Artificial Intelligence and peace: these two themes were at the center of the Pope’s presence at the G7. If the option for peace is the basis of his pontificate, it might be surprising that Francis intervenes on AI. He’s not a machine learning expert, but It is the awareness of this challenge that explains why in Fasano, for the first time in history, a Pontiff participated in the G7: the algorithms that stole the secret of knowledge from us were at the center of the world summit and the Pope wanted to re-propose the person as the pivot of any attempt to answer the questions posed by technological developments and artificial intelligence systems.
Fascinating and terrible: these are the two adjectives that the Pope accompanies the “instrument” (the use of this noun is not accidental). There is no apocalyptic position or a priori condemnation for what in his perspective is “a creative potential that God has given us”, a “cognitive-industrial revolution” that is already changing “from medicine to the world of work, from culture to communication and education”. But, as you wrote in May Message for 58^ Day World of Social Communications, “the answer is not written, it depends on us”, on the use we decide to make of it. Particular questions (and potential) come from generative intelligent agents (ChatGPT, Gemini…) capable of instilling in us the doubt of talking to people rather than machines, passing the “Turing Test”, named after the mathematician who in 1950 indicated this (un)recognizability as a discriminant to answer the question: “Are machines capable of thinking?”.
In 2024, AI was at the center of two important documents of the Pope: in addition to that of May for Social Communications, it was the theme of the Message for Peace of January 1st. On this, he asked the G7 to “rethink the development and use of devices such as the so-called ‘lethal autonomous weapons’ to ban their use, starting already with an active and concrete commitment to introduce ever greater and significant human control ”. AI is already present in some war contexts, but for Bergoglio – here the link with peace – no machine should ever be able to have the autonomy to choose whether to take the life of a human being.
On the different fields of application of algorithms, Francesco’s position is clear: if the person is at the center, problems arise when AI can adapt “autonomously to the task assigned to it and, if designed in this way, make choices independent of the human being to achieve the set objective”. Algorithms – the Pope insisted – are not neutral, they have purposes, they exclude some and enable others. These “algorithmic choices” are the ones that Nello Cristianini, professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bath, calls the three shortcuts on which AI is built: 1) the option for statistical description and the language of probability instead of scientific explanation and formal reasoning; 2) the choice to collect data online, rather than produce it, to respond to the need for lots of data in order to train the machine; 3) the option of obtaining data by observing the user – and not asking for information –, recording all his decisions to become skilled at predicting what he wants.
The Church – which has not always happened in the face of technological innovations and emerging anthropological issues – was able to intervene in public reflection on AI in time. Think of the role of the Franciscan Paolo Benanti, who leads the AI Commission for information as well as being the only Italian in the United Nations Committee on AI, or the Rome Call for AI Ethics, cited by the Pope at the G7 and promoted in 2020 by the Pontifical Academy for Life led by Vincenzo Paglia and which, after having been signed by religious leaders (Christians, Jews and Muslims), political leaders and managers of digital companies, will be signed on next July in Hiroshima by exponents of oriental religions. Transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, traceability, security and privacy: these are the seven principles underlying the document.
Francis’ pontificate is attentive to border issues, to reading the signs of the times: he dedicated his first trip to Lampedusa and migration, with the encyclical Praised yes has united climate and environmental changes with social justice, now artificial intelligence is perceived as another challenge that humanity must face. She does it by proposing – it’s the heart of Rome Call and he reiterated it in Puglia – with algorethics, the neologism that indicates the ethical approach to algorithms. As he had already written in the Brothers all, the technological paradigm embodied by artificial intelligence must not leave room for the technocratic paradigm. For this reason – and Francis made an appeal to the world’s leaders for responsibility – “politics is needed!” (the exclamation point is in the original speech). The road ahead is long, the fields of action are many, but we can read the European position on web law in this direction, which led to the approval of the Artificial Intelligence Act by the EU Parliament in March 2024. Indeed, the message that the Pope brought to the G7 does not only reflect on AI and machine learning, but rather on who we are, who we want to be, how we want to live together and based on what principles, what relationship we have with knowledge and transformation.
