Uncategorized — Page 179

  • Random thoughts on the new year

    Random thoughts on the new year

    CBCPNews,

    Although it has always been a practice that resolutions are made at the start of the new year to guide and spur us on through the year ahead of us, I believe that its success lies on the person’s consistently renewing it daily. He told me once that, “one unchristian thing we can do to another is to regard the other person as if he/she doesn’t exist.” That piece of wisdom has remained with me ever since as a reminder to always treat another person with respect, whoever he/she is. When I called up Archbishop Capalla to inform him that our General Councilor was in town for a fraternal visit to the community, and asked if I could bring her over to greet him, he said to me at once: “why not I go instead to your place and have dinner there, instead of coming here?” I was delighted to hear him say that because the community was also happy to have him around.

  • FULL TEXT: Pope Francis’ message for World Day of Social Communications 2024

    FULL TEXT: Pope Francis’ message for World Day of Social Communications 2024

    CBCPNews,

    We need but think of the long-standing problem of disinformation in the form of fake news, [3] which today can employ “deepfakes”, namely the creation and diffusion of images that appear perfectly plausible but false (I too have been an object of this), or of audio messages that use a person’s voice to say things which that person never said. For this reason, there is a need to act preventively, by proposing models of ethical regulation, to forestall harmful, discriminatory and socially unjust effects of the use of systems of artificial intelligence and to combat their misuse for the purpose of reducing pluralism, polarizing public opinion or creating forms of groupthink. Their great possibilities for good are accompanied by the risk of turning everything into abstract calculations that reduce individuals to data, thinking to a mechanical process, experience to isolated cases, goodness to profit, and, above all, a denial of the uniqueness of each individual and his or her story.