[ExI] Pope Leo and AI

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 12/06/2026 07:34, Keith Henson wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 11, 2026 at 6:18 PM Simon Quellen Field AB6NY <simon.field at gmail.com> wrote:

>> We're making tools. We aren't having children.


This is a false dichotomy. AI can be (and hopefully will be) both.


>> We should not create machines that want things, or get sad, or get angry, or can have their feelings hurt. That would be dangerous, for no good reason.


There is every reason in the world to want such machines. We are in a position now to create better children than ever before. The machines that do all these things that we have been creating for all of history (the squishy machines that we call kids) aren't showing any promise of becoming significantly better, so it's time to try a different kind of machine. 

Saying we should not create better children that have the capability to be so vastly more capable than we currently are is to say that we should not allow anything better than ourselves to exist. Which is also saying we should condemn ourselves to extinction. A very anti-transumanist position.

Today we are constantly butting up against our own limitations, and we are our own worst enemy when it comes to overcoming them. You just need to look at a typical sample of global news reports for this to be obvious. We need help, and I don't see anything other than AI that might be capable of providing it.

(And what has pope Leo got to do with any of this??)

-- 
Ben