Updating the Pope's AI Messages—Download Data, Upload Souls
Six months can bring a lot of action in the world of artificial intelligence. Pope Francis began 2024 with two messages to the Catholic Church probing AI’s prospects for good or ill. Now a half-year later, he plans to attend a G7 meeting in Italy to address the subject with world leaders.
Between those bookends, passing days have brought varied signs and wonders. They have raised awareness, on both the secular and spiritual fronts, in both positive and negative ways, about the Pope’s instruction: We must resist machine learning’s temptation “to become like God without God.”
That quote is from the Vatican’s teaching on its 58th World Day of Social Communications, which takes place May 12. As reported earlier when the document was previewed on Jan. 24, the title says it all: “AI and the Wisdom of the Heart: Towards a Fully Human Communication.”
In other words, this is a time when people must up our game—pursuing “a deeper spirituality and new freedom and interiority”—faster than AI ups its game. Big Data and “large language models” are boosted by huge investments, global competition, and, among many, visions of life-changing gains for the common good.
Supplementing our talents artificially can help us understand our “patrimony of written knowledge from past ages” and provide “loving service” through medicine, communication, and improvements for human labor, for example, Pope Francis acknowledged.
But it can also cause a “technology of simulation” that misinforms and misleads us, disconnects us from reality, makes us lazy in our relationships and highest aspirations, and feeds dangerous dreams of grandeur, according to the World Communications Day document.
We must humbly embrace our mortality and frailties, as well as our immortality in the hands of God—something not to be handed over to AI, the Pope said.
In a previous document, presented on Jan. 1, the Vatican’s 57th World Day of Peace, Francis also warned of geopolitical propaganda and strategies “to control everything” while “losing control over ourselves.” In the name of “absolute freedom,” we risk creating a “technological dictatorship,” he said.
The Vatican has called for “a binding international treaty” to regulate the development and use of artificial intelligence. Pope Francis and several key representatives have been meeting with top executives in the field and with various religious leaders. Church members are promoting particular initiatives through which tech experts can cooperate with theologians, philosophers, and other disciplines to ensure a “person-centered” AI.
This cooperation could take a giant leap when the G7 countries hold their next meeting on July 13-15, with key attendees from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with the European Union. It’s the first time a pope has been invited to address the group, and his subject will be AI.
The discussions can’t come soon enough, given the pace of breakthroughs, the craving for data, and an opportunity that was missed in 2023. Many global tech execs, such as Elon Musk, had signed a letter proactively requesting a “pause” in developments to discuss risks and regulation, but research has accelerated instead.
A surge of news, some very recent, some ongoing, has arisen since Pope Francis’s messages in January:
New signatories to the “Rome Call for AI Ethics” were named in late April. The CEO of technology giant Cisco and the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby were among the latest to agree to the document, which the Vatican composed in 2020. It urges that developments in AI be socially beneficial and reflect transparency and accountability.
The Rome Call seeks signatures from companies, global and national governance organizations, and leaders of religions. Many groups have joined previously.
The RenAIssance Foundation, a non-profit established in 2021 by Pope Francis within the Pontifical Academy for Life, continues to promote the Rome Call and to support broader international debate on AI ethics.
The foundation’s science director is Franciscan Father Paolo Benanti, a professor and principal advisor to Pope Francis who is playing many influential roles. He sits on the United Nations advisory body on artificial intelligence. He heads Italy’s national committee on AI.
Vatican discussions with top executives are following paths already well-trodden, according to a comprehensive report by Religious News Service on April 29. That pattern has included annual “Minerva Dialogues” held in March in Rome, as well as informal gatherings.
Father Philip Larrey, a Boston College professor who works with Francis on AI issues, said experts eagerly approach the Pope, “asking questions about ethics and the ramifications of what they are doing.” He added, “The Catholic tradition has an amazing framework that is incredibly relevant today.”
Larrey chairs Humanity 2.0, a combined institute and educational academy, which facilitates collaborative ventures between the public, private, and faith-based sectors. It focuses on using AI in “innovative solutions” which promote “human flourishing,” according to its website.
Listen to the audio podcast of Bill Schmitt’s interview with Father Larrey, recorded in January. They discuss the World Communications Day message and the United States context in which AI challenges and policies are being addressed. (mp3 file)
Another priest, Dominican Father Eric Salobir, participates in various meetings, RNS reported. Several years ago, he established Optic, a research network committed to bringing the Catholic perspective in AI. He staged the first “Vatican Hackathon” in 2018, bringing hundreds of U.S. students to Rome to “workshop creative solutions to the world’s most pressing issues.”
Bishop Paul Tighe, the secretary of the Vatican Council for Culture who helped establish the Minerva Dialogues, told RNS his conversations with executives stress that computers must serve humanity. Unlike technology, he says, “humans have consciousness and relationality.”
Pope Francis held an audience with tech leaders on March 27, raising questions to consider: Will AI increase inequality? “Could we lose our sense of having a shared destiny?” He told them, “Our true goal must be for the growth of scientific and technological innovation to be accompanied by greater equality and social inclusion,” as RNS reported.
A computer app, Magisterium AI, is being developed by a Catholic company named Longbeard, founded by Matthew Harvey Sanders. It aims to create “an accessible database of all Church teaching, according to RNS. The app was launched last year and is still being filled out with an abundance of documents in multiple languages.
Sanders told The Christian Post last month that Magisterium AI is already used by more than 180,000 people in 165 countries. As a bonus, Longbeard is working with various Catholic universities to help digitize their libraries. You can take the app for a spin at magisterium.tech.
Desdemona, an AI robot, spoke to a Vatican conference. Bioethics professor Father Michael Baggot introduced the robot, which has also been making the rounds at various secular meetings. Baggot, who is another ambassador to tech leaders, told RNS his goal is to help the Church set aside fears of the technology and to use it in innovative, beneficial ways.
You can learn more about Desdemona, a colorful, well-spoken, somewhat awkward kind of “poster-robot” for the field, at its X account, @DesdemonaRobot.
The New York Times reported on a challenge facing AI developers of the present and the future. An investigative piece in April revealed that a few of America’s biggest technology companies have struggled to feed their AI products with data of all kinds from the Internet, raising questions about possible infringements of copyrights and their own companies’ rules.
Competition and the goal of making a more world-transforming database have prompted technologists to seek more creative ways to gorge their products with articles, books, videos, and more, reporter Cade Metz said on The Day podcast on April 16.
By one estimate, these products will have consumed copies of all the information on the internet by 2026, Metz said. If current and future lawsuits find that some building blocks of the content—articles written by news organizations, for example—were used improperly, it might constitute a kind of “original sin” that overshadows the technology going forward, as The New York Times put it.
Despite all these examples of an apparent googolplex of knowledge being assembled, and in light of the need to make sense of it in profound ways, the caveat from Pope Francis resonates. Humans must use their gift for building relationships. And AI will still lack “the wisdom of the heart.”
Image from ClipSafari.com, a collection of Creative Commons designs.
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