According to the new pope, AI faces similar challenges to the Industrial Revolution during which Pope Leo XIII was in office.
According to the new pope, AI is similar to the industrial revolution that Pope Leo XIII was involved in.
Wes Davis is a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.
Pope Leo XIV explained his choice of papal name in a speech to the College of Cardinals. Amazingly, artificial intelligence was a major factor.
In a Vatican translation of Pope Leo XIV’s speech, he explained that his title was derived from Pope Leo XIII who presided over church at dawn of industrial revolution.
…I decided to take the name Leo XIV. This is for a variety of reasons, but primarily because Pope Leo XIII addressed the social issue in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum (19659011) in the context the first great industrial Revolution. In response to a second industrial revolution, and the developments in artificial intelligence, which pose new challenges to the defence of human rights, justice, and labour, the Church offers a treasury from her social teaching to everyone in our day. Below is a longer version of the excerpt published by Catholic News Service.
In recent years, the Catholic Church has shown a keen interest towards the development of AI. In a document published in January by the Vatican and translated into English, the Catholic Church reflected on AI and its limitations, as well as its relationship with truth and the ethics involved in developing and using this technology. The document also refers to a warning given by Pope Francis a year earlier about AI’s ability to create “partially false narratives that are believed and broadcasted as if true.”
If Pope Francis established how the Catholic Church views AI, Pope Leo XIV citing AI as a major reason for his name hints at it being an even larger part of the church’s focus during his papacy.
