Pope Leo’s first encyclical(教皇通谕), Magnifica Humanitas, is very long (at more than 42,000 words, the length of a short novel). It tackles numerous issues, perhaps too many. The pontiff(教皇) pleads for fact-checked(经核实的) journalism and multilateral diplomacy. He apologises for the papacy’s belated(迟来的) condemnation of slavery. He declares the concept of “just war(正义战争)”, most recently used by J.D. Vance, America’s vice-president, to justify the attack on Iran, “outdated”. The central purpose of the document, however, is to challenge the unregulated development of artificial intelligence.
教皇利奥的首道通谕《崇高人性》非常冗长（超过四万两千字，相当于一部短篇小说的长度）。它涉及众多问题，或许太多了。教皇恳求核实的新闻业和多边外交。他为教廷对奴隶制的姗姗来迟的谴责而道歉。他宣称“正义战争”的概念——最近被美国副总统J.D.万斯用来为攻击伊朗辩护——是“过时的”。然而，该文件的核心目的是挑战人工智能的无序发展。
That will delight officials of the European Union, who have struggled to impose constraints(施加限制) on a technology only partially understood by its developers. Among those invited to take part in the presentation of Magnifica Humanitas in the Vatican was Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the maker of the Claude and Mythos AI models. He introduced a chilling(令人不寒而栗的) note by observing that he and other researchers were encountering aspects of the models they developed that were “mysterious and even unsettling(令人不安的)”.
这将让欧盟官员感到高兴，他们一直在努力对一种连其开发者也仅部分理解的技术施加限制。受邀参加梵蒂冈《崇高人性》发布仪式的人中有Anthropic（克劳德和Mythos AI模型的制造商）的联合创始人克里斯·奥拉。他引入了一个令人不寒而栗的调子，指出他和其他研究人员正在遇到他们开发的模型的“神秘甚至令人不安”的方面。
Yet the encyclical is more than a demand for effective regulation or, in Leo’s phrase, the “disarming(解除武装)” of AI. At its philosophical core, it is a rebuttal(驳斥) of two views of humanity’s destiny that are popular in Silicon Valley and the tech community: transhumanism and posthumanism. Leo describes the first as envisaging(设想) “the enhancement of human beings through technologies”, such as body engineering, devices and algorithms, and the second as the “hybridisation(杂交；融合) of human beings, machines and the environment”. In its extreme forms, posthumanism looks forward to a point at which “humanity surpasses itself in a new evolutionary stage”. Though Leo does not use the term, this is often referred to by techies(科技人士) as the Singularity.
然而，这道通谕不仅仅是要求有效监管，或用利奥的话说，“解除”AI的武装。在其哲学核心，它是对硅谷和科技界流行的两种人类命运观的驳斥：超人类主义和后人类主义。利奥将前者描述为设想“通过技术增强人类”，如人体工程、装置和算法；后者则是“人类、机器和环境的杂交”。在其极端形式上，后人类主义期待一个“人类超越自身、进入新进化阶段”的时刻。虽然利奥没有使用这个词，但这常被科技人士称为奇点。