“No machine should ever choose to end a human life.”

He Pope Francisco argued this Friday to the leaders of the G7 for bringing an ethical dimension to artificial intelligence (AI) and has warned against its use in wars and the arms industry.

“No machine should ever choose to end a human life,” warned the pope, the first to attend a meeting top of these powers (Germany, Canada, the United States, France, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom), collected to this day in the Italian region of Apulia (south).

Francisco has been invited by the guest Prime Minister, the Italian Giorgia Melonito speak on the panel about AI and that is why in his lengthy speech he warned of the devastation of its application in the war industry and called for a ban on ‘lethal autonomous weapons’.

“Precisely on this subject, I would like to emphasize that in a drama such as that of armed conflict, it is urgent to promote the development and use of devices such as so-called ‘lethal autonomous weapons’ to ban its use, starting with an effective and concrete commitment to introduce ever greater and more significant human control,” he urged.

The Argentine Pope is closely following the arrival of this technology, to which he added his message Day for Peace 2024and promoted the Vatican the initiative since 2020 ‘Rome calls for IA ethics to give an ethical dimension to algorithms and to what giants such as Microsoft or IBM.

Francis said that AI is “fascinating and amazing”, like all of humanity’s technological prodigies. “The topic of AI is often perceived in an ambivalent way: on the one hand, it excites us about the possibilities it offers; on the other hand, it raises fears about the consequences that could occur,” he claimed.

On the one hand, AI would, according to him, be “a democratization of access to knowledge” or promoting scientific research, but also “it could yield more injustice between advanced countries and developing countries, between dominant social classes and oppressed social classes.