A top official at the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education is urging caution on artificial intelligence, warning that its hidden environmental costs, impact on jobs, and broader social risks can’t be overlooked. Source: NCR Online.
Speaking at a European theology congress in Dublin on August 23, Bishop Paul Tighe, who is the secretary of the dicastery, said AI wasn’t the silver bullet – it comes with a price, starting with the environment.
Bishop Tighe said more attention needs to be paid to the “actual environmental cost of AI” as he warned against “techno optimism” promoting AI as the means of tackling the environmental crisis.
Speaking after his address, the Irish prelate said that “addressing climate change requires a human response and a change in our patterns of consumption and use”.
He said American professor of theology Noreen Herzfeld had drawn his attention to the fact that cloud technology “is not a metaphysical reality”.
“The cloud is wires, power, a huge energy consumption, so that AI itself has a very significant cost in terms of energy, in terms of water to cool the plants, and even in the use of some raw materials extracted from very vulnerable parts of our world. We need to be attentive to the actual environmental cost of AI itself.”
He told the gathering of theologians from across Europe that while the industry admitted that AI would result in reduced employment, insufficient attention was being paid to the commercial inequalities that are likely to emerge as AI becomes more pervasive and the social cost of fewer people in work.
Another factor, he said, was that traditionally, work for many people is “the primary place of socialisation, where you grow and learn with others in a community.” AI and digitalisation, he said, are contributing to the fracturing of working relationships.
Bishop Tighe said AI and the social issues that it gives rise to will be a priority for Pope Leo XIV.
“He has very clearly put it at the top of the agenda in terms of his choice of name and the link with Rerum Novarum [the encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, which addressed the condition of the working class], and he explicitly said that reading the signs of the times this is something that we need to engage with.”
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Vatican official warns of AI’s hidden costs to environment, work and society (By Sarah Mac Donald, NCR Online)
