Just days after the new Pope, Liu XIV, he took office as head of the Catholic Church, and began talking about artificial intelligence.
He has First speech As for the press, he realized that artificial intelligence has “tremendous potential”, but he stressed that we need “to ensure that it can be used for the sake of everyone.”
In his first title of the Crozine, he explained that he is actually Choose the name Leo XIV due to artificial intelligence. The name is a reference to the former Pope, Liu XIII, who held this position during the industrial revolution in the late nineteenth century. This previous Pope was weighing as if the growing capitalism and the new technology of the day had risked the conversion of workers into goods. He said that the Catholic Church should defend the rights and dignity of workers.
The new Pope indicated that he believes that the church should enter again in this role.
“On our day, the Church offers everyone its social education treasury in response to another industrial revolution and developments in the field of artificial intelligence that constitute new challenges to defend human dignity, justice and work,” Liu said the fourteenth.
On the surface, artificial and Catholic intelligence may seem strange. How long has the Silicon Valley supposed to take drones from the Vatican?
But when you look at the Catholic history, you realize that artificial intelligence is exactly the type of thing that the Pope should have strong opinions. The Church’s past indicates that technology is something for it to actively interact – encouraging it when necessary, and criticizing when necessary, but never separated. AI in particular compels great questions about the meaning of human life, and it is important that there are spiritual thinkers who burden these instead of just allowing technicians to run the show.
The Catholic Church was the Silicon Valley in the Middle Ages
Nowadays, many people think about the Catholic Church as a technical return. Its negative views of abortion and contraceptives are known. A long time before that, during the Renaissance, was known for the persecution of scholars with anterior thinking such as Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei because they challenged the doctrines of the church, like the idea that the earth is in the middle of the universe.
But counting to the medieval period and you will see that the Catholic Church and technological innovation are walking side by side.
This is because the medieval Christian thinkers have developed a radical idea: technology, theory, can help us restore humanity to the perfection of Adam before falling from grace. If it is part of what it means to be formed in the image of God is that he was a creator, a maker, then the key to human salvation may be to tend to this aspect of ourselves.
Even in the midst of the so-called dark ages, this idea was launched in the monasteries, where the slogan “Ora Et Labora”-prayer and work-was distributed on a wide range. Some of these monasteries have become a foci of engineering, which resulted in inventions such as the first island -running water wheel and the well. Catholics also gave us everything from minerals and mills to the adoption of broad watches and printing press. To this day, one of the engineers has only four saints in Catholicism.
“In general, the church was very positive towards technology in the past,” Brian Green, a Catholic professor who focuses on technology ethics at the University of Santa Clara, Tell me in 2018. “But when humans became more powerful, the Church felt that it should say no to more things,” especially the techniques that it considers to be obstructed by human life, such as the identification of offspring or nuclear weapons.
How Pope Francis paved the way for artificial intelligence
The church problem is that opposing the dangers of technological innovation makes it look more and more in a dispute with modern life. The late Pope Francis realized that the church needs to deal with technology if it wanted to remain relevant.
To discuss how to use technology for good, in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg met with Meta and Tim Cook from Apple and Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. He had the Vatican as a place for Hackathon As well as climate technology competition. In an encyclopedia or papal message called Laudato Si, he was enthusiastic about the possibility of technology to reshape the future of humanity.
But he also warned that developing artificial intelligence could not be free for free for everyone. And called for the international organization. At the Vatican event last year, it is Assure Artificial intelligence should be used to “meet the needs of humanity”, not “enriching and increasing the already high strength of the few technological giants.”
Francis also Insist We should not look at artificial intelligence as if it was an ideal decision maker that is similar to God-these idols will be. Instead of using external sources of our agency, Francis Call For a “renewed appreciation of everything that is human.”
The Church, which secures divine revelation, has not always created humanity, and it is the opinion that humans have the agency and capabilities to discover the truth and improve the world through their own cause. But Francis He called on his followers to adopt a new Christian humanity -To emphasize their capabilities and their staff in decision -making, while continuing to rely on the religious sources of indicators in the search for meaning.
Francis said: “The Bible provides us with basic coordinates.”
Why should Catholicism – and other religions – affect artificial intelligence
Pope Francis, and Pope Liu XIII of the nineteenth century, referring to a basic point: the Catholic Church can express opinions about the great technological developments per day, because it relates to moral and spiritual questions.
The AI ​​revolution raises many of these urgent questions: How can we prevent power from focusing in the hands of a few? How do we make sure that the economic spoils are distributed fairly to all? What are the types of work and options that we must fill in artificial intelligence, and where we should preserve it for ourselves because they possess or are necessary for the human agency? Should we allow AI to take over the artistic creation? What is human life, in any case?
These types of questions are bread and butter of religion. So it is quite appropriate for religious leaders to burden them. The failure to do so means losing the largest point in the ethical transformation of the century.
This does not mean that religion has all the correct answers. However, as Francis suggested, we can think about it as a compass. For thousands of years, she had an opportunity to determine some of the “basic coordinates” of humanity – our basic psychological needs. It has been developed Mechanisms to meet them.
In 1891, Pope Liu XIII presented an example of this in RevolutionaryEncyclopedia puts his views on the industrial revolution. And note that people will sometimes agree on terrible things already for them – for example, they work seven days a week. Therefore, their interests must be protected. That is why there is a religious commitment to monitor the day of rest. The Pope explained: We need to prevent people from allowing themselves to become goods.
The new Pope Liu has a strong opportunity to bring this argument to the twenty -first century.
