Pope Francis is eager to make sure the voice of the Church is heard when it comes to artificial intelligence. Here are three key points he emphasizes:
1
Demystify AI
For the Pope, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’ can prove misleading,” as he said in his latest message for World Day of Social Communications. “No doubt, machines possess a limitlessly greater capacity than human beings for storing and correlating data, but human beings alone are capable of making sense of that data,” he insists.
He therefore urges us to awaken “humanity from the slumber induced by the illusion of omnipotence, based on the belief that we are completely autonomous and self-referential subjects, detached from all social bonds and forgetful of our status as creatures.”
In his 2024 message for the World Day of Peace, the Pontiff also stressed the limits of these new technologies. “Not everything can be predicted, not everything can be calculated.” And in the Social Communications document, he adds that “the representation of reality in ‘big data,’ however useful for the operation of machines, ultimately entails a substantial loss of the truth of things.”
2
Protect the role of human intelligence
The Pope rejects any technophobic stance, considering that new technologies, including artificial intelligence, have the capacity to greatly improve people’s lives. However, he deplores the fact that “evidence to date suggests that digital technologies have increased inequality in our world.”
For example, he is very concerned about the military use of artificial intelligence — for example, with the use of killer robots — or in the information sector, warning of the serious potential for error and manipulation. He also pointed the finger at forms of discrimination and even “social control” resulting from the massive use of artificial intelligence in “automatic processes that categorize individuals.” For example, he was concerned that an artificial intelligence could determine whether or not a person could receive a bank loan.
In another area, the Pontiff warned of the rapid destruction of jobs by industrial applications of artificial intelligence, a sign of a society where inequalities are worsening. Fundamentally opposed to these drifts, the fruit of an anonymous vision of technology, he defends a form of artificial intelligence capable of giving “every human being the role of subject.” And as he was invited to speak on AI at the G7 summit, he told priests that he wanted to ask heads of state this question: “How is your natural intelligence?”
3
Legislate
Pope Francis has welcomed recent efforts by some international organizations to regulate these technologies “so that they promote genuine progress, contributing, that is, to a better world and an integrally higher quality of life.” He insists on the need to reach a binding agreement at universal level.
Acknowledging that “it won’t be easy to reach agreement in these areas,” he asked the Holy See to produce an ethical charter that could be used to establish essential principles. This led in 2020 to the Rome Call for an Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, signed by digital giants IBM, Microsoft (shareholder of OpenAI, ed.) and Cisco. This text calls for transparent, impartial, inclusive and reliable systems, calls for users’ privacy to be protected and demands that AI creators assume their responsibility.
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