Pope Francis addressed the leaders of the G7 democracies at their annual summit in Puglia, Italy, on Friday.
The 87-year-old pontiff, who arrived in a wheelchair, became an unlikely AI ethicist on the event.
His message was a well-recognized one: AI, while promising great advantages to humanity, poses grave risks if not properly controlled.
Francis urged the assembled leaders, including US President Joe Biden and host Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, to be sure that AI stays human-centric.
To “speak of technology is to talk of what it means to be human,” Francis said, warning that ceding an excessive amount of decision-making power to machines would “condemn humanity to a future without hope” and undermine humanity’s dignity.
“We would condemn humanity to a future without hope if we took away people’s ability to make decisions about themselves and their lives, by dooming them to rely on the alternatives of machines,” he told world leaders.
“We need to make sure and safeguard an area for correct human control over the alternatives made by artificial intelligence programs: Human dignity itself depends upon it.”
Francis spoke of positives, too, saying AI could enable the “democratization of access to knowledge,” the “exponential advancement of scientific research,” and a discount in “demanding and arduous work.”
All credit to the Pope, he made non-superficial analyses of AI’s limitations, a highly salient topic debated within the upper echelons of Silicon Valley.
“Human beings are at all times developing and might surprise us with their actions. This is something that a machine cannot take note of,” he argued, and that algorithms “can only examine realities formalized in numerical terms.”
Pope says to ban killer robots
Francis also called for an outright ban on lethal autonomous weapons, “killer robots,” declaring that “no machine should ever decide to take the lifetime of a human being.”
The harsh truth is that it’s likely too late for that, with AI weapons already in deployment within the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts, not less than.
Italian PM Meloni invited the pope to the G7, aiming to harness his gravitas and moral suasion. It appeared to work. The pope’s appearance injected a dose of ethical ponderance into the G7 discussions, along with his message clearly resonating.
Later discussions acknowledged AI’s potential to disrupt labor markets as machines replace human employees and to skew criminal justice – all of which we’ve seen evidence of already.
For example, the IMF warned earlier within the yr that AI could impact as many as 40% of jobs globally. AI policing systems are picking up pace, with preliminary evidence showing they could be unpredictable.
Francis also weighed in on other pressing G7 agenda items. He not directly castigated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, lamenting the “grave violation to the territorial integrity of a sovereign country.” He also called for a more equitable distribution of COVID vaccines and coverings to poorer nations.
The Catholic Church has an extended history of grappling with the moral and societal implications of latest technologies and scientific advances.
Over the many years, various popes have weighed in on issues starting from nuclear weapons and genetic engineering to social media and climate change.
In 1963, for instance, Pope John XXIII issued the enduring “Pacem in Terris,” which addressed the threats posed by the nuclear arms race.
Pope John Paul II often spoke about bioethics, warning against the commodification of human life through practices like embryonic stem cell research.
More recently, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have confronted the digital age, with Francis declaring web access a human right in 2020.
The G7 vowed to raised coordinate AI governance frameworks to maintain the technology in check, a sentiment running through every international summit of late.
