The irony of priests being concerned with people developing emotional attachments to beings that don't consciously exist...

Religions, especially but not limited to Catholic, are what screams "artificial intimacy" to me.

From the language the Church uses ("Jesus loves you.") to the practices the Church does (confession to a priest).

The most charitable take I can make from this is that religious leaders genuinely believe what they claim to believe so they don't think it's "artificial." There are a lot of less charitable takes I could make, but I'd stop here.

I imagine this goes beyond what most people think of when they think of "intimacy" (sex, relationships) and includes all kinds of emotional closeness and friendships. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I've noticed a decline in people's willingness to engage with other people since the covid pandemic. If we start replacing interpersonal relationships with chatbots, we're headed for dark times.

> I appreciate that coinage, "artificial intimacy," and want to explore the implications of it more.

I've been looking for this phrase for years.

It describes the phenomenon perfectly, even accounting for the diminishing of emotional/mental/physical closeness that occurs.

I already see dystopian ads for friend.com, "someone who listens, responds, and supports you" but it's actually an AI necklace device, and you'll see people marking them up too given how unnerving it is to call an AI a "friend."

https://old.reddit.com/r/Greenpoint/comments/1nmk49r/dystopi...

Some people probably don't want that "deep interpersonal bonds" though. I know I don't want. I know some people who don't say they don't want but act in every way that they don't want.

Although I don't like the future proposed by the AI companies, this is the least of my concerns. The only big concern is employment. Like, if AI creates more jobs than it destroys, sure, go ahead, do it now.

The Catholic Church should probably not talk about "intimacy" at all, given their track record. As much as I am not a big fan of AI/LLMs, I would love it if AI took the Church's job away.

Removing anthropomorphism from LLM's seems like a really great idea with zero downside. Not just because people starting "relationships" with AI is going to harm society but I imagine people are also more willing to trust misinformation from an anthropomorphic AI.

> The privileged few among us (I am not one of them) don't struggle with avoiding these addictions.

Counterpoint, the richest man in the world is clearly addicted to being on twitter and posts at all hours of the day. More generally I don't see why the richest wouldn't be addicted to social media like the rest of us – after all they have a lot more free time and disposable income

> everyone else was skinny

Malnourished. The word you were looking for is malnourished. Junk food is a problem but the abundance of food didn't somehow cause "cleavage between upper and lower classes."

Consumer tech tilts toward those with poor impulse control because that ensures survival for the creators of said tech. Eventually, it becomes less of a means to an end, and more of an end in and of itself. This is a problem because it reinforces addiction.

I'd argue the iPhone crossed that line at some point within the past five years, though, admittedly, it is the iPhone + social media services working together. I doubt Jobs would have approved the gaudy, Myspace-aesthetic-level Messages backgrounds that iOS 26 was proud to launch with.

I'm more concerned that the above reasoning is flawed just because it's untrue.

I don't know any yacht owning people but the few people I know with boats are very happy with it's size. The people looking for a football field on water are _limited_. Human desires are limited and if that limit can be achieved without the collective efforts of all humans then under our capitalistic model somebody is going to starve.

While I agree that the replacement of humans with AI would lead to joblessness, I think you'll see far sooner mass joblessness as a human with better technology can replace 50+ other humans (like containership engineer vs sailship crew).

Yeah, we’ll see what happens, but one of the interesting things about the book sapiens, is it highlights that there are plenty of paradigm shifting events in human history that change our basic assumptions.

“Life is suffering” meant something very different when the Buddha first said it to now. The idea that “the only constant is change” is a relatively modern creation(or at least the significance of it), so this idea that economics is going to keep working the way it always has - at least feels like it’s going to change if we get more advanced AI.

What if you want is to keep a human alive. How can that cost less than keeping a human alive?

You stated that “the conversation about where the technology is going and what we’re going to do with it is happening among people who do not care … what any Christian church has to say on the topic.”

As a Catholic myself, I wonder what the church should say/do with regards to technology like this and would like to know where you stand on it. Personally I think that further public discussions need to be held on the morality of potential implementations of AI (I’m thinking ahead by decades once LLMs can really make a dent in the workforce) but question the effectiveness of the Church participating in discussions like that.

You could say the same about technology in general WRT physical capability. Most people use technology to avoid exercise, but some people use science and technology to exercise even better, achieving levels of strength that weren't possible in previous centuries.

First Things[0] is one of my favorite magazines. It has perspectives I rarely see anywhere else, and generally well articulated and argued for (provided you accept Christian first-principles).

New Polity Podcast[1] also regularly features smart conversations.

[0] https://firstthings.com/

[1] https://newpolity.com/podcasts

We have a subscription to Plough magazine. It has Christian scholars writing articles/commentary, but isn't restricted to them.

Recent article entitled "Your Friends Are Not In Your Phone" was fantastic: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/technology/your-friend...

"Another voice on the subject at hand" is definitely available - but simply searching "{Christian, Catholic} {[SUBJECT MATTER], [KIND OF MATERIAL]" will often unearth some good starting points. E. g. "Christian social periodical" will eventually lead you to https://firstthings.com/ (as an example).

Some suggestions for a variety of subjects:

* Fr. Stanley Jaki on Physics and the philosophy of science - I am working through https://www.abebooks.com/9780895267498/God-Cosmologists-Jaki...

* Philosophy in general, Peter Kreeft (I recommend "Jesus Shock", it's amazing how "used" to Christ we've become, and this book does a good job of pointing out just how different the reactions to him are) and Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue) are both good "recent" authors.

* Bioethics and philosophy https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Bioethics-Limits-Scie... (I will freely admit to bias here, but this is easy to read, clear, and to the point)

* Particularly interesting in the moment: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-limits-...

From the Roman Catholic point of view, there's a variety of answers.

For super up-to-date happenings, you can go to Vatican News[1]. (A great example in the first article, "Holy See urges moratorium on autonomous weapons at UN debate on AI".)

For weightier, more timeless writings that address the issues of the current day, but are meant to be read indefinitely, the Papal Encyclicals[2] are the look. Rerum Novarum is a good one to start with.

I'd be skeptical of any persuasive writings by lay-persons (i.e. not priests or nuns). It's like the difference between a lawyer's opinion and a judge's ruling. They can be fantastic scholars, but they don't speak for the church.

1: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city.html 2: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/

I recommend Paul Kingsnorth.

Insightful analysis of the modern world and the Christian response to it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3hMSZqatHI

He also has a new book out, Against the Machine, which has good reviews, but I haven't read yet.

Some of my favorites recently for intellectually engaging Christian thinking are "The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God" podcast (first season is the best), and the book "Reasonable Faith" by William Lane Craig.

> What are companies going to pay these now-dumber people to do, once they've automated away the jobs the smarter versions of these people did?

Kill each other, in some ways.

Placate them by any means. History has provided the answers.

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So if the Trump supporters fall in behind this, would that make them the "Orange Catholics"? ...and they'll be right there in time for the Butlerian Jihad as society battles it out with AI.

My problem with the "Using AI is a skill" mentality is that it sure doesn't feel like one

It reminds me of people who think slot machines have some element of skill involved. If you pull the lever juuuust right it will be a jackpot....

> In engineering I treat it like a junior intern that is very fast, has memorized a huge amount of info, but makes mistakes and has to be hand-held and anything they produce must be examined and tested

So you spend your own experienced dev time chasing down a high volume of junior dev mistakes instead of writing high quality experienced dev code?

Sorting through large amounts of junior intern code does not seem like a valuable use of an experienced dev's time.

Most people spreading the gospel of AI don't even seem to remember the kinds of feats that humans are capable of. They want to sell you back your own potential at a markup, so it's not good for them if you believe in your own potential and won't give it away

I can see this outcome, however... there's a lot more nuance to worry about here. The small percentage, even now, can still get good food. And even grow their own crop.

We're already losing physical books, and data online will slowly become more and more circumspect. That is, AI training on AI, with more and more nonsense blogs, will make simple accuracy of any data very rare.

A strong mind may have the capacity to not be taint by AI too much, but what if it cannot get anything non-AI tainted to feed it? What if there are no teachers of any caliber left, for they are all smooth-brains as you say?

What if society is run AI itself, and no one understands anything at all?

That incredible mind may make some progress, but will lack the solid foundation you and I have had.

Good luck holding together a society in which large swaths of the population find themselves useless and starving.

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