Vatican tech flop: Pope Leos AI crusade needs Trump not the UN

Pope Leo XIV is right about the need to make AI answer to the human good — artificial intelligence has to be subject to human moral responsibility.But whose?The pope warns against power accumulating in private hands:  A few companies, led by a handful of executives and board members, control AI development.The hard question “Magnifica humanitas” tries to answer is how to make AI accountable to public authority and the common good, not just the interests of its creators.This is where Leo runs into trouble — his view of politics is one-sided and decades out of date.The encyclical is written in the language of 20th-century liberalism, with the United Nations and international bodies playing an outsize role.“International organizations, particularly the United Nations, are essential instruments for promoting a civilization of love,” he writes, in the context of “negotiating shared regulations on the use of digital technologies, in order to protect civilians and the most vulnerable from ‘invisible’ yet real forms of violence.”Leo compares AI to the Tower of Babel, yet that image applies at least as well to the UN.Citing the teachings of Saint John Paul II and Pius XII, Leo affirms, “the Church values democracy insofar as it guarantees the effective participation of citizens, enables them to elect and peacefully replace their leaders and prevents power from being monopolized by small elite groups motivated by particular or ideological interests.”By that measure, how democratic are most international organizations?“In a world where data, computational resources and regulatory influence remain in the hands of a few, to speak of the common good means exposing this new form of epistemic, economic and political asymmetry and naming the new monopolies of AI,” writes Leo.Hear hear!The pope is absolutely correct about the need for transparency — if we want ethical AI, we have to know whose ethics are being written into the system.Ordinary people ha...