The Saturday after Pope Leo XIV was elected, he gave an address to cardinals in which he described his reasoning for selecting the name Leo.

He said there were different reasons for his choice, “but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,” Pope Leo XIV said. “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence, most potently visible through large language models like ChatGPT, was the driving force behind Pope Leo’s name choice. In the early days of his pontificate, he is suggesting that the Church has a key role to play in discussions about artificial intelligence – including its use, its regulation, and its effect on societies and individual human beings.

Our guest today is one of the world’s foremost experts on technology ethics and has served on a Vatican AI research group that is gathering scholars from multiple disciplines to engage issues around artificial intelligence. Brian Patrick Green is the director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and teaches AI ethics and space ethics in Santa Clara University’s Graduate School of Engineering. With a background in both technology and Catholic moral theology, Brian is perfectly positioned to help the church think through the potential benefits and risks of AI and what our own spiritual and ethical traditions might have to offer the societal conversation at large. Host Mike Jordan Laskey asked him to talk about his work and how the Vatican is approaching the complex constellation of issues surrounding artificial intelligence. They also talked about how a Catholic might think about whether or not to use AI tools and how to use them. Mike loved how clearly and compellingly Brian talked about all this thorny stuff. As AI developments are changing every day, we feel like we’ll be calling Brian back before too long to hear his updated perspectives.

Brian Patrick Green: https://www.scu.edu/ethics/about-the-center/people/brian-green/

The Vatican AI research group’s book that Brian contributed to, “Encountering Artificial Intelligence”: https://www.amazon.com/Encountering-Artificial-Intelligence-Anthropological-Investigations/dp/B0CYK7C66L

AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.

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