Vatican hosts conference on technological progress and human identity

By Joseph Tulloch

“Human: Meanings and Challenges” is the name of a conference now underway in Rome, hosted by the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Scientists, philosophers, theologians and economists have gathered in the Vatican to discuss scientific and technological progress, and ways to put it at the service of the human person.

The conference is being held from the 12th to the 13th February. As it got underway, a number of organisers and participants spoke to journalists about their hopes.

Collective action on humanity's problems

One of these was Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College London, who said that she hopes to demonstrate that the problems facing humanity today require collective action, aimed at the common good.

There is at present, she said, no economic model to support this approach: there is “no economics of the common good”. According to dominant economic theories, Prof. Mazzucato explained, governments ought to leave most affairs to the market, intervening only in cases of market failure. 

“It’s impossible to reach our goals on the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the water crisis, and the future pandemics that our coming our way,” she argued, “if we continue to think in terms of just patching things up.”

As an alternative approach, Professor Mazzucato held up Pope Francis’ encylicals Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti, which, she said, represent a call to “revive collective intelligence and collective collaboration.”

Artifical intelligence and human identity

Next to speak was Professor Jim Al-Khalili of the University of Surrey.

A research physicist, Professor Al-Khalili said that he wanted to discuss artificial intelligence, and the ways it might transform our everyday life and our perceptions of what it means to be human.

AI, he said, has “made our life easier”, even to the point where “quickly that we forget what it was like without it”. It has not, however, he suggested, made us any less human.

Being human, Professor Al-Khalili stressed, is about “more than our intelligence, intuition, or creativity, all of which will likely one day be replicated in AIs.” Being human, he said, is also a question of “our behaviour and interaction with our physical surroundings, our relationships with each other within complex collective structures and societies; it is our shared cultures and beliefs, our history, our memories.”

Archbishop with Pope Francis before the press conference

The Pontifical Academy

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, noted that, for several years now, the Academy has been devoting some of its attention to issues beyond its traditional remit of abortion and euthanasia. This new mandate, he noted, comes directly from Pope Francis’s 2019 letter Humana Communitas.

This new focus, Archbishop Paglia said, means confronting the “epochal change” we are currently experiencing. Humanity, he stressed, now has the capability to drive itself extinct in at least three separate ways - through climate change, nuclear power, and emerging technologies - and these threats demand a robust response. 

As an example of the sort of response he is hoping to give, Monsignor Paglia pointed to the 2020 Rome Call for AI Ethics - the first document of its kind - co-ordinated by the Academy and signed by, among others, the President of Microsoft, the Vice-President of IBM, the Secretary General of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, and the Italian government.