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Delphine Allaire – Vatican City

Alongside Pope Francis’ already substantial teaching on Artificial Intelligence, the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican body which focuses on issues related to bioethics has also been reflecting on this technological revolution for several years, prompted by those most directly concerned. This is illustrated by the meeting between its President  and the President of Microsoft, as he explained to Pope. With its  50,000 engineers based in  Seattle (USA) working under the imperatives of innovation, Brad Smith acknowledged to Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia the often blurry boundaries between machines and humans, and he sought "the Church’s help" in better defining them.

This concern found an immediate response from Pope Francis. The result was the "Rome Call for AI Ethics," signed in Rome on February 28, 2020, under the aegis of the Pontifical Academy for Life, by Microsoft, IBM, the FAO, and the Italian government. Since then many other signatories have joined the initiative, including sixteen representatives of different religions gathered near the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Japan) on July 10, 2024, the California-based company Cisco, and the Church of England, a few weeks earlier.

Religions' contribution shaping AI’s ethics 

Though it is not officially part of the Pope’s Magisterium like the Antiqua et Nova note, the Rome Call for AI Ethics similarly reflects the Holy See’s desire to support the centrality of the human person in this new technological frontier. To emphasize this, Archbishop Paglia introduced the neologism "algor-ethics" as a counterpoint to "algocracy", which refers to the tyranny of algorithmic calculations beyond the control of their creators.

In this regard, religions, alongside universities and the wider society, can help instill ethical awareness in AI among major corporations and policymakers. The Italian Archbishop advocates for ethical and legal regulations, established through international agreements, particularly concerning the management of big data.

"I dream of an agreement similar to the Paris Climate Accord of 2015, dedicated to emerging and converging technologies—especially artificial intelligence," he says, challenging the G20 and the United Nations "on their responsibilities."

Saving Christian humanist anthropology

It was precisely within the framework of the G7 under the Italian presidency in Puglia that the Pope Francis, seated between Giorgia Meloni and Emmanuel Macron, pleaded last June for "a space for significant human control" over AI. "The real risk is that we technologize the human instead of humanizing technology," warns Archbishop Paglia, calling for a recovery of humanism. "Let all sciences come together as in the Renaissance era. Believers and non-believers, poets and physicists, philosophers and theologians. We all must invent an alliance that helps us save humanity."

The Church, has a very strong responsibility in this field, says Archbishop Paglia, recalling that Catholics have professed from the beginning that the Word, the Logos, became flesh. "It did not become an avatar," he says citing the disturbing predictions of Japanese physicist Hiroshi Ishiguro, made several years ago at a Vatican conference. Ishiguro, who has created his own clone, speaks of current humanity as the last organic generation, with the next being envisioned as synthetic, composed of lithium or other materials. "We would be facing a radical transformation of what it means to be human," Archbishop Paglia noted.

Europe’s responsibility

To raise awareness and promote the ethical approach to AI, the prelate travels the world presenting theRome Call initiative as he did in India just a year ago. In the world's most populous country, Monsignor Paglia collected  the signatures of bishops, making them the first episcopal conference to endorse the text. Today, India co-chairs the Paris AI Summit, where Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher represents the Holy See.

An attentive observer of these events in the French capital, Archbisop Paglia Paglia has high hopes for Europe, which he urges to wake up in this race dominated by the Sino-American duopoly. "Europe has a unique sensitivity thanks to its two- or three-thousand-year-old humanist tradition; it must be integrated into this technological world, which has mainly developed in China and the United States," he notes. Though disadvantaged in terms of resources, according to Monsignor Paglia, the Old Continent must  take greater responsibility in the development of technology and scientific research to integrate them into the anthropological sphere. This he warns, is an indispensable condition  : “Otherwise we run the risk that the speed of technology surpasses the slowness of humanism, the slowness of regulations." Expressing his hope that the famous quip: "The United States innovates, China copies, Europe regulates" may be disproved.