The Catholic Church is not exactly known for being on the cutting edge of policy—it was still performing mass in Latin until the 1960s, after all. But the newly selected Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born Robert Prevost, has his eyes toward the future when it comes to artificial intelligence. In his first formal meeting with cardinals of the church, he pointed to the development of AI as one of the biggest challenges facing humanity, according to CNN.
“In our own day, the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor,” he told the senior clergy members. He also said he chose his name, Leo, as a signal of his intention to follow in the footsteps of Pope Leo XIII, who he said worked to address “the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.”
Pope Leo XIII, who served as the leader of the church from 1878 to 1903, is perhaps best known for an encyclical he issued in 1891 entitled “Rerum Novarum” or “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.” A landmark text on worker rights, the letter was a call to relieve “the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class” and issued support for, among other things, the unionization of labor.
Leo XIV is also picking up the baton from his predecessor, Pope Francis, who also identified AI as a potential risk to humanity if not developed and deployed ethically and in a human-centered way. Francis issued “Antiqua et Nova,” the “Note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence,” in which he insisted that any developments in the field of AI must “serve human dignity and not harm it.”
Pope Francis also spoke publicly on AI at the 2024 G7 Summit, where he described AI as the start of a “cognitive-industrial revolution” and warned that it posed the risk of causing “greater injustice between advanced and developing nations or between dominant and oppressed social classes.” He also delivered remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year before his passing, in which he warned that “human dignity and fraternity are frequently subordinated in the pursuit of efficiency” during the advancement of new technologies, and called on those involved with the development of AI to ensure it “promotes human dignity, the vocation of the human person, and the common good.”
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