Meet the friar who is the Vatican’s expert on AI – 02/11/2024 – World

Before dawn, Father Paolo Benanti climbed the bell tower of his 16th-century monastery, admired the sunrise over the ruins of the Roman Forum and reflected on the world. “It was a wonderful meditation on what’s going on inside,” he said, stepping onto the street in his friar’s cassock. “And also on the outside.”

There’s a lot going on for Benanti, who, as an artificial intelligence ethicist for the Vatican and the government of Italy, spends his days thinking about the Holy Spirit and ghosts in machines.

In recent weeks, this university ethics professor, priest, and self-proclaimed geek has joined Bill Gates in a meeting with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, chaired a commission seeking to save the Italian media from ChatGPT headlines, and met with officials from the Vatican to advance Pope Francis’ goal of protecting the vulnerable from the impending technological storm.

At a conference organized by the ancient Order of the Knights of Malta, he said that “global governance is necessary, otherwise the risk is social collapse,” and praised Rome Call — an effort by the Vatican, the Italian government, Silicon Valley and UN he helped organize to protect a new world with chatbots.

Author of books such as “Homo Faber: The Techno-Human Condition” and a constant presence on AI panels, Benanti, 50, is a professor at the Gregoriana, the Harvard of Rome’s pontifical universities, where he teaches moral theology, ethics and the course “The Fall of Babel: The Challenges of Digitalization, Social Networks and Artificial Intelligence”.

For a church and a country seeking to take advantage of and still survive the impending AI revolution, your job is to provide advice from an ethical and spiritual perspective. He shares his ideas with Francis, who in his annual World Day of Peace message on January 1 called for a global treaty to ensure the ethical development and use of AI in order to avoid a world without human mercy, where inscrutable algorithms they decide who gets asylum, who gets a mortgage, or who, on the battlefield, lives or dies.

These concerns mirror those of Benanti, who doesn’t believe in the industry’s ability to regulate itself and believes some rules are necessary in a world where deepfakes and misinformation can erode democracies.

He is concerned that the masters of the AI ​​universes are developing systems that will magnify inequality. He fears the transition to AI will be so abrupt that entire professional fields will be left doing menial work or nothing at all, depriving people of dignity and unleashing “waves of despair.”

This, he says, raises huge questions about wealth redistribution. But he also sees the potential of AI.

For Italy, with one of the oldest and most declining populations in the world, Benanti is thinking about how AI can keep productivity high. And all the while he applies his perspective on what it means to be alive and human when machines seem more alive and human. “This is a spiritual issue.”

His office on the Gregoriana is decorated with framed prints of his own street photography — images of disadvantaged Romans smoking cigarettes, a bored couple preferring their cellphones to their baby — and photos of him and Francisco shaking hands. His religious vocation came after his scientific one.

Born in Rome, his father worked as a mechanical engineer, and his mother taught high school science. As a child, he loved “The Lord of the Rings” and “Dungeons & Dragons,” but he was not a gaming recluse, as he was also a Boy Scout and collected photography, sailing and cooking badges.

When he visited Rome at age 12 to do charity, he met Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, who at the time was a parish priest, but who, like him, would go on to work for the Italian government — as a member of the country’s commission on aging — and for the Vatican.

Now Paglia is Benanti’s superior at the church’s Pontifical Academy for Life, which is charged with dealing with promoting the church’s ethics on life amid bioethical and technological upheavals.

Around the time Benanti met Paglia for the first time, an uncle gave him a computer for Christmas. He tried to adapt it to play video games. “It never worked,” he said.

He attended a high school that emphasized the classics, and a philosophy teacher thought he had a future reflecting on the meaning of things. But the way things worked was a greater attraction, and he pursued an engineering course at Sapienza University in Rome. It was not enough.

“I started to feel like something was missing,” he said, explaining that advancing in engineering erased the mystique that machines had for him. “I simply broke the magic.”

In 1999, his then-girlfriend thought he needed more God in his life. They went to a Franciscan church in Massa Martana, Umbria, where her plan worked very well. He then realized he needed a sacred space where he could “never stop questioning life.” At the end of the year, he abandoned his girlfriend and joined the Franciscan order, to the dismay of his parents.

He left Rome to study in Assisi, the home of Saint Francis, and over the next decade he took his final vows as a friar, was ordained a priest, and defended his dissertation on human enhancement and cyborgs. He got his job at the Gregoriana and eventually as the Vatican’s IT ethics guy.

“He is called upon by many institutions,” said Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who used to head the Vatican’s culture department, where Benanti was a scientific adviser.

Last month, Benanti, who said he does not receive funding from Microsoft, participated in a meeting between Gates, the company’s co-founder, and Meloni, who is concerned about the impact of AI on the workforce.

She has now appointed Benanti to replace the leader of the AI ​​commission in Italian media with whom she was dissatisfied. “Obedience to authority is one of the vows,” Benanti said as she fiddled with the knots on her habit rope belt, which symbolizes the Franciscan order’s promise of obedience, poverty and chastity.

The commission is studying ways to protect Italy’s writers. Benanti believes AI companies should be held accountable for using copyrighted sources to train their chatbots, although he worries it will be difficult to prove because the companies are “black boxes.”

But this mystery has also once again imbued the technology with magic, even if it is of the dark kind. In that sense, it wasn’t so new, he said, arguing that just as ancient Roman diviners turned to the flight of birds for guidance, AI, with its enormous understanding of our physical and emotional data, could be the new oracles, determining decisions and replacing God with false idols. “It’s something old that we probably think we’ve left behind,” the friar said, “but it’s coming back.”