The Vatican Has Some Thoughts on AI

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AI is a scary technology. Not just because its power is mostly concentrated in the hands of residents of Palo Alto. Not because, if its promise is realized, it may make most of us unemployed. Not even because we are likely less than three years away from AI being able to replace the very column you are reading. (This is more of a personal fear and also related to my point on unemployment.)

AI is scary because it forces us to re-examine the big questions: What is intelligence, what is consciousness, or even, what does it mean to be human? It is thus unsurprising that the pope, something of a specialist on such existential questions, is weighing in.

The Vatican released a document last week called "ANTIQUA ET NOVA: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence", in which they do their best to help resolve some of this dread. It may surprise you, but this isn’t the Catholic Church’s first foray into wrestling with the implications of AI. The Vatican has been working on this since at least 2016, when it hosted a panel at South by Southwest, and the pope has met with Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg and a variety of other tech luminaries over the last several years.

The depth of their effort—across 13,217 words and 215 footnotes—shows. Most of the work on the relation of the soul to AI has been laughably thin. This note is different.

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