Pope Leo issues harrowing warning about AI in first major teaching
Pope Leo has waded into the debate over artificial intelligence to call for AI to be 'disarmed', calling out the 'culture of power' around this new technology in his encyclical.
It's the public letter the Pope writes, originally to his bishops but over time it's become more of a wider announcement of his stance on matters, and the first one of Pope Leo's time in the Vatican has tackled a number of topics including AI, slavery and war.
Speaking about the dangers of artificial intelligence and how it needs to be 'disarmed', Pope Leo said: "The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention."
He wrote that while 'technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity' since it has improved people's lives over the years, he warned that waves of human progress 'revealed the ambiguity of tools that can cause harm when not oriented toward the good'.
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Warning that AI and its power were largely concentrated in 'private' hands, Pope Leo said that 'makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good'.
"Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of 'armed' competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon," he further wrote.
"This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.
"To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.
"It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.
"Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home.
"AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible."
Elsewhere in his encyclical he criticised 'the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak' and the 'risk of dehumanization' in a world that crunches everyone down to data.
The Pope also criticised the introduction of AI into warfare, saying that 'no algorithm can make war morally acceptable' and making something with 'intrinsic inhumanity' like war more detached from humans through AI risked 'reducing victims to data' and 'lowering the threshold for resorting to violence'.
He also called out the impact AI was having on politics as it was being used to fuel misinformation with fake images and videos designed to manipulate.
In a message for AI developers, he said: "Developers bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity."
Topics: Pope Leo, Artificial Intelligence, Technology
Joe Harker