Before dawn, Paolo Benanti He climbed the bell tower of his 16th-century monastery, admired the sunrise over the ruins of the Roman Forum and reflected on a changing world.
“It was a wonderful meditation on what is happening inside,” he said, stepping out into the street in his friar's robe. “And outside too.”
There is a lot going on for Father Benanti, who, as artificial intelligence ethics expert both the Vatican and the Italian Government, think of the Holy Spirit and the ghosts in the machines.
In recent months, the ethics professor, ordained priest, and self-proclaimed geek has been with Bill Gates in a meeting with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, chaired a commission seeking to save Italian media from ChatGPT firms and worked to promote Pope Francis' goal of Protect the vulnerable from the coming technological storm. At a conference organized by the ancient order of the Knights of Malta, he told ambassadors that “without global governance the risk is social collapse.”
Author of numerous books and regular member of international panels on AIFather Benanti, 50, is a professor at the Gregorian, Harvard of the Pontifical Universities in Rome, where he teaches moral theology, ethics and a course titled “The Fall of Babel: the Challenges of Social Media, Digital and Artificial intelligence”.
Provides advice from an ethical and spiritual perspective. She shares his ideas with Pope Francis, who in his annual World Peace Day message on January 1 called for a global treaty to ensure the ethical development and use of AI to avoid a world devoid of human mercy, where inscrutable algorithms decide who is granted asylum, who gets a mortgage, or who, on the battlefield, lives or dies.
Those concerns reflected those of Father Benanti, who does not believe the industry can self-regulate in a world where deepfakes and misinformation They can erode democracy.
He fears that the transition to AI will be so abrupt that entire professional fields will be left doing menial work, or nothing at all, stripping people of their dignity and unleashing waves of “hopelessness.”
But he also sees the potential of AI. For Italy, with one of the oldest and smallest populations in the world, Father Benanti is thinking about how AI can keep productivity afloat.
Born in Rome, he attended a high school that emphasized the classics, and a philosophy professor thought he had a future reflecting on the meaning of things. But the way things worked held a greater attraction, and he earned an engineering degree from the Sapienza University of Rome. In 1999, his then-girlfriend thought he needed more God in his life. They went to a Franciscan church in Umbria. By the end of the year he had joined the Franciscan order.
Now Father Benanti argues that AI, with its enormous command of physical, emotional and preferential data, could be the new oraclesdetermining decisions and replacing God with false idols.
“It's an old thing that we probably think we've left behind, but it's coming back.”
“Without global governance the risk is social collapse.”
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