The Heart of AI
Below is an excerpt of my recent piece in the Catholic Weekly concerning the Pope’s recent World Day of Social Communications message concerning Artificial Intelligence and the pursuit of wisdom. The link to the full text can be found at the bottom of this post.
Last week, Pope Francis issued the papal World Day of Social Communications message, entitled Artificial Intelligence & the Wisdom of the Heart: Towards a Fully Human Communication.
While the subtitle appears to be straightforward enough, the bundling of AI, wisdom and the heart in the title might require some unpacking.
We can read this message against the backdrop of his World Day of Peace message released on New Years Day, Artificial Intelligence and Peace. That message looked at spheres in which AI, left unchecked by ethical, social, cultural and legal parameters, can actually undermine ethics, societies, cultures and laws rather than building them up.
Not resorting to Luddite knee-jerk anathemas against AI, the pope instead drew our attention to the questions that AI technologies in and of themselves do not answer, namely the “deeper understanding of the meaning of human life, the construction of knowledge, and the capacity of the mind to attain truth” (3).
It was this striking statement that got further treatment in his social communications message.
We get a sense of this in the pope’s first body paragraph, which began by quoting from the philosopher-priest Romano Guardini’s Letters from Lake Como (written in the mid-1920s).
“[W]e are constantly in the process of becoming,” Guardini thought, and must enter into the process with “openness but also with sensitivity to everything that is destructive and inhumane.”
If the pope’s message could be summed up in a phrase, it is that the fulcrum to the process of becoming—the pursuit of life, knowledge and truth, and negotiating our current machine-learning context with our humanity intact—is located in the heart.
As Augustine suggested in his Confessions, we are …(read full article at The Catholic Weekly)
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