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The world is charging headlong into adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI), and it will have a fundamental impact on modern humanity.

In smaller developing companies like in Jamaica and across the Caribbean, many people will be displaced, and it could lead to a rise in disgruntlement, mental health issues and unemployment, which will impact law and order.

“Artificial Intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention,” said Pope Leo.

The head of the Catholic Church went on to add that AI could be used to enslave people and strip them of their humanity which will become normalised.

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has continually used Artificial Intelligence to create images and videos to communicate his point of view.

The Pope pointed out that efforts are not being made to prevent the devastating impacts of AI like misinformation, disinformation and the displacement of the human mind, which was created by God. 

The biggest companies in the world are Nvidia, Anthropic, Alphabet and OpenAI. They are keeping the world’s economy afloat in a time of chaos and attracting unprecedented sums of money.

Yesterday in Pope Leo’s first encyclical entitled “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, the Pope warned against “ a race for even more powerful algorithms and larger datasets by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.”

Encyclicals are letters written by the Pope and sent to the Catholic community and its bishops.

“It is important to restore and strengthen young people’s confidence in the human ability to guide the development of new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and not see this development as following an inevitable path,” declared the American Pope.

There are 1.4 billion practising Catholics in the world.

“Developers bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility for every design choice that reflects a vision of humanity. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating.

“There needs to be robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility. Artificial Intelligence now demands to be disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death. Like nuclear energy, it must be at the service of all and of the common good.”

Pope Leo expressed concerns about the use of AI in modern warfare, saying, “No algorithm can make war mortally acceptable. Not only does AI not remove the ‘intrinsic inhumanity of war ‘ but it also risks sparking conflict more quickly and rendering it more impersonal by lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defence into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data.” 

Pope Leo made it clear that the AI used in war reduces human control of deadly weapons capable of wiping out civilisations and this makes it more difficult to consider a war just. 

We now live in a time where entire populations across the world can be completely wiped out by AI warfare. God did not intend for this.

“We must work towards the common good rather than the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak. Those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few,” said Pope Leo. 

Importantly, the Pope makes this point, and it is the crux of this matter and should be paid attention to 

“Artificial Intelligence does not undergo experiences, does not possess a body, does not feel joy or pain, does not mature through relationships and does not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.

“Nor does it have a moral conscience, since it does not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations or bear responsibility for consequences.”