Before dawn, Paolo Benanti climbed the bell tower of his 16th-century monastery to watch the sun rise over the ruins of the Roman Forum and reflect on a changing world.
“It was a great meditation to think about what’s going on inside,” he said as he stepped out into the street wearing monk’s robes. “And outside too.”
As the Vatican and Italian government’s go-to AI ethicist, Father Benanti spends his days thinking about the Holy Spirit and ghosts in machines.
In recent weeks, the ethics professor, ordained priest, and self-described nerd has joined Bill Gates in a meeting with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, leading the Italian media away from the ChatGPT byline and general AI oblivion. He presided over a committee aimed at saving him and also met with Vatican officials. This is to further Pope Francis’ goal of protecting the vulnerable from the coming technological storm.
“We need global governance or we risk social collapse,” he told a crowd at a conference organized by the Ancient Order of Malta. He also spoke about Rome Call, an initiative he helped organize between the Vatican, the Italian government, Silicon Valley, and the United Nations.
Father Benanti, 50, the author of many books (Homo Faber: The Techno-Human Condition) and a regular on international AI committees, is a professor at Gregorian College, the Pontifical Harvard University. He is a professor and teaches moral theology. His course is Ethics and “The Fall of Babel: Challenges of Digital, Social Networks, and Artificial Intelligence”.
His job is to provide advice from an ethical and spiritual perspective to churches and nations seeking to take advantage of and survive the coming AI revolution. In his annual message on World Peace Day on January 1, he called for the ethical development and use of AI to prevent a world without human mercy, where arcane algorithms decide who is righteous. He shares his insights with Pope Francis, who called for a global treaty that guarantees Those who are granted asylum, those who take out mortgages, and those who live or die on the battlefield.
These concerns echo those of Father Benanti, who doesn’t believe in the industry’s ability to self-regulate and that some rules are needed in a world where deepfakes and disinformation can erode democracy. I believe.
He worries that the masters of the AI world are developing systems that widen the chasms of inequality. He worries that the transition to AI will be so sudden that entire disciplines will be left doing menial tasks or doing nothing, stripping people of their dignity and causing a flood of “despair.” are doing. This raises big questions about wealth redistribution in an AI-dominated world, he said.
But he also recognizes the potential of AI
In Italy, a country with one of the world’s oldest and shrinking populations, Father Benanti is thinking hard about how AI can help maintain productivity. And he’s always applying his perspective on what it means to be alive and human, when machines seem more alive and human. “This is a spiritual question,” he said.
After his morning meditation, Father Benanti walks to work, the hem of his blue jeans peeking out from under his black robe. He passed his 2nd-century Column of Trajan and stepped carefully into a crosswalk on one of Rome’s busiest streets.
“This is the worst city for self-driving cars,” he said. “It’s too complicated. Maybe we’re in Arizona.”
His office at the Gregorian Museum is filled with framed prints of his own street photography. There’s a picture of a down-and-out Roman man smoking cigarettes, a bored couple who prefer their cell phones to their baby, and a picture of him and Pope Francis shaking hands. He explained that his religious mission came after his scientific mission.
Born in Rome, his father worked as a mechanical engineer and his mother taught science at a high school. As a child, he loved The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons, but he was also a Boy Scout who collected photography, navigation and cooking badges, so he didn’t just retreat into gaming. did.
He met Musgul when his group of 12-year-olds visited Rome for charity work. Vincenzo Paglia was a parish priest at the time, but like him, he went on to work for the Italian government and the Vatican as a member of the Commission on Aging. Cardinal Paglia is currently Father Benanti’s superior at the church’s Pontifical Academy of Life, where he is grappling with the challenge of how to advance the church’s bioethics amid upheaval in bioethics and technology.
Around the time Father Benanti first met Monsignor Paglia, his uncle gave him a Texas Instruments home computer for Christmas. He tried to redesign it so he could play video games. “It never worked out,” he said.
He attended a classically oriented high school, and to prove his antiquity, he belted out the opening lines of the Odyssey in ancient Greek on his way to work. And his philosophy teacher thought he had a future in thinking deeply about the meaning of things. But he was more fascinated by the way things worked, so he pursued an engineering degree at Sapienza University in Rome. It wasn’t enough.
“I started to feel like something was missing,” he said, explaining that as he progressed as an engineering student, his mystical impressions of machines disappeared. “The spell just broke.”
In 1999, his then-girlfriend decided he needed more God in his life. They went to a Franciscan church in Massa Martina, Umbria. So her plan worked. Because he realized he needed a sacred space where he “couldn’t stop questioning life.”
By the end of that year, he had dumped his girlfriend and joined the Franciscans, much to the surprise of his parents, who asked if he was making up too much for the bad breakup.
He left Rome to study in Assisi, the hometown of St. Francis, and spent the next ten years taking his final vows as a monk, being ordained a priest, and defending his doctoral thesis on human enhancement and cyborgs. He got a job in the Gregorian Church and eventually became his IT ethics officer at the Vatican.
“Father Benanti is called upon by many institutions,” said Cardinal Gianfranco Rabassi, who was head of the Vatican’s Cultural Affairs Department, where Father Benanti served as a scientific advisor.
In 2017, Cardinal Rabassi organized an event at the Italian Embassy of the Holy See in Rome, where Father Benanti spoke on the ethics of AI. The Microsoft people in attendance were impressed and asked to keep in touch. In the same year, the Italian government asked him to contribute to an AI policy document, and the following year he successfully applied to the National AI Strategy Development Committee.
Then, in 2018, he reunited with current Cardinal Paglia, a favorite of Francis, and told him: “Look, something big is at work.” Shortly thereafter, Father Benanti’s contact at Microsoft asked Francis and Microsoft President Brad to help him arrange a meeting with Smith.
As part of the Vatican delegation, Father Benanti translated terminology during the 2019 conference. He said Francis at first didn’t understand what Microsoft was actually doing, but that Smith pulled one of the pope’s social media speeches from his pocket and told him that the company executive had highlighted and shared it. He said he liked the fact that he expressed his concerns to the pope.
Francis, who Father Benanti said has become more knowledgeable about AI, has since become more active, especially after an image of the pope wearing an AI-designed white puffer coat went viral. Father Benanti said the pope liked that the discussion was not about technology but about “what you can do to protect the vulnerable.”
Father Benanti, who said he is not paid in any way by Microsoft, participated in a meeting last month with Microsoft co-founder Gates and Meloni, who is concerned about the impact of AI on the workforce. “She has to run the country,” he said.
She has now appointed Father Benanti to replace the disgruntled head of the Italian media’s AI committee.
“Obedience to authority is a vow,” Father Benanti said, fiddling with the knot in the lace belt of his robe, which represents the Franciscan promise of obedience, poverty and chastity.
The commission is studying ways to protect Italian writers. Father Benanti believes AI companies should be held accountable for using copyrighted sources to train chatbots, but worries it will be difficult to prove because the companies are “black boxes.” ing.
But for Father Benanti, that mystery, even if of a dark kind, has once again imbued technology with magic. In that sense, he said, this is not all that new, and just as ancient Roman augers turned to the flight of birds for direction, so too do we look to our physical, emotional and preferential data. He argued that AI, which can grasp vast amounts of information, has the potential to become a new oracle. Make decisions and replace God with false idols.
“It’s probably an old thing that we think we left behind,” said the monk. “But it’s coming back.”
