World needs urgent political action to guide AI, pope tells G7

(The US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Carol Glatz).

Political leaders have a responsibility to create the conditions necessary for artificial intelligence to be at the service of humanity and to help mitigate its risks, Pope Francis told world leaders. “We cannot allow a tool as powerful and indispensable as artificial intelligence to reinforce such a (technocratic) paradigm, but rather, we must make artificial intelligence a bulwark” against the threat, he said in his address June 14 at the Group of Seven summit being held in southern Italy. “This is precisely where political action is urgently needed,” he said. Many people believe politics is “a distasteful word, often due to the mistakes, corruption and inefficiency of some politicians — not all of them, some. There are also attempts to discredit politics, to replace it with economics or to twist it to one ideology or another,” he said. But the world cannot function without healthy politics, the pope said, and effective progress toward “universal fraternity and social peace” requires a sound political life. 

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