Pope Francesco, the 266th generation, is known to have a deep relationship with technology in many ways, such as saying that the Internet is a gift from God or challenging programming. Pope Francesco draws attention by praying that he hopes that robots and artificial intelligence will always be helpful to mankind.
The Catholic Church publishes monthly prayer topics by the Pope to help deepen daily prayers with a focus on specific topics or events. Every month, the subject is different, but in November 2020, the theme is artificial intelligence, and Pope Francesco writes that he wishes the advancement of robots and artificial intelligence will always benefit humanity.
Pope Francesco said that artificial intelligence is at the center of the breakthrough changes we experience. Robotics connects to the public interest and leads to a better world. It is explained that we are going to focus on the dignity of people and creatures and pray that the development of robots and artificial intelligence will always be for humanity.
In February 2020, he made a Roman appeal on AI ethics demanding the ethical use of artificial intelligence, in cooperation with companies such as Microsoft. Among these, six principles were proposed to guide the evolution of artificial intelligence in the right direction.
Pope Francesco did not mention the six principles mentioned in his appeal to AI ethics in a video talking about prayer intent. However, he writes that it is simple to think of how artificial intelligence promotes social division. Specifically, examples include the development of a biased face recognition system leading to false arrests and test results assigned as an algorithm to reproduce inequality among students. Related information can be found here .