In office buildings in Silicon Valley, at closed-door meetings in Rome and in private audiences with Pope Francis on the Vatican, programmers pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence are mining the church’s insight on what makes human beings tick.
The rapid development in the sphere of AI “is asking us to reassess fundamentally about what it’s that makes us human. What distinguishes humans from machines?” said Bishop Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican Council for Culture and amongst a handful of Catholic clergy who’re bridging the divide between scientific knowledge and the church’s spiritual and theological tradition.
In conversations with AI programmers and experts, Tighe said he talks about consciousness and “relationality” as key prerogatives of human beings that distinguish us from machines. But the creators of AI will not be attempting to re-create humans, he said in a recent interview with Religion News Service. “They are creating one other form of entity.”
As Silicon Valley fills with wannabe gods, they’re turning to the Catholic Church’s 2,000-year-old study of the human condition for answers, and limits. “They are asking questions on ethics and the ramifications of what they’re doing,” said the Rev. Philip Larrey, who teaches a course on technology and AI at Boston College.
Larrey incessantly meets with movers and shakers in the sphere of AI, difficult them about the probabilities and possible threats of this developing technology. “Whenever you speak to those people it’s essential have a framework that is smart. The Catholic tradition has an incredible framework that’s incredibly relevant today,” he said, describing his role as translating “the language of tradition to the language of Silicon Valley.”
Larrey said he’s asked about whether AI, which does not need a body and might compute at a much higher level than humans, will be considered to be much like angels. Transhumanists — who welcome technological improvements on human consciousness — ask him whether the human soul will be disconnected from the body.
“I tell them, ‘You can. It’s called death,'” Larrey said.
Pope Francis’ engagement in the sphere of AI has been growing steadily because the technology develops, and the Vatican announced on Friday that the pontiff will take part in the session dedicated to AI of the following G7 summit, a gathering of representatives from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union, which is able to happen in southern Italy June 13-15.
While the Vatican also engages with the tech industry officially, its biggest influence on the sphere of AI — as with other scientific endeavors — is usually through unofficial channels. “There is a powerful effort by individuals within the Catholic Church to make a difference, to influence the policies which are coming out,” Larrey said, explaining that it’s “not a unified or organized effort.”
“It’s about different actors who’re using their networks, friendships and relationships to get the Catholic perspectives across,” he added.
Several tech CEOs visit the Vatican repeatedly for personal meetings with Pope Francis, Larrey said, including Sam Altman, generally known as the “father” of ChatGPT; Demis Hassabis, who directs Google’s DeepMind AI project; and Elon Musk, who has already secured half a billion dollars for his xAI startup.
The Minerva Dialogues, an annual gathering in recent times of tech leaders and Catholic prelates on the Monastery of St. Mary Sopra Minerva in Rome, is an example of the deep mutual interest between the Vatican and Silicon Valley.
Founded by the Rev. Eric Salobir, a Dominican priest, the group has no website and operates under the Chatham House rule, which ensures privacy and anonymity for individuals who don’t need to tie their corporations to the Catholic brand.
Salobir is the founding father of Optic, a network committed to bringing the Catholic perspective to the sphere of AI. In 2018, he organized the primary “Vatican Hackathon,” where a whole lot of young U.S. students got here to Rome to workshop creative solutions to the world’s most pressing issues, from poverty to migration to climate change.
Among the participants within the Minerva Dialogues are Eric Schmidt, who was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and its executive chairman from 2011 to 2015; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman; James Manyika, former head of the McKinsey Global Institute; Maurice Lévy of the Publicis Groupe, the world’s third largest promoting and communications group; and Carlo D’Asaro Biondo, former president of Google for Eastern Europe.
“The continuity of the dialogue has created a context of friendship,” said Tighe, who’s among the many organizers of the Minerva Dialogues. “There is a determined effort by all participants to try to be certain that the event of AI will ultimately be in service to humanity and attempting to put the human person at the middle,” he added.
At a papal audience on March 27, Francis warned participants within the Minerva Dialogues of the risks of AI, drawing examples from the biblical Tower of Babel, a lesson about human attempts to rival God. The pope probed for answers about technical matters: Can institutions hold technology corporations accountable for the impact of their products? Will AI increase inequality?
But Francis also expressed concern for the human community. “Could we lose our sense of getting a shared destiny?” he asked in his speech. “Our true goal have to be for the expansion of scientific and technological innovation to be accompanied by greater equality and social inclusion.”
Together with the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, then led by Cardinal Peter Turkson, Tighe organized a 2019 conference titled “The Common Good within the Digital Age.” Later that yr he visited Santa Clara University in California to debate AI with Western and Eastern scholars.
Francis’ growing interest in AI is shown within the theme he selected for his 2024 message on the World Day of Peace, on Jan. 1, when he spoke of the “urgent must orient the concept and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way.”
The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, led by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, has also organized events and conferences drawing attention to the moral implications of AI. In February 2020, the academy organized a conference titled “The ‘good’ Algorithm? Artificial Intelligence: Ethics, Law and Health,” drawing leading thinkers in the sphere, including the Rev. Paolo Benanti, the pope’s adviser on AI, who serves as a liaison between the Vatican and the United Nations on emerging technologies.
The conference led to the creation of the “Rome Call for AI Ethics,” a document signed by IBM, Microsoft and U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization representatives. It lays out guidelines for promoting ethics, transparency and inclusivity in AI. On Wednesday, Chuck Robbins, chairman and CEO of computer giant Cisco, got here to the Vatican so as to add his name to the list of signatories.
Catholics at every level are also grappling with the existential implications of this technology. Last week, Catholic Answers, a California Catholic evangelization group, rushed to vary the name of its chatbot, Father Justin, after complaints — and a little bit of ridicule — from those that found a virtually collared dispenser of AI advice problematic.
“We have rendered ‘Fr. Justin,’ just ‘Justin.’ We won’t say he’s been laicized, because he never was an actual priest!” said a press statement from Catholic Advocacy group on Wednesday.
Some Catholic groups are being more deliberate. The Catholic company Longbeard created Magisterium AI, which is compiling an accessible database of all of the church’s teaching. “We were attempting to construct probably the most Catholic AI that we could,” said the founding father of Longbeard, Mathew Sanders, during a news conference on the Pontifical Oriental Institute titled “AI on the Service of the Church’s Mission” on the Vatican on April 18.
Magisterium AI attempts to avoid errors by inserting strict rules for sources and transparency into its programming, however it’s not perfect. When asked about whether pastors can bless couples in same-sex relations, Magisterium AI answered no, despite a recent decision by the Vatican’s doctrine department to permit the practice.
The system, which relies on a large amount of documents in quite a few languages, may also need to struggle to maintain up with Pope Francis’ own style and leadership, which tends to depart official doctrine unchanged while promoting latest attitudes and openness though actions and dialogue. Despite the hurdles, it’s essential that the church remain involved in the sphere of AI, Sanders said.
If politicians are busy with more pressing issues and tech corporations are kicking the can on the downsides of AI, Sanders said that it’s as much as the church to be prophetic. “How can the church help facilitate the conversation to handle the downsides of this emerging technology?” he asked.
The Rev. Michael Baggot, who teaches bioethics on the University of Regina Apostolorum, is engaged in academic dialogues on AI and the Catholic faith. He envisions a day when robots is perhaps spiritual gurus or religious assistants, although “only a weak, frail, sinful human being can actually administer the sacraments,” he said in an interview.
According to Baggot, the church must put aside any fear and actively engage with AI and emerging technologies, and to prove it he got down to speak with Desdemona, an AI-powered robot who made the closing remarks on the Vatican conference.
Dressed in white, Desdemona politely answered questions in English, Chinese, German and Italian, blinking rapidly and tilting her head in mocking interest while clunkily shaking hands with participants. Though she wouldn’t say if she was super intelligent, “I can say I’m super cool,” she quipped.
© Religion News Service
