The Pope Speaks Out On The Ethics Of AI

The Roman Catholic Church says that the ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) should be agreed upon and an influential Vatican institute and top officials from the European Union, United Nations, IBM and Microsoft have recently joined forces to push for the ethical development of AI. 

Leaders from the two tech giants met senior church officials in Rome, and agreed to collaborate on "human-centred" ways of designing AI.

The officials have signed a document, called the "Rome Call for AI Ethics". The call was supported by Pope Francis, in his first detailed remarks about the impact of AI on humanity on Friday 28th February. The Rome Call for Ethics was co-signed by Mr Smith, IBM executive vice-president John Kelly and president of the Pontifical Academy for Life Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia.

It puts humans at the centre of new technologies, asking for AI to be designed with a focus on the good of the environment and "our common and shared home and of its human inhabitants". 

The Vatican’s interest in the technology is hardly new, and several of its pontifical academies, essentially research societies under the Pope’s authority, are hard at work studying what AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies will mean for the Catholic faith and humanity at large.  The document is one indication that organised religion is increasingly interested in weighing in on the ethics of artificial intelligence and, in the case of the Vatican, working alongside large tech companies in the process.

Tech and Religious Giants
Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia said the meeting came about after he developed a friendship with leaders of Microsoft and IBM.
Microsoft's Brad Smith said: "I think it's a challenging time because there is so much polarisation in so many parts of the world." The group wants to start a new dialogue on ethics and technology and invites other companies to sign up and work together.

Mr Smith said agreeing a universal ethical paradigm on artificial intelligence may prove impossible because across human history people had not agreed a single ethical framework to rule their lives.  The Vatican's interest in addressing ethical issues in technology has been growing for some time.  

Pope Francis has written that while inequalities could expand "enormously" the dangers "must not detract from the immense potential that new technologies offer."

New Jobs
IBM's John Kelly said every job in the world would be touched in some way by artificial intelligence in the immediate future. 
He said the best scenario was humans not being replaced by machines, but working alongside them. "When we were first developing AI we were running AI machines in competition with humans and I think we learned from that in certain tasks, certainly machines can beat humans and certain tasks machines can't..... The really interesting part is when man and machine combine and works synergistically, so we are looking across the board for opportunities to do that whether it is in health care or whether it is in food supply chains, safety and security, or energy discovery and exploration," he said. 

Humanising Technology
All the speakers said they were inspired by the Pope's leadership in this area. The new ethics document puts the Catholic Church at the forefront of major world religions in working toward a possible doctrine on artificial intelligence. But the Vatican is joining a long list of governments, companies, and nongovernmental groups that have articulated AI ethics principles in the past three years. 

Earlier this month the European Union laid out its strategy for AI development and regulation in a white paper, and the US Department of Defense issued ethical guidelines for the use of AI. 

The European Union can hardly be counted as one of the data industry’s big winners, with its tech firms more often than not playing second fiddle to rivals from the US and China. But the European Commission, which proposes EU legislation, wants to change that and the Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said “our ambition to shape Europe’s digital future.”

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