About the Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. Can it be called Luddism?

The publication of Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas has prompted some people to accuse it of being an exercise in Luddism and a return to the Middle Ages (many of these people know little about the medieval period), sometimes accompanied by gruesome images of robots being burned at the stake, undoubtedly generated using AI tools. The speed of their responses is so surprising that one may wonder if they are judging the text without having read it. Are they right? Can the encyclical be accused of Luddism?

Let's begin by defining the word Luddism, as it appears in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

The beliefs or practices of the Luddites: one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest. Broadly : one who is opposed to technological change.

It is, therefore, a term primarily applied to the use of violence against technological advancements. Violence is certainly difficult to justify, although in Ned Lud's case it is understandable, considering what happened at the time as a consequence of the introduction of machinery (looms) in textile factories. Some employers took advantage of this to dismiss their workers, telling them something like this:

New Ways to Scam the Unwary

Wallet scam
Spanish film "Los Tramposos"

About 30 years ago, I received my first attempt at the Nigerian scam: a letter from someone unknown to me offering me the chance to participate in a capital evasion operation involving several million dollars, which they proposed depositing into my bank account, offering to share the profits in return. Of course, I didn't reply, although I kept the Nigerian stamp that came with the letter. I suppose that if I had replied, they would have asked for access to my account to make the transfer, and instead, it would have been emptied.

Since then, I've received dozens of similar attempts, since a certain time via email, always originating from some African country. This scam is, in a way, similar to the wallet scam, because in addition to the swindler, the victim also tries to commit fraud; in one case against the supposed mentally challenged person offering the alleged money, in the other against the governments affected by the capital evasion.

The Use of “AI” Tools

The second entry for the word tool in the Merrian-Webster dictionary states:

Something… used in performing an operation or necessary in the practice of a vocation or profession

Since the origin of the genus Homo, human beings have used tools, which together with skeletons or fossilized bone fragments are one of the main sources of information about our ancestors. Monofacial and bifacial pebble tools seem primitive today, but during human prehistory they served as weapons and tools and surely helped us survive.

Information technology, which has developed significantly during the last century, has provided us with many useful tools. Throughout the 21st century, these tools have become increasingly “intelligent,” tackling tasks that until very recently could only be performed by humans. But when using them, we should keep in mind some very general ideas, which should always be applied, but not always are:

Natural and artificial intelligence

As we saw in the previous post, the book Free Agents by Kevin Mitchell deals with the origins of human consciousness and free will. In a brief epilogue, the book addresses the topic of strong artificial intelligence—the real kind, which doesn't yet exist—and formulates some hypotheses about the possibility of its becoming feasible.

It emphasizes that one of the most active branches of research in AI, especially in recent years, is the field of artificial neural networks, which has led to advances such as Large Language Models (LLMs). It compares these neural networks in our programs with those that exist in our brains and in the brains of many animals more or less similar to us. It says that we are witnessing impressive advances in fields such as image recognition, text prediction, speech recognition, and language translation, based on the use of deep learning, remotely inspired on the architecture of the cerebral cortex.

Hallucinations or Lies

My hallucinations by August Natterer

Since ChatGPT appeared in late 2022, I have been warning that the answers provided by Large Language Models (LLM; I refuse to call these tools Artificial Intelligence) are unreliable and should be treated with the utmost caution. Often, these answers seem plausible and are written linguistically correctly, but they are false. These types of answers have been called hallucinations.

This is not surprising. It is a logical consequence of the algorithm used by these programs, which I described in another post in this blog, which I simulated by means of a program with only 18 instructions. The algorithm works by adding words extracted from the most frequent ones that follow the previous words, chosen from billions of files taken from the Internet. It is evident (just think about it) that this algorithm cannot guarantee that the answers these tools provide are true.

Should Barbie chat with children?

ChatGPT and similar tools, called LLMs (Large Language Models), are being used with greater frequency in our daily lives. Google, for instance, has integrated its GEMINI tool with its search engine. Sometimes, when the program behind the search engine deems it appropriate, the question asked is sent to GEMINI, and the response of the LLM appears first, albeit with this warning at the end, in small print:

AI responses may include mistakes.

Of course, they may include mistakes! These responses are not generated by understanding the question, but by using information previously obtained from the Internet, and applying an algorithm based on extracting words that typically appear in that information after the previously generated words. See a post in this blog where I explained that algorithm. Since the information extracted from the Internet can be true or false, and the algorithm can introduce new falsehoods where none existed, the answers obtained may be correct, partially correct, or completely wrong, therefore Google's warning is valid.

The Chinese and artificial intelligence

Wolfgang von Goethe

The media has been reporting on a recent breakthrough in LLMs (large language models), the hottest applications in the field of artificial intelligence, which in the last two years have given rise to great hype, suspicions of stagnation and accusations of excessive energy and water costs.

This latest breakthrough has been achieved by a Chinese company, DeepSeek, which has jumped to the front line because it successfully competes with the big companies in the field, OpenAI (which built ChatGPT and GPT4) and Google (with GEMINI), but at a lower cost.

There are now many tools of this type, but the two mentioned in the previous paragraph (GEMINI and GPT4) provided the best performance, although they were the most expensive. Their code is secret, owned by the two companies (Google and OpenAI) and users cannot modify it. Alongside them, now there are others with open source, which can be adapted to each user, but with lesser performance.

Computational Intelligence and Consciousness

Eduardo César Garrido Merchán

In recent years there have been many advances in artificial intelligence, especially in the field of automatic generation of texts and images that sometimes compete successfully with human productions. In light of this, the media, and even some scientists, have rung the bells announcing that we are on the verge of creating conscious artificial intelligence, which would compete with human beings as our equal. But others believe that this goal, if it were possible (which is not clear), is much further away than some think.

In an article signed by Eduardo César Garrido Merchán and Sara Lumbreras and published in the journal philosophies with the title Can Computational Intelligence Model Phenomenal Consciousness, the authors review Bertrand Russell's analogy, which asserts that consciousness and intelligence are closely correlated. In other words, any entity that possesses consciousness will also possess a high level of intelligence, and vice versa. In a way, this analogy is similar to the Turing Test, which is much better known.