He welcomed input from outside actors like the Catholic Church, to “push events in a better direction”, saying that “the questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community”.
Leo said he accepted Olah’s invitation “to walk together, to listen and to speak and together to find the way for humanity”.
He had confidence that “together, we can discern the major questions of our time, and so, the future of humanity”.
Leo said he had listened to scientists, engineers, political leaders, parents and teachers in preparing his manifesto, and had heard “very troubling voices” as well as “the silence of those who have no voice”.
AI must be “freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death”, he said.
In his encyclical, Leo sounded the alarm over AI-directed weaponry, saying it was “not permissible to entrust lethal” decisions to tech.
Leo has repeatedly clashed with the White House over the Iran war and its use of religion to justify conflict.
The “just war” theory – espoused recently by the Trump administration – was “outdated”, Leo wrote, adding that “no algorithm can make war morally acceptable”.
AI could be worth up to $4.8 trillion by 2033, a 25-fold increase in a decade, while concentrating its profits in the hands of a limited few, according to the United Nations.
Leo wrote: “Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.”
AI should be “human-friendly”, accessible to all and opened to discussion and debate, he added.
The head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics has made the hot-button issue a cornerstone of his papacy by dedicating to it his first encyclical – a document that lays the basis for Church teaching and longer-term debate.
– AFP