The Vatican has released an Artificial Intelligence ethics handbook.
The Holy See has published guidelines about the growing tech space - which is viewed by many as a threat to society - devised by Pope Francis and the Markkula Centre at Santa Clara University via their new organisation, the Institute for Technology, Ethics and Culture.
Their first initiative has been to create ‘Ethics in the Age of Disruptive Technologies: An Operational Roadmap’ as part of their effort to “ask the deeper questions” about the tech, which is currently experiencing a boom through avenues like chatbots, notably OpenAI’s Chat GPT and Google’s Bard.
Father Brendan McGuire, a pastor at St Simon Parish in Los Altos and advisor to ITEC, told Gizmodo: “The Pope has always had a large view of the world and of humanity, and he believes that technology is a good thing. But as we develop it, it comes time to ask the deeper questions. Technology executives from all over Silicon Valley have been coming to me for years and saying, ‘You need to help us, there’s a lot of stuff on the horizon and we aren’t ready.’ The idea was to use the Vatican’s convening power to bring executives from the entire world together.”
This move comes after those who have pioneered the tech deemed it an “existential threat to humanity” like ‘the godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton - who quit his position at Google amid concerns about the threats the tech poses to copyright and misinformation - earlier this year.
The 75-year-old computer scientist told the New York Times: “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”
