VATICAN CITY — The Catholic Church has a valuable role to play in providing “clear moral leadership” to protect humanity from the negative impact of new technologies, a prominent AI researcher said under the vaulted ceiling of the Vatican headquarters. the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican Gardens. .
“You could have made that much money from human cloning; “The Catholic Church has come out against it, every country is against it, it’s illegal everywhere, we have no problem with it,” said Max Tegmark, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and president of the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit dedicated to reducing the existential risks associated with advanced technologies.
Speaking at a forum on the development of artificial intelligence on October 24, Tegmark said that today, in the age of AI, the Church must advocate for a pause in developments in artificial general intelligence – a form of AI that exceeds human cognitive abilities in many tasks – and computing. superintelligence “at least until one day, perhaps, someone understands how it can be controlled or aligned.”
Otherwise, he said, “we have no idea how to keep this stuff under control.”
Tech industry executives, church officials, ethicists and entrepreneurs gathered at the Vatican for a conference on the ethical development of AI on October 24-25, hosted at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
AI, its perils and its promises, has become a growing concern for the Vatican. Pope Francis dedicated his message for the World Day of Peace on January 1 to the theme of artificial intelligence and peace, and he spoke about AI to world leaders at the G7 summit in southern Italy in June.
At the Oct. 24 conference, Taylor Black, director of AI and venture ecosystems at Microsoft, highlighted how few people in the tech industry “think about people in a holistic way because we think a whole bunch of things about what makes a business.” person, a person is not within the purview of technology, whether it is correct or incorrect.
This is why the advent of artificial intelligence is a “fantastic opportunity” for the Church, he said, since “the technology must arrive at the only place where the person is truly understood and where we have ways to better understand the human person.
Uncontrolled development of AI could notably harm human dignity by replacing large swaths of the workforce without providing any sort of relief to those thrown out of work, said Anthony J. Granado, Secretary General Deputy of the United States Conference. Catholic bishops.
Artificial intelligence, he told Catholic News Service, “should complement what humans do, it should not replace them,” he said, noting that the U.S. bishops’ conference is currently studying ways to “minimize the impact” of artificial intelligence on job losses. .
A 2023 Goldman Sachs report estimates that artificial intelligence could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs while increasing the total annual value of goods and services produced worldwide by 7%.
Yet he noted that AI also has potential benefits for the Church, such as being a “great tool to help promote catechesis.”
“The Church, throughout human history, must look and read the signs of the times and use these opportunities to promote the Gospel in different ways. So AI will be one of those frontiers where the Gospel will have to be preached,” Granado told CNS.
Addressing the dual role of the Church in adopting but also ethically guiding the development of AI, Dominican Father Eric Solobir, chairman of the executive committee of the Human Technology Foundation, said the Church must work with the technology industry to “align the planets” between its profitability and its ethics. .
“We need to try to create a paradigm shift to change the software ethics” of the tech industry, he said, which tends to be consequentialist and prioritize long-term gains to the point of ignoring the immediate damage caused by certain decisions.
Father Solobir recalls talking with tech executives about ethical issues, explaining that people in the tech industry typically judged the permissiveness of an action based on its legality, not in terms of promotion of human flourishing.
The Church, he said, “can put a few drops of that virtue ethics into its thought process, and it completely changes the way we deal with the ethics of technology.”
