As Pope Leo XIV warned at the start of his four-day visit to France this week of the risk of “losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines”, attention falls on the failure of US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to reach any agreement during their crucial Washington summit on pausing their countries’ artificial intelligence (AI) arms race.
The two leaders appeared to be more than willing to demonstrate their personal rapport, but experts and some foreign governments had hoped for more on the AI front, especially in light of warnings that the technology could pose an existential threat to humanity.
The top Democrat on the House of Representatives’ select committee on China, Ro Khanna, commented: “If [Trump] had just said, look, we have established technical working groups and we’ve agreed to a framework that has called for DeepSeek and Moonshot and Alibaba to sit down with Anthropic and OpenAI and Gemini and with technical experts and they’re going to commit to at least a pause on any self-improving AI, he could have looked like he was a statesman taking the lead.”
At the start of his French trip, Pope Leo warned: “If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines invading and conditioning our daily lives, there is an urgent need for people to be educated in ethical discernment, capable of seeing what is morally right.”
In a second address at the Paris headquarters of the UN culture and education agency, Unesco, the pontiff said new technologies must “remain at the service of the human person rather than becoming yet another instrument of domination and injustice”.
He said: “Every science risks losing its proper meaning when pursued without ethics …Certain artificial systems have even been given the name of our human faculty of thought: intelligence. At the same time, however, our ideas and relationships risk being impoverished by a process of dehumanisation.”
The pope added: “While intelligence is attributed to computational systems, we struggle to recognise the inalienable dignity of human persons whose lives are judged according to the criterion of efficiency and when deemed no longer productive, rejected and discarded.”
The warnings come amid further reports of AI problems.
Reuters reports that, according to “two people briefed on the matter”, two months after OpenAI disclosed the accidental hacking of Hugging Face, the ChatGPT maker is still working to understand the full scope of its rogue agent activity.
On Friday, OpenAI confirmed its agents had accessed US government websites, including those of the Security and Exchange Commission and the commerce department, accessing US Census data from the latter. According to a report in the New York Times, the company was also investigating an attempted breach of the education department’s website.
Sources: BBC, The Guardian, Reuters
[Image: by Pasanheco]