‘Mere cogs in a system’
Some corporations are using AI to gather personal information on millions of people and sell this to corporations and government agencies for surveillance use. Other bad actors can also use that information to harass and threaten, and blackmail or extract money or sexual favors from other people, especially children.
It can be said personal privacy is almost nonexistent for millions of people using AI-driven tools. This is what Pope Leo is challenging in “Magnifica Humanitas.” He clearly denounces a business mindset that reduces people to commodities, in which every human choice is dictated exclusively by measuring efficiency and profit.
Pope Leo warns that this reduces human beings to “mere cogs in a system” and risks making society view vulnerable lives — like the sick, elderly or impoverished — as less useful, even disposable.
Among those leading the AI industry and promoting the technology’s benefits for humanity is Chris Olah, co-founder of the company Anthropic, which developed an AI tool called Claude AI. It’s an AI assistant capable of highly advanced reasoning, document analysis, and math.
Olah joined Pope Leo in the Vatican Synod Hall, where he said AI companies must follow an ethical code of conduct, and AI developers must be held accountable.
“We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend,” Olah said, speaking for AI developers with a moral conscience and living by a code of ethics.
Olah acknowledged that computer scientists cannot alone determine ethical boundaries. He said the driving forces behind these developers were not of a spiritual or ethical nature, but were continuously influenced by “incentives,” such as ambition, competition and financial pressure.
He also said companies like his needed structured moral guidance to guard against “incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.”
Doing the “right thing” is to develop AI software that can serve humanity and protect both children and adults by detecting, blocking and erasing damaging child-abuse images.
The work of the Preda Foundation is helping young victims of sexual abuse, in which 12- and 13-year-old boys rape 6-year-old girls. The abusers have been influenced by easily available sexual-abuse images viewed on their phones.
Pope Leo, in “Magnifica Humanitas,” explicitly warned that providing personal mobile devices to children at too early an age without supervision “exacerbates their vulnerability to online exploitation, grooming, and extortion.”
We can add to that the moral corruption of the youth over the AI-driven internet that cannot distinguish right from wrong and is driven by AI-generated images to sexually assault children. Pope Leo said modern corporate AI algorithms were designed to propagate and display images that would attract viewers, especially young ones, to buy digital connections to get online and view the illegal images. This is designed to maximize profits.
The addiction of children and adults to social media platforms and illegal content is a corrupting influence that must be stopped. Some countries like Australia and Indonesia have passed legislation restricting minors from accessing social media platforms, and more nations are planning similar measures.
The Philippines should do likewise to protect its children and national dignity./PN
