Scholars, theologians and tech leaders talk AI ethics at the Vatican

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Catholic Church has a valuable role to play in providing "clear moral leadership" to protect humanity from the negative impact of new technology, a leading AI researcher said under the vaulted ceiling of the Pontifical Academy for Sciences headquarters in the Vatican Gardens.

"You could have made so much money on human cloning; the Catholic Church came out against it, all countries are against it, it's illegal everywhere, we do not have a problem with that," said Max Tegmark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and president of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing existential risks from advanced technologies.

Speaking at a forum on artificial intelligence development Oct. 24, Tegmark said that today, in the AI age, the church must advocate for pausing further developments in artificial general intelligence -- a form of AI which surpasses human cognitive capabilities across many tasks -- and computer superintelligence "at least until maybe one day someone will figure out how it can be controlled or aligned."

Otherwise, he said, "we have no idea how to keep things like that under control."

Leaders in the tech industry, church officials, ethicists and entrepreneurs gathered at the Vatican for a conference on ethical AI development Oct. 24-25, hosted at the Pontifical Academy for Sciences.

AI, and its perils and promises, have become an increasingly important area of concern for the Vatican. Pope Francis dedicated his message for World Day of Peace Jan. 1 to the theme of artificial intelligence and peace, and he spoke about AI to world leaders at the G7 summit in southern Italy in June.

At the conference Oct. 24, Taylor Black, director of AI and venture ecosystems at Microsoft, noted how few people in the technology industry "think of persons in a holistic sort of way because we think that a whole bunch of things about what makes a person a person are outside of the purview of tech, whether that's correct or incorrect."

That is why the advent of artificial intelligence is a "fantastic opportunity" for the church, he said, since "tech has to come to the only place where the person is really understood and where we have paths to further understand the human person."

One way in which unchecked AI development could harm the dignity of the human person is by replacing large swaths of the workforce without providing any kind of fallback for people put out of work, said Anthony J. Granado, associate general secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholics Bishops.

Artificial intelligence, he told Catholic News Service, "should supplement what humans do, it should not replace humans," he said, noting how the U.S. bishops' conference is currently looking at ways to "minimize the impact" of artificial intelligence on job losses.

A 2023 Goldman Sachs report estimated that artificial intelligence could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs while increasing the total annual value of goods and services produced globally by 7%.

Yet he noted that AI also holds potential benefits for the church, such as being a "great tool for helping to promote catechesis."

"The church throughout all of human history has to look at and read the signs of the times and use those opportunities to promote the Gospel in different ways, so AI will be one of those frontiers where the Gospel will need to be preached," Granado told CNS.

Addressing the church's dual role in embracing but also ethically guiding the development of AI, Dominican Father Eric Solobir, chairman of the Human Technology Foundation's executive committee, said the church must work with the tech industry to "align the planets" between its profitability and ethics.

"We need to try to create a paradigm shift to change the ethical software" of the tech industry, he said, which tends to be consequentialist and prioritize long-term gains to the point of ignoring immediate harm caused by certain decisions.

Father Solobir recalled engaging with tech leaders on matters of ethics, explaining that people in the tech industry would typically gauge the permissiveness of an action on its legality and not in terms of promoting human flourishing.

The church, he said, "can put some drops of this virtue ethics in their process of reflection, and that completely changes how one deals with the ethics of technology."