When AI Meets The Church
AI has offered news for this week. On Friday 28th, IBM and Microsoft, represented by John Kelly (Executive Vice President) and Brad Smith (President) respectively, have signed the Vatican’s “Rome Call for AI Ethics” agreement. This pledge aims to develop AI by protecting the planet and human rights. For the first time, we witnessed a collaboration between the Church and technology leaders.
Which topics are mentioned in this document?
The main foundation for “Rome Call for AI Ethics” is that AI has a lot of nuances, some are beneficial, and others are harmful to the society. The pledge calls for AI to safeguard the rights of all humankind with a focus on the weak and unprivileged ones.
One AI application has emerged from this discussion: Facial Recognition. In the Pope’s speech, he mentioned that facial recognition is known for extracting consumers’ data for commercial and political purposes, against individual will. This is alarming from the Church’s perspective. Moreover, he stated that using FR to detect crime and to hire new talent is illegitimate and can lead to increasing inequalities, knowledge/ wealth disparities, which are threats to democracy.
To remediate those issues, it has been said that tech leaders have a duty to show the purpose/ objectives of AI algorithms and the way they come to their decisions.
Who has signed?
IBM and Microsoft are the first to sign. This initiative is led by the Pontifical Academy for Life in the Vatican, which calls for the help of governments, NGOs, industry leaders and other associations to join along with tech companies.
“The Vatican is not an expert on the technology but on values. The collaboration is to make the Vatican and the whole society understand how to use this technology with these values” — Francesca Rossi, IBM’s Global AI Ethics Leader
This is a symbolic time when the Pope encourages everybody to learn programming basics to maintain “World Peace”.
