Diocesan Ideas Council, convened by Archbishop V The twenty-second meeting of Christian thoughtWe discussed it last Wednesday “Ethical Governance and Artificial Intelligence” On the basis of the document “Antiqua et nova” issued by the Vatican departments … For faith, culture and education in a session organized by the diocesan delegation for the secular mission, which broke all attendance records by more than a hundred. Professionals, academics, business people, journalists and military personnel Seville civil society.
Presentations leading to a rich symposium with a broad exchange of ideas have been made before Agustín Domingo Moratalla, Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Valencia and Minister of Industry, Energy and Mines Jorge Paradilla. But the most disturbing thing about the meeting was dropped Endesa delegate in Andalusia, Rafael Sanchez Duranwho stated that the technological singularity that could mean that humans will lose control over the behavior of artificial intelligence is closer to the turn of five years.
But it was not an alarmist session with apocalyptic overtones, but rather an update on burning issues affecting life and the human conscience itself. Professor Domingo Moratalla put on the table a term that Catholic thought highlights: algorithmism, that is, a new ethics for the algorithmic society because “artificial intelligence is not a neutral process from an ethical point of view.” Furthermore, he went so far as to say that “the algorithm has never been seen as compassionate,” which is the root of Christian behavior.
The core of his intervention focused on the question of whether AI represents “disembodied” knowledge, and whether or not it represents “disembodied” knowledge. “Intelligence without soul”This would clash with the long-traded Christian approach to church teaching. One of the main problems that AI poses is taking responsibility for its misuse or any bias or exclusion derived from the algorithm it was programmed with.
Advisor Paradella provided a more detailed presentation of the data, starting with the figure of 25 billion connected electronic devices that currently exist in the world. “No one can comprehend all the technological progress that has occurred recently,” he said, before revealing that a simple search in any artificial intelligence program consumes ten times more energy than another search in a simple search engine.
Paradella wondered, as global financial markets do, whether the rise of the stock market for companies investing heavily in the development of artificial intelligence would not end in an explosion, as happened with the so-called “dot-com” at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In his thesis, he cited several times Yuval Noah Harari, a champion of transhumanism who calls for overcoming the physical and intellectual limitations of man that are the basis of the transcendent meaning of life.
In this sense, Professor Domingo Moratala pointed out that the emergence of artificial intelligence could lead to a “Changing the Anthropological Paradigm” By overcoming old age and, ultimately, the death that characterizes all known human existence. How to combine such a possibility for a select group of billionaires who have access to renewable healthcare with the misery in which large sectors of the world’s population live is a moral challenge that the Church wants to answer: “We do not come here to close doors, but to offer a balanced conclusion, open to truth and guided by love,” explained the Archbishop of Seville.
Specifically, the bishop used the primary teachings of Pope Leo XIV to reaffirm the primacy of the “infinite and irreducible dignity” of the human person, superior to “any technological construct.” He thus called for “a solid anthropological vision, the necessity of a normative framework that regulates and calls upon the wisdom of the heart” contained in each person’s natural intelligence to avoid falling into “moral risks of enormous importance.” He even said: “The human being cannot be reduced to the algorithm.”
Monsignor Saez Meneses cited Psalm 139 (“Much wisdom is sublime, it is beyond me and I cannot reach it”) and called for “education to be done by looking into our eyes and not at the screen.” At the end of his final reflection, he left in the air the question of who would direct the entire process following AI: “The relentless system seeking maximum benefit or the gospel-driven human community?” He concluded: “We Christians are called to be a leaven of hope, contributing to making artificial intelligence a tool for good, and a path to a more just and fraternal society.”