Hello. I\u2019m Se\u00e1n-Patrick Lovett. I\u2019d like to open this Vatican Confidential with a quote. See if you
can guess who said this:
\u201cA small number of very rich men have laid upon the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of
slavery itself\u201d, creating \u201c\u2026a gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty.\u201d
You\u2019re right. It was Pope Leo. Just not this Pope Leo. It was his namesake, Leo XIII. He was
writing at the end of the 19th<\/p>\n\n\n\n
century, warning against the negative effects of the Industrial
Revolution, defending workers\u2019 rights, and essentially formulating what we call Catholic social
doctrine.
It was this approach towards the machine-driven tech revolution of the 1800\u2019s that inspired his
successor to take the name, Leo XIV. Almost immediately after his election, Pope Leo described
our present time as a \u201cnew industrial revolution\u201d, spearheaded by the uncontrolled rise and
unrivalled expansion of Artificial Intelligence.
\u201cDebugging\u201d Artificial Intelligence \u2013 in the sense of finding and fixing the errors inherent in
unchecked AI \u2013 is clearly one of the defining missions of his pontificate.
In his very first address to the cardinals who elected him, Pope Leo warned of the dangers AI
poses to \u201chuman dignity, justice and labor\u201d. When he spoke to journalists two days later, he
stressed that AI must be used \u201cfor the good of all\u201d. And at a recent conference on the topic here
in Rome, he acknowledged the contribution of AI to research in healthcare and scientific
discovery, but said it raises \u201ctroubling questions\u201d regarding \u201chumanity\u2019s openness to truth and
beauty\u201d and our \u201cability to grasp and process reality\u201d.
While university professors struggle to cope with AI-generated student essays, and deep-fake
videos flood the internet, a growing number of stories about people falling in love with (and even
wanting to marry) their Chatbots, raise \u201ctroubling questions\u201d indeed.
And it\u2019s not just about ethics either. Artificial Intelligence risks creating a new digital divide,
splitting the world into those with computing power capacity and those without. \u201cA small number
of very rich men\u201d currently controls almost two-thirds of the world\u2019s AI computing hubs, data
centers that cost literally billions of dollars to build and maintain. Like the first industrial
revolution, a handful of super-powerful companies rake in the profits at the expense of those
who risk losing their jobs to AI-driven technology.
Confidentially-speaking, that\u2019s why it\u2019s so interesting (and so important) to follow what is fast
becoming a Leonine magisterium on how to approach AI with caution and care.
I opened with a quote and I\u2019d like to close with one too. This one synthesizes a superbly
common-sense approach to AI (and happens to be one of my personal favorites)\u2026 Who said:
\u201cData must not be confused with intelligence\u201d?
Pope Leo, of course. The XIV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
VATICAN Confidential: How Pope Leo is debugging Artificial Intelligence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":758,"featured_media":80238,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"acf":{"video":"https:\/\/youtu.be\/fy1Syw_RXh4","video_descarga":"https:\/\/attuale.romereports.com\/news\/confrichmeneng.mp4","international_url":"https:\/\/attuale.romereports.com\/news\/","type":"none","newsletter":"si"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.romereports.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80237"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.romereports.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.romereports.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.romereports.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/758"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.romereports.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80237"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.romereports.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80242,"href":"https:\/\/www.romereports.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80237\/revisions\/80242"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.romereports.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.romereports.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.romereports.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.romereports.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}