Get up babe: new Pope simply dropped. Pope Leo XIV was elected on Might 8 following the loss of life of Pope Francis, changing into the first-ever American Pontiff, and on Saturday gave his first handle to the Faculty of Cardinals, the place he revealed his alternative of identify was pushed by issues about our age’s technological revolutions and AI particularly (thanks, Ars Technica).
The Pope’s identify is Robert Prevost, however as is custom he bought to decide on a particular papal identify, and it seems “Leo” is a callback to the Pope that led the church in the course of the industrial revolution, in addition to a nod to Pope Francis’s issues about the place expertise goes.
“Sensing myself known as to proceed on this similar path [as Pope Francis], I selected to take the identify Leo XIV,” stated the Pope. “There are completely different causes for this, however primarily as a result of Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social query within the context of the primary nice industrial revolution.”
This encyclical’s title interprets as “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor” and is subtitled “On the circumstances of labour.” It was issued by Pope Leo XIII in Might 1891 to all Catholic worthies, and is one thing of a broadside geared toward unrestricted capitalism and the way its operation should be tempered by ethical issues: it is notably famous for its depiction of the situation of the working lessons.
Getting again to our personal age, Pope Leo XIV went on to inform the Cardinals that AI is “one other industrial revolution” and presumably requires the identical sort of Papal redress. Pope Francis first warned us about AI in August 2023 in his World Day of Peace handle, and earlier this yr returned to the theme within the essay Antiqua et Nova (“outdated and new”).
“As in all areas the place people are known as to make selections, the shadow of evil additionally looms right here,” stated Francis. “The place human freedom permits for the potential of selecting what’s fallacious, the ethical analysis of this expertise might want to bear in mind how it’s directed and used.”
Pope Leo XIV believes that, a lot as the commercial revolution upended conventional methods of dwelling and dealing, AI goes to do the identical, and never essentially for the higher.
“In our personal day,” stated the Pope, “the Church gives to everybody the treasury of her social instructing in response to a different industrial revolution and to developments within the subject of synthetic intelligence that pose new challenges for the protection of human dignity, justice, and labor.”
Nicely, seeing the brand new Pope take up in opposition to AI is an odd one. Leo XIV is presumably going to be main the Catholic church for many years to come back (when he is not taking part in Wordle) and who is aware of what developments we’ll see from the AI sector in that point. However I, for one, am very a lot wanting ahead to Sam Altman being subtly dissed in Latin.
