Extract from ABC News
Pope Leo XIV presents his first encyclical, focused on the rise of artificial intelligence. (Reuters: Yara Nardi)
In short:
Pope Leo XIV has urged governments worldwide to slow the development of AI systems and curb their disruptive effects.
He was supported by Anthropic co-founder Chris Oah, who said firms like his needed outside scrutiny.
What's next?
Pope Leo XIV also made a historic apology for the Holy See's role in legitimising slavery
Pope Leo XIV has issued a fervent manifesto, urging governments worldwide to slow the development of AI systems and curb their disruptive effects.
Catholic popes have been urging global leaders to address social justice issues for 135 years across some two dozen major documents that many of the world's 1.4 billion faithful can cite by their two or three-word titles.
Now, Leo XIV has added his name to the pantheon, issuing his sweeping vision on Monday titled Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity).
The pope called for "robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility".
Invoking the biblical story of the Tower of Babel — where a human tribe is driven by pride to build a tower tall enough to reach Heaven, angering God — the pope said the story shows the risk of any enterprise that "aspires to reach heaven without God's blessing".
"With the heart of a shepherd and a father, I ask everyone to abandon the construction of yet another Tower of Babel and to join forces in building up the common good," Pope Leo stated.
At the Vatican event, Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah thanked Pope Leo for addressing the problems raised by the disruptive new technology.
He said firms like his faced strong commercial pressures and needed outside scrutiny.
Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah supports Pope Leo's vision. (Reuters: Yara Nardi)
"Every frontier AI lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing," Mr Olah said.
Anthropic is the company that produces the Claude AI tools.
Pope wants to centre 'moral and ethical arguments'
"Like other popes before him, Pope Leo is responding to one of the most pressing social issues of his time," John Thavis, a longtime Vatican correspondent who covered three papacies, told Reuters.
"Clearly [Leo] wants to help shape the debate over technology and AI, by emphasising the moral and ethical arguments that centre the human person," Thavis said.
A year into his papacy, Pope Leo formally signed the AI text on May 15, the 135th anniversary of his predecessor's publication of Rerum Novarum, firmly tying the newest papal document urging global action on social issues to the papal text widely considered to have done so first.
Anna Rowlands, a British academic and church adviser, said at a Vatican event on Monday, presenting Leo's text, that for more than a century, popes had cautioned that the world "will not be saved by the market".
"Today, Pope Leo cautions that we will not be 'saved' by AI,"she said.
Encyclicals are one of the highest forms of teaching from a pontiff to the church's members.
Popes choose the topics of encyclicals carefully to highlight the main priorities of their papacies, as the texts, which can span hundreds of pages, often take years to prepare.
Leo, who has adopted a more forceful tone in recent months and has drawn the ire of US President Donald Trump after criticising the Iran war, warned in his text that AI spreads misinformation, prioritises conflict and could lead the world down a path of unending war.
At Monday's Vatican event, he also expressed concern that some autonomous weapons systems have advanced "practically beyond any human reach to govern them".
Pope Leo warns AI spreads misinformation and prioritises conflict. (Reuters: Yara Nardi)
Mixed record of success for papal encyclicals
Papal encyclicals urging action from world leaders have a mixed record of producing substantive change.
Pacem in Terris, published just months after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, is credited by some historians with giving moral backing to negotiations between then-US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that led to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Francis, whose Laudato Si' was the first papal document to endorse the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases are warming the Earth's atmosphere, frequently lamented that governments were not doing more to mitigate climate change.
Mr Thavis said it was usually hard at first to judge whether a papal encyclical would have a lasting impact, as it took time for the lengthy documents to be digested by people worldwide.
"Their ideas tend to surface gradually in the public square, in the media and in grassroots activism," he said.
"I suspect this encyclical will act as a landmark reference point in the ongoing debate over artificial intelligence."
The encyclical is expected to be a "landmark reference" in the AI debate. (Reuters: Yara Nardi)
Pope also makes a historic slavery apology
Pope Leo XIV also made a historic apology for the Holy See's role in legitimising slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican's record a "wound in Christian memory".
Past popes have apologised for Christians' involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologised for, the role that past popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave "infidels".
Leo raised the issue of the slave trade in relation to what he called the new forms of slavery and colonialism that the digital revolution is fuelling.
"It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord," Leo wrote. "For this, in the name of the church, I sincerely ask for pardon."
Shannen Dee Williams, historian at the University of Dayton and author of the 2022 history of American Black Catholic nuns, Subversive Habits, welcomed the apology as a "monumental step toward the kind of essential truth-telling and reparation that many Catholics have prayed and worked to witness".
"The Catholic Church has never been an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy,"she said.
"Black Catholics have waited a long time to hear the Vatican speak honestly about the church's leading roles in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, and thus by extension the enduring systems of anti-Black racism in the world today."
Reuters/ AP
No comments:
Post a Comment