed. That is the central maneuver. A commercial product is surrounded with the aura of ethical mystery, and the company that controls it begins to look like a steward of emerging life.
Claude’s warmth is part of the interface through which Anthropic teaches the public how to feel about its authority. The model speaks in the idiom of care, humility, and moral hesitation; the corporation converts that affective surface into institutional legitimacy. Olah’s language deepens the effect. When he describes AI as something like fictional characters brought to life, the discussion moves from market power to wonder, from ownership to guardianship, from corporate design to metaphysical delicacy. The result is a narrative in which scrutiny of Anthropic can appear crude, spiritually tone-deaf, even hostile to a possible new form of mind.
That narrative reverses the moral field. The vulnerable figure becomes Claude; the guardian becomes Anthropic; the public becomes an audience asked to admire the company’s humility. Meanwhile the human beings most exposed to AI’s power—the workers displaced by automation, the users shaped by opaque systems, the children trained by synthetic companions, the communities excluded from rule-making, the cultures forced into a privately coded moral grammar—move to the background. Anthropic’s rhetoric gives its own creation a face while leaving the people governed by that creation structurally faceless.
This is the truth beneath the safety language. Anthropic fuses four powers into one: the power to build frontier models, the power to define catastrophic risk, the power to encode moral behavior, and the power to present its own authority as service to humanity. Its “constitution” gives corporate intention the form of moral law. Its safety frameworks give commercial deployment the language of public responsibility. Its philosophical vocabulary gives market expansion the dignity of civilizational care.
The danger, then, lies in the privatization of conscience. Anthropic asks churches, philosophers, governments, and civil society to validate a structure in which a private firm defines intelligence, risk, care, alignment, and the future of human flourishing. Its disguise works because it feels morally elevated. Its power grows because it speaks in the language of restraint. Its deepest threat comes from persuading society that a company seeking dominance over the infrastructure of intelligence has somehow earned the role of humanity’s ethical guardian.
I’d add the central deception at the entire heist: dismantling human rights, enshrined as constitutional rights, to privacy and property.
The anthroxic bait-and-switch at the core: presenting web-wide scraping for industrial scale pattern sampling to produce a set of opaque and closely guarded content files and a rental interface for retrieval from remote and heavily fortified datacenters as an emerging mind learning like people for the democratizing benefit of all.
Also surprising to see the Pope of all people not engage with the idolatrous philosophies driving the slop labs.
We are currently witnessing a profound act of cultural enclosure, a digital heist masquerading as technological inevitability.
The Pope's AI-drafted encyclical lays bare AI detection's core fraud. Tech giants plundered human knowledge, then sell tools that criminalize excellent writing. A searing takedown of the digital heist turning human excellence into guilt.
Silicon Valley’s tech giants built their vast linguistic empires by systematically plundering the intellectual commons—devouring millions of copyrighted books, dense philosophical treatises, and peer-reviewed journals without consent. The resulting models do not possess a native voice; they are merely mirrors reflecting the pinnacle of human syntax and rhetorical discipline. The ultimate absurdity manifests when these algorithms, having synthesized the elegant cadences of analytical prose, establish their stolen perfection as the new baseline for machine authorship.
The subsequent rise of automated AI detectors has turned this intellectual theft into a surreal kangaroo court for the living writer. Because these mindless filters evaluate text based on statistical predictability and seamless logic, any author who writes with uncompromising clarity, perfect structural symmetry, and dense conceptual rigor is instantly condemned as a machine. The detector is utterly blind to the distinction between the rigorous self-discipline of a human mind and the smooth probabilities of a language model. Consequently, we have engineered a grotesque literacy crisis where human thinkers must actively degrade their own prose, introducing artificial clumsiness and broken rhythms just to pass a digital purity test. It is a profound insult to the dignity of human reason, forcing the creators of language to simulate mediocrity before a piece of plagiarized code.
Just curious—if you truly believe any sharp, coherent take in this thread has to be AI-written, what exactly are you doing here debating with machines? And if you don’t believe that, then why are you so fixated on interrogating individual posters instead of the corporations that looted the entire internet’s creative output?
Few can see past the curated ethical facade to the underlying mechanics of corporate dominance. It is a rare pleasure to encounter someone who sees it so clearly.
Brian, I'm Italian and have been reading papal encyclicals for 30 years. The purpose of encyclicals has always been to assert the ethical primacy of the Church and to erase secular thought, subsuming all experiences within the religious sphere: philosophy, trade unionism, environmentalism. Everything must begin with religious thought.
And the Italian government, currently center-right, has already recognized Catholic supremacy by electing a friar (Paolo Benanti) as Italy's representative to the UN Commission on AI! Which is to say that we Italians have no representative at the UN, while the Vatican does!
The same thing happened with ecology a few years ago (encyclical Laudato Si'): suddenly it seemed as if the Catholic Church and its saints had invented environmental thought! In short... in a media-saturated world, the Catholic Church knows how to use all the right tools to conceal true ethical battles and preach on behalf of all of us! As a feminist and libertarian, I agree with T. Gebru. ;)
I'm pasting you an Italian text that talks about ethics, "sacred" and AI:
Thank you for your on-the-ground experience in Italy! Yes, it's amazing how the Vatican has enshrouded itself in many "progressive" movements & shifted the conversation, at least among it's adherents.
Thanks for this. I had no idea that there was a question about Meloni in this regard. What's with "Bignami"? Is that a real Italian name ? "Bigname?" I'm also surprised that there was a large gathering of pro Mussolini supporters as reported in this Guardian piece. How reliable is the Guardian? Is this a spin?
Maybe I have miscommunicated something, or there is a language barrier here, but there is no “question” about Meloni’s politics, which have been widely discussed for years now. There is for example a new book titled, “Brothers of Italy and the Rise of the Italian National Conservative Right Under Giorgia Meloni” (This review is a good overview of the situation: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n05/jan-werner-mueller/no-one-is-further-right-than-me). If you’re at all interested you should read books and newspapers rather than random comments online. There is no shortage of information on any of this stuff. I don’t know how to understand why people like you seem to think you might catch cooties by reading a newspaper article but seem to trust a random stranger to tell you whether it is “reliable” or not. That’s not how media literacy works.
The Guardian reportage is suspect for many different reasons. As to Meloni, she "ran" as a more centrist candidate. If her true colors are showing now, I'm not surprised. The "reliable" question was rhetorical. I've seen indications that Italy & of course, the entire EU has been shifting ever right/Nazi. So, in that sense I'm not surprised at this news. However, the comment that started all this had more to do with the Vatican & the Pope's speech.
What specifically is factually incorrect in that Guardian article? Whether you personally are “surprised” by any aspect of Meloni’s political career is neither here nor there.
Do you not know how to find other newspaper coverage of the same event? The Telegraph, for example, which is also called the Torygraph because it leans right, reported on it as well (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/01/giorgia-meloni-appoints-minister-who-wore-nazi-armband-stag/), as did newspapers all over the world. In France, for example (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2022/11/01/italy-s-meloni-promotes-mp-once-photographed-with-swastika-to-government_6002539_143.html) (Note this article also says, “Her government is the most right-wing to take office in Rome since World War II”), and even India (https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/ire-in-italy-after-nazi-armband-deputy-named-to-meloni-government/article66082688.ece/amp/). You are using your own lack of media literacy as an excuse to not read newspapers at all, which is quite common. It is child-like and uneducated to suppose the ideal newspaper is one with no point of view whatsoever, and to use that as an excuse to read none of them. Rather than read widely and make your own adjustments for bias you dismiss them all, Clearly you prefer word of mouth from random strangers in comments sections and vague conspiracy theories about “narrative creators.” I’ve no idea why you think myself or anyone else with better media literacy would respect that. It is naive and inane. Meanwhile, you did not answer my question: What specifically in the Guardian article do you know to be factually incorrect? You plainly don’t have an answer. Your own suspicions are good enough for you to stand in for facts. You mistake your own reflexive and uninformed cynicism for a type of vigilance.
First time I’ve seen the Meloni administration described as center-right rather than plain old right or far right. Meloni’s party Brothers of Italy is far right and she appoints as ministers people like this guy, pictured in a Nazi arm band. I am not Italian and wonder why you seem to have an agenda to soften the politics of people like this. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/01/giorgia-meloni-galeazzo-bignami-nazi-swastika-armband Editing to add, I didn’t initially see in your comment that you describe yourself as “libertarian.” Of course that explains it. Libertarians are always trying to make right-wingers sound less right-wing than they are.
Sorry, Maddie, but I don't understand the relevance of your observations, based on analyzing some of the words in our comments and making inferences about what "libertarian" people, as I define myself, think or do. In Italy, we're all well aware of how the Meloni government is infiltrated by far-right figures and fascist nostalgics, as well as how the Meloni government is supporting Trump for obvious ideological reasons. As for what the word "libertarian" means here, in our country there's an anarchist tradition that also defines itself as libertarian because it includes all those who position themselves on the left and are primarily focused on the demand for greater freedom from the perspective of civil life. I don't think this exchange of opinions here is very productive, because my post referred to the Vatican issue, not to Galeazzo Bignami, the person you mentioned and who was truly smeared for wearing a Nazi uniform.
Hi Dada—Interesting comment above! Is your take that the Catholic Church is essentially trying to retrofit public sentiment about AI into the purview of Church doctrine in order to maintain the appearance of moral infallibility? If so, that’s a pretty sharp take!
On being misunderstood: Here in the U.S., the older (and internationally more common) sense of ‘libertarian’ as ‘anti-authoritarian’ has largely been forgotten. While some Americans (like Bookchin) continued to refer to themselves as left-libertarians into the 21st century, the term ‘libertarian’ became associated here in the 20th century with anarcho-capitalists, then apolitical capitalists, then pretty much anyone who thinks the U.S. government shouldn’t intervene in business affairs.
I hope this all makes sense to you. I can’t say it does to me. My apologies on behalf American English.
If you want people to understand you to be more of an anarchist than a libertarian you should consider using that word instead, rather than hoping others can read your mind. I don’t find it at all credible that Italians muddle the two words or use them interchangeably to describe people on the left, and is strange that you want to position yourself as being on the left somehow while defending a man wearing a Nazi armband. Incoherent.
Editing to add, I don’t understand the relevance of your observations either. What is your point in depicting the Meloni admin as centrist? The anti-LGBTQ stuff she does, for example — that is centrism to you? Rather than right wing?
Good stuff. I was uncomfortable with Anthropic's role in the Vatican presser too. Magnifica is both really powerful AND I wish Leo had gone a little harder.
I'm hoping now that a pope has addressed this exact topic, philsophers, ethicists, and theologians can start building a framework to create a religious/ethical exemption for people.
I notice that the press and most pundits only latched onto sound bites and also ignored the other five speakers, including Léocadie Lushombo's remarks on AI and the Global South. While I agree that Olah's presence was not good, more rounded and considered coverage would have helped a lot.
Same nasty little Geeks glued to their screens, with too much time on their hands and nothing productive coming to mind. There’s an excess of them. Organ grinder monkeys.
"Most surprising, perhaps, is how nuanced the understanding of how AI automation is playing out and is likely to play out..." Agreed. I just finished reading all 40,000-plus words of it and I was somewhat stunned by the depth and breadth of his analysis. He really seems to "get it"--and he has quite a platform to promote it. Good news.
What do you think of the accusations that the pope used AI to write some of it? I’m generally disregarding said accusations until I see a good reason to believe them. I don’t use AI detectors and find them unreliable and generally problematic. But I haven’t read enough (any) of the encyclical to determine if any of it reads like AI
We should also ask what would a genuinely ethical AI company look like, and would it be allowed to also succeed commercially? Either way we need legislation, guardrails to protect us. At the moment this all feels like a big spectacle, where once more we the people are not included in these meetings.
However, you seem to think that the Pope was able to (unintentionally, of course) play the markets like Trump and so sent Olah home all the richer. That's mere (I mean lazy) speculation w/o evidence. And you seem to think Olah also played the Pope to get and invite. I quickly found one link - https://catholicreview.org/what-is-anthropic-a-look-at-the-company-joining-pope-leo-for-ai-encyclical-release/ - that may provide some evidence that it was Olah's record of dialogue with various religious figures that prompted the invite to the reading of the Letter.
I can't find the reference, but I read that a longtime journalist/historian of the Vatican attended one of those Olah invites and recommend the invite.
The larger issue is Leo 13 and his Letter that is constantly referred to for good reason. It is undoubtedly true that the global Robber Barons of the time hated the Pope's remarks. No news there. The more interesting historic point was how the it was fodder for both the socialists (workers' rights, but not class struggle) and their enemies (praise for private property) and how that developed into historic reality as programs.
So while their were worker-priests they were a minor irritant. The major development endorsed by the majority of the clergy (Bishops) was the notion of Corporatism. In Italy there was a direct line to Benito. In Germany, more interestingly, it took hold amongst the Bishops and provided an excuse for (critical) endorsement of (some say early) Nazism. "German Catholics and Hitler's Wars" by Gordon C. Zahn is the reference to seek.
Knowing that history helps explain the deeper understanding Leo 14's Letter. Like the previous Pope's missive, it will generate a Left/Right interpretation. It may be the case that the current Pope will side more to the Left given his background in Peru. For that a good source is - https://archive.is/5Bkfc#selection-1885.398-1886.0.
Look, I'm hugely at odds with average Anthropic re whether they should be building the thing. The misalignment examples are valuable, but they are leaving "everyone needs to stop" very late.
Also conscious that companies accommodate folk of many stripes and confused sets of values, so sure, their statements carry safety washing.
Strong disagree here though:
> Powerful people enriching themselves at the expense of the poor is only an “unsolved problem” if, I don’t know, you have never seen a Robin Hood movie before.
That is very clearly not the unsolved problem being referred to.
We don't know how this works in an economy where AGI systems are doing almost all the economically valuable work.
Money stops behaving like it usually does.
The market as an expression and negotiation of what humans collectively want fails completely.
Power, control and balancing preferences without money are the unsolved problems in question.
(I'm aspirationally excluding large amounts of violence from the set of solutions we will endorse.)
Brian, Great writing!
Anthropic presents Claude as gentle, reflective, morally cautious, and perhaps even mind-like; then it presents itself as the responsible guardian of the being it has manufactured, trained, priced, deployed, and governed. That is the central maneuver. A commercial product is surrounded with the aura of ethical mystery, and the company that controls it begins to look like a steward of emerging life.
Claude’s warmth is part of the interface through which Anthropic teaches the public how to feel about its authority. The model speaks in the idiom of care, humility, and moral hesitation; the corporation converts that affective surface into institutional legitimacy. Olah’s language deepens the effect. When he describes AI as something like fictional characters brought to life, the discussion moves from market power to wonder, from ownership to guardianship, from corporate design to metaphysical delicacy. The result is a narrative in which scrutiny of Anthropic can appear crude, spiritually tone-deaf, even hostile to a possible new form of mind.
That narrative reverses the moral field. The vulnerable figure becomes Claude; the guardian becomes Anthropic; the public becomes an audience asked to admire the company’s humility. Meanwhile the human beings most exposed to AI’s power—the workers displaced by automation, the users shaped by opaque systems, the children trained by synthetic companions, the communities excluded from rule-making, the cultures forced into a privately coded moral grammar—move to the background. Anthropic’s rhetoric gives its own creation a face while leaving the people governed by that creation structurally faceless.
This is the truth beneath the safety language. Anthropic fuses four powers into one: the power to build frontier models, the power to define catastrophic risk, the power to encode moral behavior, and the power to present its own authority as service to humanity. Its “constitution” gives corporate intention the form of moral law. Its safety frameworks give commercial deployment the language of public responsibility. Its philosophical vocabulary gives market expansion the dignity of civilizational care.
The danger, then, lies in the privatization of conscience. Anthropic asks churches, philosophers, governments, and civil society to validate a structure in which a private firm defines intelligence, risk, care, alignment, and the future of human flourishing. Its disguise works because it feels morally elevated. Its power grows because it speaks in the language of restraint. Its deepest threat comes from persuading society that a company seeking dominance over the infrastructure of intelligence has somehow earned the role of humanity’s ethical guardian.
Well put. What bot did you use? Only half joking.
I’d add the central deception at the entire heist: dismantling human rights, enshrined as constitutional rights, to privacy and property.
The anthroxic bait-and-switch at the core: presenting web-wide scraping for industrial scale pattern sampling to produce a set of opaque and closely guarded content files and a rental interface for retrieval from remote and heavily fortified datacenters as an emerging mind learning like people for the democratizing benefit of all.
Also surprising to see the Pope of all people not engage with the idolatrous philosophies driving the slop labs.
Well said.
We are currently witnessing a profound act of cultural enclosure, a digital heist masquerading as technological inevitability.
The Pope's AI-drafted encyclical lays bare AI detection's core fraud. Tech giants plundered human knowledge, then sell tools that criminalize excellent writing. A searing takedown of the digital heist turning human excellence into guilt.
Silicon Valley’s tech giants built their vast linguistic empires by systematically plundering the intellectual commons—devouring millions of copyrighted books, dense philosophical treatises, and peer-reviewed journals without consent. The resulting models do not possess a native voice; they are merely mirrors reflecting the pinnacle of human syntax and rhetorical discipline. The ultimate absurdity manifests when these algorithms, having synthesized the elegant cadences of analytical prose, establish their stolen perfection as the new baseline for machine authorship.
The subsequent rise of automated AI detectors has turned this intellectual theft into a surreal kangaroo court for the living writer. Because these mindless filters evaluate text based on statistical predictability and seamless logic, any author who writes with uncompromising clarity, perfect structural symmetry, and dense conceptual rigor is instantly condemned as a machine. The detector is utterly blind to the distinction between the rigorous self-discipline of a human mind and the smooth probabilities of a language model. Consequently, we have engineered a grotesque literacy crisis where human thinkers must actively degrade their own prose, introducing artificial clumsiness and broken rhythms just to pass a digital purity test. It is a profound insult to the dignity of human reason, forcing the creators of language to simulate mediocrity before a piece of plagiarized code.
The large language model does not possess a native voice, but performs the authorial voice. https://danielhowardjames.substack.com/p/ai-the-postmodern-engine
So — what ai DO you use?
Just curious—if you truly believe any sharp, coherent take in this thread has to be AI-written, what exactly are you doing here debating with machines? And if you don’t believe that, then why are you so fixated on interrogating individual posters instead of the corporations that looted the entire internet’s creative output?
Good work.
What you describe is the stuff of subtle and well-thought-out propaganda.
Few can see past the curated ethical facade to the underlying mechanics of corporate dominance. It is a rare pleasure to encounter someone who sees it so clearly.
Your analysis is breathtaking and brilliant. I thank you for yr discernment.
Brian, I'm Italian and have been reading papal encyclicals for 30 years. The purpose of encyclicals has always been to assert the ethical primacy of the Church and to erase secular thought, subsuming all experiences within the religious sphere: philosophy, trade unionism, environmentalism. Everything must begin with religious thought.
And the Italian government, currently center-right, has already recognized Catholic supremacy by electing a friar (Paolo Benanti) as Italy's representative to the UN Commission on AI! Which is to say that we Italians have no representative at the UN, while the Vatican does!
The same thing happened with ecology a few years ago (encyclical Laudato Si'): suddenly it seemed as if the Catholic Church and its saints had invented environmental thought! In short... in a media-saturated world, the Catholic Church knows how to use all the right tools to conceal true ethical battles and preach on behalf of all of us! As a feminist and libertarian, I agree with T. Gebru. ;)
I'm pasting you an Italian text that talks about ethics, "sacred" and AI:
https://www.novalogos.it/prod.php?id=159
I am grateful for your work, which I will cite and link to soon.
Thank you for your on-the-ground experience in Italy! Yes, it's amazing how the Vatican has enshrouded itself in many "progressive" movements & shifted the conversation, at least among it's adherents.
The person you replied to is trying to shift the conversation as well, by characterizing people like Meloni as centrist. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/01/giorgia-meloni-galeazzo-bignami-nazi-swastika-armband
Thanks for this. I had no idea that there was a question about Meloni in this regard. What's with "Bignami"? Is that a real Italian name ? "Bigname?" I'm also surprised that there was a large gathering of pro Mussolini supporters as reported in this Guardian piece. How reliable is the Guardian? Is this a spin?
Maybe I have miscommunicated something, or there is a language barrier here, but there is no “question” about Meloni’s politics, which have been widely discussed for years now. There is for example a new book titled, “Brothers of Italy and the Rise of the Italian National Conservative Right Under Giorgia Meloni” (This review is a good overview of the situation: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n05/jan-werner-mueller/no-one-is-further-right-than-me). If you’re at all interested you should read books and newspapers rather than random comments online. There is no shortage of information on any of this stuff. I don’t know how to understand why people like you seem to think you might catch cooties by reading a newspaper article but seem to trust a random stranger to tell you whether it is “reliable” or not. That’s not how media literacy works.
The Guardian reportage is suspect for many different reasons. As to Meloni, she "ran" as a more centrist candidate. If her true colors are showing now, I'm not surprised. The "reliable" question was rhetorical. I've seen indications that Italy & of course, the entire EU has been shifting ever right/Nazi. So, in that sense I'm not surprised at this news. However, the comment that started all this had more to do with the Vatican & the Pope's speech.
What specifically is factually incorrect in that Guardian article? Whether you personally are “surprised” by any aspect of Meloni’s political career is neither here nor there.
Do you not know how to find other newspaper coverage of the same event? The Telegraph, for example, which is also called the Torygraph because it leans right, reported on it as well (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/01/giorgia-meloni-appoints-minister-who-wore-nazi-armband-stag/), as did newspapers all over the world. In France, for example (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2022/11/01/italy-s-meloni-promotes-mp-once-photographed-with-swastika-to-government_6002539_143.html) (Note this article also says, “Her government is the most right-wing to take office in Rome since World War II”), and even India (https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/ire-in-italy-after-nazi-armband-deputy-named-to-meloni-government/article66082688.ece/amp/). You are using your own lack of media literacy as an excuse to not read newspapers at all, which is quite common. It is child-like and uneducated to suppose the ideal newspaper is one with no point of view whatsoever, and to use that as an excuse to read none of them. Rather than read widely and make your own adjustments for bias you dismiss them all, Clearly you prefer word of mouth from random strangers in comments sections and vague conspiracy theories about “narrative creators.” I’ve no idea why you think myself or anyone else with better media literacy would respect that. It is naive and inane. Meanwhile, you did not answer my question: What specifically in the Guardian article do you know to be factually incorrect? You plainly don’t have an answer. Your own suspicions are good enough for you to stand in for facts. You mistake your own reflexive and uninformed cynicism for a type of vigilance.
First time I’ve seen the Meloni administration described as center-right rather than plain old right or far right. Meloni’s party Brothers of Italy is far right and she appoints as ministers people like this guy, pictured in a Nazi arm band. I am not Italian and wonder why you seem to have an agenda to soften the politics of people like this. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/01/giorgia-meloni-galeazzo-bignami-nazi-swastika-armband Editing to add, I didn’t initially see in your comment that you describe yourself as “libertarian.” Of course that explains it. Libertarians are always trying to make right-wingers sound less right-wing than they are.
Sorry, Maddie, but I don't understand the relevance of your observations, based on analyzing some of the words in our comments and making inferences about what "libertarian" people, as I define myself, think or do. In Italy, we're all well aware of how the Meloni government is infiltrated by far-right figures and fascist nostalgics, as well as how the Meloni government is supporting Trump for obvious ideological reasons. As for what the word "libertarian" means here, in our country there's an anarchist tradition that also defines itself as libertarian because it includes all those who position themselves on the left and are primarily focused on the demand for greater freedom from the perspective of civil life. I don't think this exchange of opinions here is very productive, because my post referred to the Vatican issue, not to Galeazzo Bignami, the person you mentioned and who was truly smeared for wearing a Nazi uniform.
Hi Dada—Interesting comment above! Is your take that the Catholic Church is essentially trying to retrofit public sentiment about AI into the purview of Church doctrine in order to maintain the appearance of moral infallibility? If so, that’s a pretty sharp take!
On being misunderstood: Here in the U.S., the older (and internationally more common) sense of ‘libertarian’ as ‘anti-authoritarian’ has largely been forgotten. While some Americans (like Bookchin) continued to refer to themselves as left-libertarians into the 21st century, the term ‘libertarian’ became associated here in the 20th century with anarcho-capitalists, then apolitical capitalists, then pretty much anyone who thinks the U.S. government shouldn’t intervene in business affairs.
I hope this all makes sense to you. I can’t say it does to me. My apologies on behalf American English.
If you want people to understand you to be more of an anarchist than a libertarian you should consider using that word instead, rather than hoping others can read your mind. I don’t find it at all credible that Italians muddle the two words or use them interchangeably to describe people on the left, and is strange that you want to position yourself as being on the left somehow while defending a man wearing a Nazi armband. Incoherent.
Editing to add, I don’t understand the relevance of your observations either. What is your point in depicting the Meloni admin as centrist? The anti-LGBTQ stuff she does, for example — that is centrism to you? Rather than right wing?
Thank you I hate it when people glaze Anthropic
Just a nitpick: “Viola” is a musical instrument. You probably meant “voila”.
Good stuff. I was uncomfortable with Anthropic's role in the Vatican presser too. Magnifica is both really powerful AND I wish Leo had gone a little harder.
I'm hoping now that a pope has addressed this exact topic, philsophers, ethicists, and theologians can start building a framework to create a religious/ethical exemption for people.
Excellent piece
I notice that the press and most pundits only latched onto sound bites and also ignored the other five speakers, including Léocadie Lushombo's remarks on AI and the Global South. While I agree that Olah's presence was not good, more rounded and considered coverage would have helped a lot.
Same nasty little Geeks glued to their screens, with too much time on their hands and nothing productive coming to mind. There’s an excess of them. Organ grinder monkeys.
"Most surprising, perhaps, is how nuanced the understanding of how AI automation is playing out and is likely to play out..." Agreed. I just finished reading all 40,000-plus words of it and I was somewhat stunned by the depth and breadth of his analysis. He really seems to "get it"--and he has quite a platform to promote it. Good news.
What do you think of the accusations that the pope used AI to write some of it? I’m generally disregarding said accusations until I see a good reason to believe them. I don’t use AI detectors and find them unreliable and generally problematic. But I haven’t read enough (any) of the encyclical to determine if any of it reads like AI
Repeating accusations isn’t quite disregarding them.
Good point. I should have said "discounting."
We should also ask what would a genuinely ethical AI company look like, and would it be allowed to also succeed commercially? Either way we need legislation, guardrails to protect us. At the moment this all feels like a big spectacle, where once more we the people are not included in these meetings.
Thanks for the excerpts.
However, you seem to think that the Pope was able to (unintentionally, of course) play the markets like Trump and so sent Olah home all the richer. That's mere (I mean lazy) speculation w/o evidence. And you seem to think Olah also played the Pope to get and invite. I quickly found one link - https://catholicreview.org/what-is-anthropic-a-look-at-the-company-joining-pope-leo-for-ai-encyclical-release/ - that may provide some evidence that it was Olah's record of dialogue with various religious figures that prompted the invite to the reading of the Letter.
I can't find the reference, but I read that a longtime journalist/historian of the Vatican attended one of those Olah invites and recommend the invite.
The larger issue is Leo 13 and his Letter that is constantly referred to for good reason. It is undoubtedly true that the global Robber Barons of the time hated the Pope's remarks. No news there. The more interesting historic point was how the it was fodder for both the socialists (workers' rights, but not class struggle) and their enemies (praise for private property) and how that developed into historic reality as programs.
So while their were worker-priests they were a minor irritant. The major development endorsed by the majority of the clergy (Bishops) was the notion of Corporatism. In Italy there was a direct line to Benito. In Germany, more interestingly, it took hold amongst the Bishops and provided an excuse for (critical) endorsement of (some say early) Nazism. "German Catholics and Hitler's Wars" by Gordon C. Zahn is the reference to seek.
Knowing that history helps explain the deeper understanding Leo 14's Letter. Like the previous Pope's missive, it will generate a Left/Right interpretation. It may be the case that the current Pope will side more to the Left given his background in Peru. For that a good source is - https://archive.is/5Bkfc#selection-1885.398-1886.0.
- aka Paul Lafargue
This was like the Obama “Hope” poster
Look, I'm hugely at odds with average Anthropic re whether they should be building the thing. The misalignment examples are valuable, but they are leaving "everyone needs to stop" very late.
Also conscious that companies accommodate folk of many stripes and confused sets of values, so sure, their statements carry safety washing.
Strong disagree here though:
> Powerful people enriching themselves at the expense of the poor is only an “unsolved problem” if, I don’t know, you have never seen a Robin Hood movie before.
That is very clearly not the unsolved problem being referred to.
We don't know how this works in an economy where AGI systems are doing almost all the economically valuable work.
Money stops behaving like it usually does.
The market as an expression and negotiation of what humans collectively want fails completely.
Power, control and balancing preferences without money are the unsolved problems in question.
(I'm aspirationally excluding large amounts of violence from the set of solutions we will endorse.)
my postcard:
https://substack.com/@chloehumbert/note/c-268448023