While I agree with the thrust against deification and idolatry - these characterizations border on naive and myopic:
"remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity"
and
"AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life"
We just don't know yet. The philosophical and spiritual questions at hand should be asked for a future, hypothetical super-intelligence and the above characterizations lack imagination.
Probably makes sense to not comment too much on hypotheticals to avoid the "Vatican predicts AI will be sentient" interpretations. I don't see them inaccurate given what we have currently
I think they are fair statements, but perhaps not saying what you think.
Plato covers a lot of this kind of thing and it is maybe useful to use his framework (since much of modern Catholicism has a healthy dose of Platonism). Both flowers and music can be called "beautiful" and there is some sense in which both partake in a universal "Beauty". Yet at the same time the nature of the beauty of flowers and music is distinct. This is a difficult paradox to contemplate.
And so it may be with Intelligence. There may be some Platonic form of Intelligence that both humans and AIs partake in, but there may be some aspect of the human manifestation of that form that will forever remain distinct to humans.
Of course, it is up to you how much you value the distinctness of that expression of the universal form. Catholic faith suggests that the particular distinctiveness of human expressions of these forms is "divine" in some sense. That is, it is our manifestation of the universal that is valuable, not the universal in and of itself.
>but there may be some aspect of the human manifestation of that form that will forever remain distinct to humans.
Lets not forget the converse may be true for AI. Humans may be a very specialized form of intelligence (though we do like to consider ourselves general intelligences).
That is one implication. There is a sense in which the "beauty" that is particular with a rose shares more in common with a lily compared to the "beauty" either share with music. So it is the degree of particular-ness that is a matter of personal interpretation.
Imagine a science fiction future where we use AIs to enhance neuroscience to determine how to make Octopuses more intelligent, such that they reach LLM levels or near human levels of language. Is their brain not a neural network that could be optimized?
In our wildest dreams we might consider the breadth of intelligence possible and our particular relationship with respect to it. We might face questions that are harder to answer than we anticipate.
Perhaps considering the question is more important than deciding on an answer?
On the contrary, I appreciate how this passage is grounded in reality rather than falling into the typical tropes around AI.
There is no reason to believe AI will ever be more than a compressed and queryable form of the Internet and this passage seems to imply this rational and scientifically informed view. Imagination means nothing in the context of scientific debate.
"remember that AI is but a pale reflection of humanity" and "AI cannot possess many of the capabilities specific to human life"
We just don't know yet. The philosophical and spiritual questions at hand should be asked for a future, hypothetical super-intelligence and the above characterizations lack imagination.