As Pope Leo XIV laid out his vision for the papacy in an address to the College of Cardinals, he also explained why he picked his papal name. Incredibly, artificial intelligence played a big part.
In the Vatican’s translation of his speech, Pope Leo XIV explained that his name references Pope Leo XII, who presided over the church at the dawn of the industrial revolution.
…I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
Below is more of the excerpt, published by the Catholic News Service.
The Catholic Church has taken a keen interest in the development of AI in recent years. In a January document published by the Vatican and translated to English, the church reflected on AI, its limitations, its relationship with the truth, and the ethics of developing and using the technology. The document also references a warning issued a year prior by Pope Francis about AI’s potential to create “partially or completely false narratives, believed and broadcast as if they were true.”
But if Pope Francis set up how the Catholic Church feels about AI, Pope Leo XIV citing it as a main reason for his name hints that it will be an even bigger part of the church’s focus during his papacy.
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