Pope urges G7 leaders to regulate AI responsibly and ban AI weapons

Bari (Italy), June 14 (IANS/DPA) Pope Francis has called on Group of Seven (G7) leaders to take a cautious approach to artificial intelligence (AI) and ban the use of autonomous weapons fatalities during the G7 summit in Italy. Friday.

Speaking at the Summit, the Pope highlighted both the exciting possibilities and potential dangers of AI.

“It is up to everyone to make good use of it. But it is up to politics to create the conditions for such good use to be possible and fruitful,” the Pope said.

The Pope also described AI as an “extremely powerful tool” whose advantages and disadvantages depend on how it is used.

“The use of our tools, however, is not always oriented solely toward good,” the Pope said.

“When our ancestors sharpened flints to make knives, they used them both to cut skins for clothing and to kill each other.”

He also highlighted the complexity of AI, noting that it could enable machines to make autonomous decisions.

However, he stressed that the final decision-making should be left to humans.

“We would condemn humanity to a hopeless future if we removed people's ability to make decisions about themselves and their lives,” he warned.

“Human dignity itself depends on it,” the pope added, urging politicians to ban the use of deadly autonomous weapons. “No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being.”

Pope Francis is the first pontiff to attend a G7 summit in its nearly 50-year history. The seven advanced industrialized democracies include Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.

A series of bilateral meetings are also on Pope Francis' agenda at the conference venue, a luxury resort on the Adriatic coast in southern Italy's Puglia region.

Source: IANS