Pope Leo's Unsettling Vision of the AI Future

A new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, addresses safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. It lists dangers in detail while offering limited discussion of potential benefits. It warns about AI-driven unemployment, especially for young people, and about environmental harm from energy-intensive, carbon-emitting AI infrastructure. It condemns exploitation of workers involved in data labeling, content moderation, and extraction of resources needed for AI devices and microprocessors. It also rejects autonomous weapons, stating that moral judgment requires conscience, personal responsibility, and recognition of others as persons. It concludes that lethal or irreversible decisions should not be entrusted to artificial systems.

"Leo seeks to counterbalance alarm with hope. He composes a long and vivid list of dangers posed by AI, but insists that the technology is a "gift that can alleviate suffering and open up new possibilities"-as long as it's ordered by humane values rather than monopolistic interests. As for the specific advantages that AI might yield, however, Leo is largely silent. His expressions of alarm are detailed and expansive; his expressions of hope, perfunctory and brief."

"Leo decries AI-driven unemployment, especially among young people, as well as the environmental degradation caused by energy-intensive, carbon-emitting AI infrastructure. He condemns the exploitation of workers such as those who label data, moderate disturbing content, or extract "the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends.""

""Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person," Leo writes. "Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems.""

Read at The Atlantic