Whoever knows the history of the Church, the papacy and its obscurantisms of the Middle Ages, with the bonfires of the Inquisition, and whoever remembers the persecutions and death sentences of the great geniuses of science such as Savonarola, Copernicus or Galileo Galilei, will be concerned about the audacity of To better understand Pope Francis, who blessed the dreaded artificial intelligence (AI).
During his rich pontificate, the Argentine pope has become accustomed to surprising us by addressing topics that were taboo in the church, from blessing homosexuals to reviving the original strength of women in the first Christian communities. The newly elected Pope recalled that he comes from “the periphery of the Church,” which until his time had been Eurocentric. And on the same day he broke all the protocols of the centuries by not wanting to be called Pope, an heir to the influence of the Roman Empire, but simply Bishop of Rome. For this reason, he refused to live in luxurious palaces, preferring a room in a small Roman hotel.
But perhaps his greatest audacity, which Alesandre Chiavegatto has just recalled here in Brazil in the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, was the open and unequivocal defense of the much-discussed AI. I have met half a dozen popes through my work as a journalist, but none were as courageous as Francis, who broke old inquisitorial prejudices and opened the church's doors to modernity.
“The meaningful use of AI,” says Francisco, “will introduce important innovations in agriculture, in the improvement of education and in culture.” An improvement in the life of nations and the growth of human fraternity and social friendship.” The Pope After discussions with Microsoft gurus, he even launched Vatican prizes for the best doctoral theses on the subject of AI.
According to Francis, AI, which worries the traditional Church about the dogmas, anathemas and excommunications of the past, is just “a reflection of human dignity and our ability to create.” It is not that Francis ignores the possible dangers and challenges that the new invention could pose to humanity if it is misused, for example to create even deadlier weapons. He knows it, but unlike in the past, when fear and condemnation of any scientific novelty prevailed in the official Church, Francis has preferred to focus on the positive aspects of the new horizons that were opening up to Homo sapiens.
According to Francisco, “The answer to AI is not written; It depends on us. It is up to humans to decide whether to become food for algorithms or feed their heart of freedom. And the fears that AI could challenge human intelligence and take unknown paths? Faced with this fear, the Pope preferred to focus on the positive aspects. And with regard to possible misuse of the new tool, he limited himself to saying that it was necessary to “criminalize the crime, not the tool.” Pure wisdom.
Sometimes those of us who have studied the history of the papacy and the secular ups and downs of the Church can admire the open-mindedness of the Argentine pope. The first Pope who looked with serenity and even hope on the new and revolutionary discoveries of science, which the Church had feared for centuries, and condemned their protagonists.
We are living in a historic moment of global confusion and fear of an increasingly unpredictable future. A time when everything seems to be framed as uncertainty and when we glimpse for the first time the disappearance of Homo sapiens, whose intelligence was until today considered superior to the rest of creation. And perhaps for this reason, the defense of the much feared AI by the highest authority of the Church in the light of old scientific obscurantisms never ceases to surprise and outrage the traditional Church of the old excommunications. Furthermore, it opens up new hopes so that faith, whatever it may be, faith in the inevitable afterlife, no longer appears to be characterized by fears but by new and unexpected hopes for better times.
Yes, Pope Francis seems to have lost the Church's old fears of science and its discoveries, like the illusion of a rainbow that appeared after the old fear-filled storms of radical obscurantism.
For centuries the Church defended the physical existence not only of Hell and Purgatory, but even of Limbo, where unbaptized children would end up. Since they could not yet sin, they could not be condemned to hell, but neither could they enjoy heaven. They went into limbo, where they suffered not, but neither did they enjoy anything. It was the conservative Pope John Paul II who declared that Limbo did not exist and removed it from the official Catholic catechism. Reason? He told it himself. As pope, he wanted to gather his entire family in a single tomb, with the exception of one of his sisters, who had been stillborn. Her parents, who were staunch Catholics, could neither baptize nor bury their daughter.
The Polish Pope was not satisfied that his sister, who had never sinned, was not in heaven but in limbo. Said and done. He explained that Limbo, like heaven and hell, are not “physical places” in which one enjoys or suffers, but rather spiritual states. I mean, they don't exist.
Today, Pope Francis not only does not condemn AI as creating a new hell on earth, but he also sees it as a new conquest of human intelligence. It is regrettable that those who were sacrificed at the stake of the Inquisition for reacting to the dogmatisms of the Vatican, which today are slowly dissolving in the new spring of a pontificate that makes history, cannot be resurrected.
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