The Catholic Church will not be precisely recognized for being on the slicing fringe of coverage—it was nonetheless performing mass in Latin till the Nineteen Sixties, in any case. But the newly chosen Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born Robert Prevost, has his eyes towards the longer term in terms of synthetic intelligence. In his first formal assembly with cardinals of the church, he pointed to the event of AI as one of many greatest challenges going through humanity, in keeping with CNN.
“In our personal day, the church gives to everybody the treasury of her social educating in response to a different industrial revolution and to developments within the area of synthetic intelligence that pose new challenges for the protection of human dignity, justice and labor,” he advised the senior clergy members. He additionally stated he selected his identify, Leo, as a sign of his intention to comply with within the footsteps of Pope Leo XIII, who he stated labored to handle “the social query within the context of the primary nice industrial revolution.”
Pope Leo XIII, who served because the chief of the church from 1878 to 1903, is probably finest recognized for an encyclical he issued in 1891 entitled “Rerum Novarum” or “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.” A landmark textual content on employee rights, the letter was a name to alleviate “the distress and wretchedness urgent so unjustly on the vast majority of the working class” and issued assist for, amongst different issues, the unionization of labor.
Leo XIV can also be selecting up the baton from his predecessor, Pope Francis, who additionally recognized AI as a possible threat to humanity if not developed and deployed ethically and in a human-centered manner. Francis issued “Antiqua et Nova,” the “Note on the connection between synthetic intelligence and human intelligence,” during which he insisted that any developments within the area of AI should “serve human dignity and never hurt it.”
Pope Francis additionally spoke publicly on AI on the 2024 G7 Summit, the place he described AI as the beginning of a “cognitive-industrial revolution” and warned that it posed the chance of inflicting “higher injustice between superior and growing nations or between dominant and oppressed social lessons.” He additionally delivered remarks on the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this yr earlier than his passing, during which he warned that “human dignity and fraternity are continuously subordinated within the pursuit of effectivity” throughout the development of recent applied sciences, and referred to as on these concerned with the event of AI to make sure it “promotes human dignity, the vocation of the human particular person, and the frequent good.”
