This is a task close to the Pope's heart. Earlier this year he spoke of political leaders' responsibility to ensure AI is used ethically.

Project plan

The University has announced that it will use an endowment to develop faith-based frameworks for the ethical uses of artificial intelligence - known as AI or AGI (the G stands for General).

This "is a pivotal moment for technology ethics" says Meghan Sullivan, director of the Catholic university's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good.

AGI is developing quickly and can potentially change our economies, our education systems and the fabric of our social lives, she says.

"We believe that the wisdom of faith traditions can make a significant contribution to the development of ethical frameworks for AGI" Sullivan says.

The first part of the framework development will see the Catholic University undertake a year-long planning project.

By next September, Sullivan says the university aims to have engaged and built a network of higher education and technology leaders, along with leaders of different faiths "to broach the topic of ethical uses of AI and eventually create faith-based ethical frameworks".

"This project will encourage broader dialogue about the role that concepts such as dignity, embodiment, love, transcendence and being created in the image of God should play in how we understand and use this technology.

"These concepts - as the bedrock of many faith-based traditions - are vital for how we advance the common good in the era of AGI."

The university says that, in September 2025, a conference will focus on the most pressing faith-based issues relating to the proliferation of AGI and provide training and networking opportunities for leaders who attend.

Priority work

For some time Pope Francis has been pushing for work on AI ethics to begin.

It must be used only to benefit humanity, he told the Group of Seven leaders at a summit in southern Italy in June.

"We cannot allow a tool as powerful and indispensable as artificial intelligence to reinforce such a technocratic paradigm but rather we must make artificial intelligence a bulwark against its expansion," Pope Francis said.

"This is precisely where political action is urgently needed."

According to 2024 statistics from National University in San Diego, 77 percent of companies are either using or exploring the use of AI in their businesses.

For 83 percent, the technology is a top priority in their future plans.

Source

• Crux

But no brain on Earth is yet close to knowing what brains do in order to achieve any of that functionality. The enterprise of achieving it artificially — the field of ‘artificial general intelligence' or AGI — has made no progress whatever during the entire six decades of its existence.

Why? Because, as an unknown sage once remarked, ‘it ain't what we don't know that causes trouble, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so' (and if you know that sage was Mark Twain, then what you know ain't so either). I cannot think of any other significant field of knowledge in which the prevailing wisdom, not only in society at large but also among experts, is so beset with entrenched, overlapping, fundamental errors. Yet it has also been one of the most self-confident fields in prophesying that it will soon achieve the ultimate breakthrough.

Despite this long record of failure, AGI must be possible. And that is because of a deep property of the laws of physics, namely the universality of computation. This entails that everything that the laws of physics require a physical object to do can, in principle, be emulated in arbitrarily fine detail by some program on a general-purpose computer, provided it is given enough time and memory. The first people to guess this and to grapple with its ramifications were the 19th-century mathematician Charles Babbage and his assistant Ada, Countess of Lovelace. It remained a guess until the 1980s, when I proved it using the quantum theory of computation. Read more

Sources

• Aeon Magazine
• Image: atariarchives.org