Pope Calls for 'Healthy Politics' to Remedy AI Ailments

Pope Francis brought his campaign for a new modus vivendi between humans and artificial intelligence directly to a meeting of world leaders on June 14. His sobering message: Governments—and all of us—must up our game in confronting the moral hazard of digital developments.

“The onus is on politics to create the conditions” for fruitful uses of AI, but first things first, he advised. Such efforts can be made only through “healthy politics,” and that elusive goal requires real intelligence.

Government authorities must make difficult, well-considered decisions based on “wisdom—the phronesis of Greek philosophy and, in part, the wisdom of Sacred Scripture.” Francis addressed President Joe Biden and leaders from six other countries (plus the European Union) attending last week’s G7 meeting in Italy.

Phronesis, described by Aristotle as judgment using values and morals to take practical steps toward what is good, involves human hearts. Such decision-making is different from the technical “choices” made by computer algorithms, the Pope said in his speech.

Leaders must incorporate a wise and worldwide spectrum of people’s concerns when overseeing AI. That’s because AI is “an exciting and fearsome tool” portending “epochal transformations.”

To build a future of hope and confidence, governments must exercise “a healthy politics involving the most diverse sectors and skills”—integrating economics and human creativity with “a political, social, cultural, and popular program directed to the common good.”

Francis cited both benefits and dangers in what he called the “cognitive-industrial revolution,” but he expressed dissatisfaction with the current state of world politics.

“Global society is suffering from grave structural deficiencies that cannot be resolved by piecemeal solutions or quick fixes,” he said, speaking to the representatives from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

“Much needs to change, through fundamental reform and major renewal,” in order to prevent AI from stifling human dignity and values.

The Pope fears that unrestrained growth in AI “could bring with it a greater injustice between advanced and developing nations or between dominant and oppressed social classes,” replacing a “culture of encounter” with a “throwaway culture.”

Human beings have made tools throughout history, developing each with a purpose and adopting ethics to guide their freedom and responsibility in using each device well, Francis pointed out.

But AI is a unique tool because it “can autonomously adapt” to an assigned task and “make choices independent of the person.” Determining the good use of AI devices “will not be fully under the control of either the users or the programmers who defined their original purposes.”

This tool will have growing influence over “our social relationships and even the way we conceive of our identity as human beings.”

Persons are created to be “radically open to the beyond” and to the future, the Pope said. “Our openness to others and to God originates from this reality, as does the creative potential of our intelligence with regard to culture and beauty.”

He went on, “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 depend on the choices of machines.”

Francis urged banning the use of “lethal autonomous weapons,” for example, because crucial life-and-death decisions must engage personal accountability. “No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being.”

In general, we must not surrender control to a technology that searches for more data—not for more truth—to modify itself, he said.

Sometimes, programmers are themselves uncertain how their AI brainchild arrived at particular results. This mystery will intensify with quantum computing obeying the “complex laws of quantum physics.”

Other programmers will not realize how a machine’s mere computations might be toxified with bias.

The Pontiff posited an example: Suppose a judge is deciding whether to keep a convict imprisoned or to allow home-confinement. An AI system gathers abundant data about the prisoner’s private life in various pre-set categories, perhaps including ethnicity, education level, and credit rating.

Ostensibly objective data “may implicitly incorporate prejudices inherent in the categories,” Francis warned. The AI choices which result, while well-informed in a sense, could change a person’s life without considering basic truths and principles. “Human beings are always developing,” for instance, “and are capable of surprising us by their actions.”

Even a more mundane AI function like “chatbots” can hold conversations and build “close relationships” with users, reassuring them and convincing them that certain facts are definitely and universally true, the Pope said.

So-called “generative” AI, now known for writing students’ essays, is not generating any new concepts or analyses. Instead, it is repeating and reinforcing the data it finds most prevalent—without checking for “errors or preconceptions.”

Francis pointed out that education “should provide students with the possibility of authentic reflection.” Reliance on AI “not only runs the risk of legitimizing fake news and strengthening a dominant culture’s advantage, but, in short, it also undermines the educational process itself.”

He cautioned against “a loss, or at least an eclipse, of the sense of what is human and an apparent reduction in the significance of the concept of human dignity.” The world already seems to be “losing the value and profound meaning of one of the fundamental concepts of the West: that of the human person.”

Without individual dignity to inspire virtuous purposes for AI, developers of technology might pursue advantage in a game of sheer power, “enabling certain people to perform specific actions while preventing others from performing different ones.”

In light of all these concerns, Pope Francis reminded the world leaders of the “Rome Call for AI Ethics,” which started accumulating signatories in 2020. The document has won broad credibility and influence, calling for “ethical moderation” of AI through a “global and pluralistic platform” of principles he calls “algor-ethics.”

Francis acknowledged that his long crusade for algorithms which serve humanity, rather than a “technocratic paradigm” of the future, requires broad agreement among “cultures, religions, international organizations, and major corporations.”

That’s where politics comes in, he told the G7 leaders, calling for a quantum leap in the wisdom called phronesis:

“If we struggle to define a single set of global values, we can … find shared principles with which to address and resolve dilemmas or conflicts regarding how to live.”

Of course, the collaboration must belong to everyone, not only seven governments. As mentioned in last week’s Washington Post coverage of the Pope’s ongoing AI mission, detailed in Phronesis in Pieces on May 8, his message to the world simply echoes his parting words in a 2019 conversation with a Microsoft executive—“Keep your humanity.”

Image from ClipSafari.com, a collection of Creative Commons designs.

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