Francis’ speech at the extended session of the summit taking place in Puglia under the Italian presidency. The first time a pontiff meets the “greats of the Earth.” In the speech dedicated to the topic of artificial intelligence – a “fascinating and terrible tool” – he called for safeguarding the dignity of every human being also in this area. In one of the bilateral summits, the Prime Minister of India renewed his invitation to the Pope to visit his country.
Brindisi () – An exciting speech on artificial intelligence, a “fascinating and tremendous tool” that places politics in front of crucial decisions for the future of humanity. The specific request to ban “lethal autonomous weapons”, which are based precisely on these new technological frontiers. And then a long series of bilateral meetings with the world’s greats, including the highly anticipated ones with the recently confirmed Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, and the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. These were the key moments of the afternoon that Pope Francis spent today at the G7 summit taking place in Borgo Egnazia, in Apulia, under the rotating presidency of the Italian government.
The pontiff arrived by helicopter from Rome and participated in an expanded session of work in which, along with the seven member countries (United States, Canada, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy and Japan), other heads of state also participated. and government and representatives of international institutions. Francisco held nine individual discussions with various personalities. In addition to Modi and Zelensky, the Pope met with the president of the United States, Joe Biden, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, the president of Kenya, William Samoei Ruto, the president of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the general director of the International Monetary Fund Kristalina Georgieva.
Particularly significant for Asia was the hug with which Indian Prime Minister Modi received the pontiff in the room where the summit is taking place. It was the second time Francis and the Hindu nationalist leader had met, after the audience at the Vatican in October 2021, when the BJP leader was in Italy for the G20. This same afternoon, in a Tweet, Modi confirmed that he had renewed the invitation to Francis to visit India, which he had first made three years ago. “I admire your commitment to serving people and making our planet better,” the Indian Prime Minister wrote on X while commenting on the hug image. “I am very happy with this meeting – declared Cardinal Oswald Gracias from Mumbai, interviewed by the ANI agency -. Meetings of this type are useful and are a sign for everyone that the prime minister respects the Holy Father and values what he has to offer. say. This shows a certain community and interest in working for the good of the world.
It is the first time that a Pope participates in a G7 session. The occasion was given by one of the topics on the agenda: the increasingly widespread use of systems based on artificial intelligence, which also places governments at an ethical crossroads. Pope Francis had already dedicated his message for the World Day of Peace on January 1 to this argument. And today – in Apulia, sitting at the table with the heads of state and government of some of the most important powers on Earth – he has once again pointed out his ambivalence. Artificial intelligence – he observed – “on the one hand, excites by the possibilities it offers; on the other, it provokes fear of the consequences that could occur”, “it could allow a democratization of access to knowledge, the exponential progress of scientific research , the possibility of delegating exhausting jobs to machines; but, at the same time, it could bring with it greater inequality between advanced nations and developing nations, between dominant social classes and oppressed social classes, thus endangering the possibility of a “culture of encounter” and favoring a ‘culture of throwaway'”.
At stake is not only the question of correct use, but also understanding the particular characteristics of this tool. “When our ancestors sharpened flint stones to make knives – said Francisco – they used them both to cut skins for clothing and to eliminate each other. But artificial intelligence is an even more complex tool. It can adapt autonomously to the task assigned to it and, if designed in that way, it could make decisions independently of the human being to achieve the set objective.” This dimension, if not properly regulated and controlled, can have serious consequences. anthropological. “We would condemn humanity to a hopeless future – the pontiff warned – if we took away people’s ability to decide for themselves and their lives, condemning them to depend on the choices of machines. We need to guarantee and protect a space. of significant human control over the choice process used by artificial intelligence programs. Human dignity itself is at stake.
That’s why he called for a ban on “lethal autonomous weapons,” because “no machine should ever choose to end the life of a human being.” But Pope Francis also cited another problematic example: programs designed to assist magistrates in decisions regarding granting house arrest to prisoners serving sentences in a penitentiary institution. “Artificial intelligence is asked to predict the probability of recidivism of the crime committed by a convicted person based on predetermined categories” – he explained – but it is a method that “can implicitly refer to the biases inherent in the data categories.” used”, while “on the contrary, the human being is always evolving and is capable of surprising with his actions, something that the machine cannot take into account.”
Even the same “generative artificial intelligence” – on which tools like ChatGPT are based today -, if not properly guided, carries not only “the risk of legitimizing the spread of fake news and strengthening the advantage of a dominant culture”, but also that of “undermining the educational process in its essence (in nuce)”; because “education, which should give students the possibility of authentic reflection, runs the risk of being reduced to a repetition of notions, which will be considered increasingly incontestable simply because they are presented again and again.”
In summary, therefore, it is about putting the dignity of the person at the center again, even in the new frontiers of technology. “That is why – Pope Francis recalled – I welcomed the signing in Rome, in 2020, of the Rome Call for AI Ethics [13] and his support for that form of ethical moderation of algorithms and artificial intelligence programs that I have called “algoretics.” It is “a series of principles that are revealed as a global and plural platform capable of finding the support of the cultures, religions, international organizations and large companies that are protagonists of this development.”
But all this cannot work without political action. Because “politics is useful – Francis reiterated – and its greatness is shown when, in difficult times, one acts based on great principles and thinking about the common good in the long term.” “This – he concluded – is precisely the case of artificial intelligence . It is up to each person to make good use of it, and it is up to politics to create the conditions so that this good use is possible and fruitful.”
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