Pope Francis will attend this year’s summit of Group of Seven (G7) leaders to discuss the challenges posed by artificial intelligence (AI), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Friday.
This year, the pope warned against the “perverse” dangers of artificial intelligence and renewed his call for global regulations to harness it for the common good.
The G7 meeting takes place in the Puglia region of southern Italy from June 13 to 15 and brings together the leaders of the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada and Japan, as well as several specially invited guests.
“For the first time in history, the Pope will take part in the work of the G7,” Meloni said in a video message.
She said she would participate in a session on artificial intelligence, calling it one of the “greatest anthropological challenges of our time.”
“I am convinced that His Holiness’s presence will make a decisive contribution to developing an ethical and cultural regulatory framework for artificial intelligence,” Meloni said.
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Italy, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the G7, this week approved a draft law aimed at laying down basic principles for the operate of artificial intelligence, targeting investments in the sector and setting sanctions for AI-related crimes.
“(It is) a technology that can generate enormous opportunities, but also carries enormous risks, and also inevitably impacts global balance,” Meloni said on Friday, adding that artificial intelligence must be “both human-centric and controlled him.”
In January, Pope Francis spoke about his fears and hopes for artificial intelligence.
While he urged people to temporarily “put aside the catastrophic predictions and their numbing effects” about novel things, his three-page message was mostly tragic and warned against “cognitive pollution” that can distort reality, promote false narratives and trap people in ideological chambers reverberation .
A month earlier, he called for a legally binding international treaty to regulate artificial intelligence, saying algorithms cannot be allowed to replace human values and warning of a “technological dictatorship” that threatens human existence.
(Reporting by Crispian Balmer, editing by Gavin Jones, Alex Richardson and Ed Osmond)
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