Signalling the Vatican’s growing engagement in efforts to ensure the ethical development of new technologies, the Vatican has announced that “Artificial Intelligence and Peace” will be the theme for the next World Day of Peace. Source: NCR Online.
“The remarkable advances made in the field of artificial intelligence are having a rapidly increasing impact on human activity, personal and social life, politics and the economy,” the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development said in a statement released yesterday.
“Pope Francis calls for an open dialogue on the meaning of these new technologies, endowed with disruptive possibilities and ambivalent effects,” the statement said.
The Pope, it continued, “recalls the need to be vigilant and to work so that a logic of violence and discrimination does not take root in the production and use of such devices, at the expense of the most fragile and excluded; injustice and inequalities fuel conflicts and antagonisms”.
The statement underscored that “the urgent need to orient the concept and use of artificial intelligence in a responsible way, so that it may be at the service of humanity and the protection of our common home, requires that ethical reflection be extended to the sphere of education and law”.
It added that human dignity and a concern for fraternity are “indispensable conditions for technological development to help contribute to the promotion of justice and peace in the world.”
The World Day of Peace was inaugurated by St Paul VI in 1968 and is celebrated every January 1, the feast of Mary, Mother of God.
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Pope’s peace day message to focus on ethical concerns over AI (By Justin McLellan, CNS via NCR Online)
