A few days after the new Pope, Leo XIV, he touched his position as head of the Catholic Church, began talking about artificial intelligence.
In his first speech before the press, the recognized one that AI has “an immense potential” but empeded that we need “to ensure that it can be used for the good of all.”
And in his first direction to the cardinals, he explained that the Real chose the name Leo XIV due to the AI. The name is a reference to a previous Pope, Leo XIII, who hero the position of the industrial revolution at the end of the 19th century. That ancient Pontiff intervened in the capitalism of cutting and the new technology of the day ran the risk of turning workers into basic products. The Catholic Church, argued, should defend the rights and dignity of workers.
The new Pope pointed out that he thinks that the Church must take that role again.
“In our day, the Church sacrifices to all the treasure of its social education in response to another industrial revolution and the developments in the field of artificial intelligence that raise new challenges for the defense of human dignity.
On the surface, AI and Catholicism may seem like a strange combination. Since when is Silicon Valley supposed to take the Vatican’s march orders?
But when you take a look at Catholic history, you realize that AI is exactly the kind of things about which the Pope should have strong opinions. The church settings suggest that technology is something to activate activating it, encouraging it on where you appropriate, criticizing when necessary, but never disconnect. The AI in particular is forcing great questions about the meaning of human life, and it is important that spiritual thinkers intervene in them instead of simply letting technologists execute the program.
The Catholic Church was the Silicon Valley of the Middle Ages.
Today, many people think of the Catholic Church as a retrograde technological. He is known for his negative points of view about abortion and contraception. And long before that, the duration of the Renaissance, was known for chasing scientists with a vision of the future such as Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei because they challenged the doctrines of the Church, as the idea that the Earth is in the center of the universe.
But he returns to the medieval period and will see that the Catholic Church and technological innovation once went hand in hand.
This is because Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages developed a radical idea: technology, theorized, could help us restore humanity to the perfection of Adam before its fall in grace. If part of what Mean would form Adam to the image of God was that He was a creator, a manufacturer, then perhaps the key to human redemption was to rely on that aspect of our eloles.
Just in the so -called dark age, this idea shot in the monasteries, where the motto “Ora Labsa” and Circle of Work and circulated widely. Some of these monasteries became engineering hotacos, producing inventions such as the first known tide water wheel and the impact well. Catholics also cool us everything, from metallurgy and mills to adoption in the watch watches scale and printing. To this day, engineers have no one but four patron saints in Catholicism.
“In general, the Church has been very positive towards technology in the past,” Brian Green, a Catholic professor who focuses on technological ethics at the University of Santa Clara, told me in 2018. “But as humans have become more powerful, the Church has felt that it has felt, it has felt, which perceives as an obstacle human life, such as birth control or nuclear weapons.
How Pope Francis paved the way in ai
The problem for the church is that opposite technological innovation runs the risk of making it look more and more disagreeing with modern life. The late Pope Francis acknowledged that the Church needs to commit to technology if it wants to stay relevant.
To discuss how technology can be used for good, in 2016 with Meta Zuckerberg, Tim Cook of Apple and Eric Schmidt, then Alphabet Executive President, the Google parent company. He made the Vatican serve as a place for a Hackathon, as well as a climate technology competition. And in an encyclical or papal letter, called laudato yes, it was heard about the potential of technology to remodel the future of humanity.
But he also warned that the development of AI could not be a free reckless for everyone. He called international regulation. In an event of the Vatican last year, it was emphasized that AI should be used to “meet the needs of humanity”, no “enrich and increase the high power of the few technological giants.”
Francis also insisted that we should look at AI as a perfect and divine decision maker, which would be idolatry. Instead of outsourcing our agency to the machines, Francis advocated “an appreciation renewed for everything that is human.”
The Church, which values divine revelation, has not always embraced humanism, the opinion that humans have agency and skills to discover truth and improve the world through their own reason. But Francis asked his followers to adopt a new Christian humanism to affirm their agency and decision -making skills while based on religious sources for advice on the search for meaning.
“The sacred writing,” said Francis, “offers us the essential coordinates.”
Why Catholicism, and other religions, should evaluate AI
Pope Francis, and Pope Leo XIII of the nineteenth century before him, were making a key point: the Catholic Church can and must express opinions about the great technological developments of the time, because they relate to moral and spiritual issues.
The AI revolution is raising many of these pressing questions: how can we prevent power from concentrating on a few? How do we make sure that the economic spoil is distributed quite a lot? Why do the son of work and that we outsually outline the AI, and that we keep for us choose because they enter into organs or essential for the human agency? Should we allow AI to take care of artistic creation? What is a human life for anyway?
These types of questions are bread and butter of religion. Therefore, it is completely appropriate for religious leaders to evaluate it. Not doing so mean perhaps perhaps the greatest moral inflection point of the century.
That does not mean that religion has all the right answers. But, as Francis suggested, we can consider it as a compass. On the millennia, it is the opportunity of idea of the “essential coordinates” of humanity: our fundamental psychological needs. And mechanisms were developed to know them.
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII offered an example of this in Rerum Novarum, an encyclical that presents his views on the industrial revolution. He noted that people sometimes consent to things that are real terrible for them, for example, working seven days a week. Therefore, your interests must be protected. That is why there is a religious obligation to observe a rest day, explained the Pope: we need to prevent people from becoming basic products.
The new Pope Leo has a powerful opportunity to bring that argument to the 21st century.
