Dr. Steven Umbrello suggested that 80 years of popular science fiction have effectively convinced many that technology is deterministic: scientists create an intelligent design, and that creation becomes sentient and inevitably turns on humanity.

One need look no further than the Terminator franchise as proof.

The University of Turin research fellow declared that such a dystopian outcome need not be the real-life eventuality when it comes to the ascendancy of artificial intelligence. He said we have the agency to shape how this technology will influence us over time.

Advertisement

“The way we design the technology itself will determine the kinds of impacts that it will then have on our behaviour, and then that behaviour will therefore also impact on how we design future iterations of the technology,” said the Catholic. “We have to push away from the technological deterministic narrative towards a more co-constructive narrative of technology.”

Umbrello, managing director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies think tank, said it is important for young people capable of “speaking both the language of code and the language of Christ” to enter the fray and build systems that can virtuously serve the common good.

“The field of AI development doesn't just need technical brilliance, and it shouldn't just have technical brilliance,” said Umbrello. “If it does, it'll just be sterile, right? If not, deleterious. It needs people with a moral imagination, and that's something the Catholic tradition is uniquely equipped to offer.”

Pope Leo XIV offered similar sentiments during his first formal audience on May 10.

“In our own day, the Church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour,” the Pope said.

Advertisement

During that same meeting in the Vatican, Leo XIV said he chose his papal name as a nod to Pope Leo XIII and how he stood up for the rights of the working class and outlined the social and economic issues of the Industrial Revolution through his seminal 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.

Umbrello said Popes Leo XIII and XIV are confronting the same theological question, just in different eras: “What does it mean to be human in a time when technology risks are eclipsing the person?”

He anticipates the Pope will likely provide his answer in an encyclical or an apostolic exhortation in the months to come. He said perhaps this document will “stand synergistically” alongside Pope Francis’ encyclicals Laudato Si' and Fratelli Tutti and will naturally advance the precepts contained within Rerum Novarum into a 21st-century context.

Umbrello, who has pondered how the Church will contend with AI with his written analyses for the Word on Fire media organization, suggested the Holy See would be well served by establishing a permanent research institution for AI and digital ethics.

“(It could be) something akin to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, but more focused on technological development rather than pure theory,” said Umbrello. “So, this could include things like partnerships with universities, obviously ethics researchers and even the more sympathetic tech developers.”

The potential pastoral dimension of Pope Leo XIV’s response to AI, posited Umbrello, is to provide bishops and priests with needed tools and formation to address AI-related issues with their communities. Specifically, these spiritual leaders will be called upon to answer “questions about privacy, education, employment and even the spiritual life in an AI-kind of saturated world.” The 32-year-old suggested Leo XIV “could provide theological vision and the institutional structure” to help clerical leaders shepherd grassroots Catholics.

In a May 20 submission for Word on Fire, titled Pope Leo XIV and the New Social Question of AI, Umbrello delved into Antiqua et Nova, a doctrinal note about the ethical development and usage of AI published in January by the Dicastery for Culture and Education. He said this document “draws on the deep well of the Church's tradition while engaging with the technological frontier in, I would say, a courageous way.” One anthropological claim particularly stood out to him.

“No matter how powerful and advanced it becomes it remains a tool,” said Umbrello. “It's not a person. It cannot reason or love or take responsibility. The document is explicit about this.

Advertisement

“It even warns that using terms like artificial intelligence can be misleading because it tempts us to think of these systems as if they were agents. They're fundamentally passive, they're products of human design.”

Umbrello advocated that Catholics around the world, including Pope Leo XIV, need to embrace Antiqua et Nova’s conviction “insistence that all technological development must be judged through the lens of human dignity and becoming good.”