RISKING VIOLATING FAIR USE I'm going to give you a big chunk of this article by Scott Hurd, without links, so you should definitely read it at the one I'm giving you the link for.
This Lent, will you "unplug " and "recharge" your religious "batteries"? Try to find the "bandwidth" for daily Mass? "Rewire" your prayer life or "reboot" your spiritual reading? Lent is, after all, a chance for an "upgrade" to a better, holier you: "Version 2.0," if you will.
Sound weird? That's because I've described typical Lenten goals with the computer jargon that's crept into our everyday talk. And I'm just as guilty of using it as anyone else. Which is why I'm making an appeal: This Lent, let's give up referring to ourselves as if we're machines. Because we aren't! But plenty of people think that we are — with serious consequences.
Pope Leo XIV seems to appreciate the threat, especially as AI creeps into more corners of our lives. In asking why life's busyness often leaves us feeling exhausted and empty, he said: "Because we are not machines, we have a 'heart.' " And he pointedly reminded the Italian bishops that "the person is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery."
This is all a consequence of the conscious adoption of materialist ideology as the default of academically, culturally and conventionally respectible life - so much of a default in the dim modernist past that even many of those who would claim they aren't materialists don't have any idea that is how they think about other People. Which, by the way, is the reason that I started capitalizing words that refer to People and other living Creatures a number of years ago, fall out from the atheist-materliast fad of the '00s. I suppose it's more of a personal discipline to remind myself not to revert to that materialist habit of thought than something I've advocated everyone do. Though maybe I should.
This part of the article, which is why I had the idea to write this, raises some questions I don't think the tweeting CEO below would like us going into very far.
But not everyone shares this understanding of the human person. To some — especially in tech circles — we are in fact "machines" driven by a "system of algorithms."
Consider the response made by Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, to an influential academic paper's claim that, unlike humans, AI chatbots don't understand what they generate because they're simply "stochastic parrots" that mimic their training data.
Altman didn't buy it. To mock the authors' conclusion, he turned to "X", the social media platform owned by his OpenAI co-founder, Elon Musk. "i am a stochastic parrot," Altman tweeted, "and so r u."
In other words, according to this billionaire tech titan, human beings are really no different from unthinking machines. You and I are simply computers whose output parrots our input. And nothing more.
While I'm sure it would be news to Altman and his, no doubt philosophy disdaining fellow CEOs, if we are just "stochastic parrots" as are the atomated "AI" content-theft and plagarizism machines he makes what I'd bet are billions from - WHAT IS THE PRINCIPLE ON WHICH COPYWRIGHT AND PATENT LAW BASED IN? It must be entirely make believe and nothing real if what he claims is true, especially for the things he makes his billions from. It is allegedly based on the rights to intellectual content by their HUMAN creators. Rights which do not inhere to machines or algorithms, themselves BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE SELVES. If all content is merely the parroting of previously existing content, which is stolen and monatized by those tech billionaires then there is no intellectual basis for the laws which allow them to amass the billions they have - NOR IS THERE ANY REAL AGENT WHICH WE HAVE ANY KIND OF PRINICIPLED, "ETHICAL" OR MORAL OBLIATION TO ALLOW THEM THE PRIVILEGES TO MAKE THOSE BILLIONS OR KEEP THEM.
Altman's arrogant confession that that's all there is to the creation of algorithms and programs and higher structures that corporations (imaginary entities given "personhood" by the corrupt lies of Supreme Courts and the corporpate lawyer who invented such artificial "persons) and those who are merely said to own them make those billions from . . . . all of that is something that we have eveyy right to use to mow down the kudzu of legal fiction that his entire professional life is founded in.
NOT that I expect that any part of the sleaziest part of the system of "justice" or the lawyers that service and man it would ever want to address such claims if they were ever made in a lawsuit by or against such a corporation and the billionaire eliminative matrialists like this Altman as to the most fundamental of consequences - lawyers, judges and "justices" are trained to lie on behalf of the super-rich and the corporations that such "justices" have endowed with "personhood." But I believe that, as the article points out, that it's high time we consider these things very, very seriously because we are beyond the tipping point in them treating us not only as individual objects but as specs and drops collectively considered as raw material resources FOR THEIR USE AND DISPOSAL.
"Remember you are dust and to dust you will return," may be the formular used to anoint a Person with ashes in some liturgical traditions but the intellectual basis of that, at least in Catholic theology, only refers to the material body, not the real person which is much more than the sum of its material parts . Secularism has no such basis, matrialist-atheist-scientism must negate it, though without applying their ideological claims to those artificial and profitable entities that they enjoy which their ideology has to, if honestly considered, impeach.
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