If Pope Francis talks about neural networks with Jews and Muslims
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This text is part of the Special AI of Italian Techentitled “Talk to me. The artificial intelligence revolution”, on newsstands free of charge with the newspaper The Republic starting Thursday 23 March
A super computer, as we would have defined it today, brought piece by piece to the Buddhist monastery. In the middle of the Himalayan mountains, it was then reassembled by two technicians from the United States to calculate all possible nine billion names of God, as requested by the monks. The American engineers ignored the real purpose of the “Project Shangri-La”, they did not imagine the consequences of uniting prophecy and the power of the machines. When Arthur C. Clark published in 1953 The Nine Billion Names of Godshort story appeared by us in that memorable collection entitled The wonders of the possiblestaged what could happen by uniting two things apparently at the antipodes: information technology and religion.
Seventy years later, that distance has narrowed almost suddenly. It happened in Rome, in the Vatican, at the beginning of January. Pope Francis, in the Sala Clementina of the Apostolic palace next to St. Peter’s basilica, started talking about neural networks: “We are all aware of how much artificial intelligence is increasingly present in every aspect of daily life”, he explained. “It affects our way of understanding the world and ourselves (…). I am pleased to know that you also want to involve the other major world religions and men and women of good will so that algorithmic, i.e. ethical reflection on use of algorithms, is ever more present”.
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Algoretic therefore and not the nine billion names of God, or at least not yet. The Vatican, and with him also the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the religious representatives of the United Arab Emirates, have no intention of using ChatGPT and its ilk to achieve a certain purpose, on the contrary they intend to have their say to condition its development.
“This story was born around 2017, from the meeting between us, Microsoft and Ibm”, he recalls Paul Benanti, a Franciscan raised on consoles and home computers, today a professor of technology ethics at the Pontifical Gregorian University. “We understood that we had a common vision and that therefore we could join forces. From what comes what and so we arrived at the Rome Call for AI Ethics”.
The first declaration of intent dates back to February 2020. Six principles for those who develop AI, which make sense but are generic, to the point that it is hard to believe that someone does not want or can subscribe to them: transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, security and privacy. At the time it was signed by the Vatican itself, the Italian government, the FAO and some large technology multinationals such as Microsoft and IBM.
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But the Vatican RenAIssance Foundation, which has taken charge of the operation with Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia at its top, aims at something else: to create a great alliance between religions on the subject of artificial intelligence. And it is this terrain, diplomatic as well as ethical, that is perhaps the most significant.
In front of Pope Francis, an unusual event took place in January 2023, with the accession of the Abu Dhabi Peace Forum and the Interreligious Dialogue Commission of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. Abu Dhabi, while influential due to its economic power, represents only a small piece of the Sunni Muslim world. However, his presence is still significant. A beginning, which could also be followed by the signing of the charter by other souls of Sunnism and perhaps of Shiism.
“Every man-made tool has always been controlled by man,” he stressed Rabbi Eliezer Simcha Weisz, thus expressing the common concern that AIs may escape this law. Fear underlined a few minutes earlier, even if in other words, give it Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, chairman of the Abu Dhabi Peace Forum and the UAE Shariah Fatwa Council. The nuances are obviously different, but everyone agrees on the fact that we need to start setting boundaries and that companies in the sector cannot do it alone.
The road is long and full of unknowns. For example, it will be necessary to agree on which yardstick to adopt to judge AIs. According to some, starting from Microsoft president Brad Smith, the only one is to judge them by what they do. According to others, however, it is necessary to make them accessible, open, so that we can check how they have come to construct certain contents. But this clashes with the will of hi-tech companies to defend what they consider to be their intellectual property. In short, every possible regulation will have important repercussions on a world that is flourishing with a series of applications that have made inroads, reaching an ever wider audience.
“We need rules for this sector and we also need basic ethics”, concludes Benanti. “We are well aware that ethics alone is not enough, it must be accompanied by laws, by the self-regulation of those who create artificial intelligence and by the protection of privacy. But it is a key element from which to start”. The only possible one for the Catholic Church, in the end. Because tables will soon be created to regulate the development and use of artificial intelligence, and in order to have greater weight in the Vatican they first opened up to other monotheistic religions and in July they aim to involve exponents of Shintoism and Buddhism in Japan, in a stage in Asia which may not be the only one.
We just need to understand how far we can go with ethics and with alliances. As long as we stick to mission statements, it’s easier to bring together many different souls who have distinct visions of what’s best for humanity. It is quite another thing to decide concretely what is lawful and what is not. And sooner or later we will have to get to that stage, going beyond the various white papers seen up to now.
At the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in upstate New York, Rabbi Joshua Franklin, for example, asked ChatGPT to write a sermon. While it’s not like asking a computer to list the possible nine billion names of God, as Arthur C. Clark imagined, we’re roughly on that path: using artificial intelligence for religious purposes. This is just to say that, in all probability, it will not be only Microsoft or Google that will have to self-regulate in terms of AI.
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