“AI is already an environment in which we are immersed and a power with which we must deal. This is why it is not enough to regulate it: it must be disarmed and made accessible,” argues Leo XIV in this text focused on the protection of human dignity.
Pope releases major document on human dignity in the age of AI
“Disarming does not mean renouncing technology, but preventing it from dominating humans,” underlines the pontiff, for whom “the race for the most efficient algorithm and the most vast data bank” often only aims to “consolidate a geopolitical or commercial advantage over all others”.
For the head of the Catholic Church, we must “break this equivalence between technical power and the right to govern”. “When these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created (…) fueling the gap between the included and the excluded,” underlines Leo XIV.
The Pope therefore insists on the need for a “new spiritual, ethical and political framework” to regulate these innovations, a framework which must also take into account respect for the environment.
The encyclical denounces in particular “the new forms of slavery” born to extract the resources necessary for the use of AI and calls for “more sustainable technological solutions in order to reduce the impact on the environment”.
“In certain regions of the world, adolescents and children work in dangerous conditions grinding the materials from which rare earths are obtained. Bodies marked, mutilated, worn out so that the flow of calculation is not interrupted,” he criticizes.
Pope warns against any attack on human “dignity” in the age of AI
“In addition, criminal networks use online platforms, messaging systems, anonymous payments and profiling techniques to recruit, control and move victims of trafficking, often minors, transforming men and women into ‘data’ to be tracked and ‘packages’ to be moved (…)”
The Bishop of Rome takes the opportunity to ask “sincere forgiveness” for the delay with which the Church condemned “the scourge of slavery” throughout History.
It also emphasizes the role of education, of “crucial” importance in confronting this technological revolution, and warns against “the phenomena of embezzlement of minors, blackmail and sexual exploitation” of the latter made “more insidious” by “AI tools capable of manipulating images and videos”.
Pope Leo
“Today more than ever, it is important to reaffirm the overcoming of the theory of ‘just war’ too often invoked to justify any war, subject to the right to self-defense in its strictest sense”, he wrote in his encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” (Humanity). magnificent), published Monday.
