Pope Leo warned over the weekend that a social calamity could come from mass unemployment due to the adoption of artificial intelligence technologies. Prediction market traders appear to think that worry isn’t misplaced.
Disarm” artificial intelligence (AI) to “prevent it from dominating humans : Pope Leo
Ecology, crisis of multilateralism, economic monopolies: in Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), a 130-page text with a deeply social tone, the American Pope responds to a multitude of challenges of our time by posing as defender of human dignity in the era of the digital revolution.
Leo XIV calls for going beyond the concept of just war invoked in particular by the American administration of Donald Trump and denounces the delegation of lethal decisions to technology.
Pope Leo issued a sweeping declaration Monday on the risks of artificial intelligence in the form of a papal encyclical that runs more than 42,000 words. Leo presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic. The encyclical calls for government regulation, retraining for workers, better education for students, protections for children and safeguards to ensure that humans — and not AI models — will make decisions on the use of weapons. This is Pope Leo.
Citing Plato, JRR Tolkien, Picasso and even Beethoven for their contribution to fighting dehumanization, the American Pope also castigates the new forms of slavery born to extract the resources necessary for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and calls for more sustainable technological solutions in order to reduce the impact on the environment.
In some parts of the world, teenagers and children work in dangerous conditions grinding rare earth materials. Bodies marked, mutilated, worn so that the flow of calculation is not interrupted, he denounces.
Beyond technological issues, the Pope is concerned about a risk of dehumanization, warning against a vision of humans reduced to their performances or to data exploited by machines.
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Source: Democracy Now and Le journal La Presse
