Franciscan friar Paolo Benanti, an expert in artificial intelligence (AI), warned about its ethical risks during a colloquium organized by the Pablo VI Foundation in Madridwhere he warned that “the people who control this type of technology control reality.”
The Italian religious, president of the Commission for Artificial Intelligence of the Italian Government, stressed that “the reality we are facing is different from that of 10 or 15 years ago and it is a reality defined by software.”
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“This starting point impacts the way we exercise the three classic rights connected with the ownership of a thing: use, abuse and usufruct,” he explained.
Very especially about the latter, because, he pointed out, “the values you produce with the use of these devices are not yours, but go to the cloud.”
“So who are those who do not have the usufruct of things? The slaves,” he added.
Therefore, it encouraged us to reflect on what it means to live in a reality defined by software. “We have to have an ethical approach to technology,” and in particular to those linked to artificial intelligence, “because they are what make up the reality of our world and the people who control this type of technology control reality.”
“We have to recognize that we live in a different reality. The software is not secondary, but rather it questions what reality is, what property is, what rights we have,” said the Franciscan.
Centralization and decentralization of power
Secondly, Brother Benanti specified how the development of computing after the Second World War has produced different processes related to power, democracy and intimacy.
In the 1970s, decentralization processes took place in the United States and Europe, which years later led to the creation of personal computers that “allowed everyone to have access to very simple things.”
In the 90s of the 20th century, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a commitment to a more liberalized market with the idea that “it would lead to greater well-being” and promote the model of liberal democracy in countries with other models. . However, that policy “made China richer, but not more democratic.”
Thus, Western democratic values entered into crisis when it was proven that “you can be rich and have well-being without being democratic.”
In the so-called Arab Spring (2011) the use of mobile phones showed the “intimate computational capacity”. But shortly after that ability began to be suspected: “mobile phones were no longer the allies of democracy, but the worst ally of fake news, polarization, post-truth and all that kind of things.”
With the arrival of the Covid 19 pandemic, “we were able to surrogate our lives thanks to our personal computing power” through the use of video calls or the development of applications for bank payments, among other utilities.
“We realized that, silently, from 2012 to 2020, the smartphone had taken over reality and now the things that happened in reality were happening directly on the phone,” he recalled.
The risk of computational democracy
During the second decade of the 21st century, “we have artificial intelligence inside the smartphone” and, in the opinion of Friar Benanti, classical liberal democracy is leading to “a computational democracy.”
In it, “we are using artificial intelligence to remove the person’s computing capacity and take it to a centralized place that we call a data center,” in such a way that a new ethical challenge appears: “now all processes are centralized again in the cloud.”
The expert stressed that these “clouds” or data centers “belong to five companies” that own “all the data,” which represents a challenge not only personal “but for democratic processes.”
Regarding these challenges, the religious explained how artificial intelligence can also pose a threat to people’s freedom through its ability to make predictions about behavior.
“The suggestion you are interested in is not only predicting what you can buy, but it is also producing the things you are going to buy,” he summarized.
This possibility represents “a real problem” because the existence of this type of system in our pockets “is capable of forcing and shaping the freedom of public spaces.”
These types of questions about the weaknesses, opportunities, strengths and threats of artificial intelligence are the reason why “we should have governance over these types of innovations.”
Regarding the future, Brother Benanti predicted great impacts of artificial intelligence on access to information, medicine and the labor market. Regarding the latter, he noted: “If we do not regulate the impact that artificial intelligence can have on the labor market, we could destroy society as we know it now.”
Nicholas de Cardenas
Born in 1980, I am a Spanish husband and father and journalist with more than 20 years of experience in print and digital media, specializing in sociopolitical and religious information. I have worked for more than 10 years in defense of human rights and have accreditations in Journalism and Comprehensive Communication. Since July 2022, I have been a correspondent for ACI Prensa and EWTN Noticias in Spain, covering international events of the Catholic Church.