alt Hacker NewsWhen you stop to think of it, historically people have told their secrets to the church, now they also tell them to AI. There is some kind of relation there, the power that people willingly give to an organization. The Ads are coming so I guess people will start to think about it a bit more.
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"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."
"God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."
"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."
"The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."
—Morpheus, Deus Ex
Contrary to prevailing fetish, not everything is about “power”. Framing everything in terms of it is not only self-refuting, but it impoverishes the range of human relations and warps understanding.
Confession is not about some kind of organizational power. The whole point is that it liberates the penitent. It is protected by absolute secrecy in order to, among other reasons, remove the element of power. A priest who breaks the seal of confession incurs automatic excommunication and faces further penalties, like removal from public ministery and from the clerical state. In short, a priest is expected to endure torture and even death to preserve the seal. There is no admissible exception. Not much of a “power move”.
In the case of big tech and AI, profit and power do enter the picture. Secrecy is the last thing big tech wants.
for whatever merit it may achieve, concentrated attack upon religion fails to account for resultantly deprecated cultural aspects that are vital to continued functioning society, and this blind spot is not discussed often enough - in this case ,confession to a priest is significantly less evil than confession to sam altmans torture machine in the making
To the best of my knowledge, traditional confessions have always been processed locally, not sent upstream¹.
AFAICT, it is much harder to get a priest to reveal your confession than it is to get a log of your ChatGPT sessions.
¹) I first wrote "not sent to the cloud", but if God is all-knowing, records of all sins are already in the cloud, just not accessible by support staff.