· Vatican City ·
There were academics, journalists, researchers, and media education specialists from universities, international institutions, and the technology sector. These were women accustomed to reflecting on what happens when machines begin to imitate human language, emotions, and relationships. On May 21, at the Pontifical Urban University, the international conference “Preserving Human Voices and Faces”, organized by the Dicastery for Communication in collaboration with the Dicastery for Culture and Education for the 60th World Day of Social Communications, brought together some of the world’s leading male and female scholars and experts. The event has also become an important forum for exploring artificial intelligence and its social and cultural consequences from a female perspective.
Guiding the proceedings were the words of Pope Leo XIV: “The question that concerns us is not what the machine can or will be able to do, but what we can and will be able to do ourselves as we grow in humanity and knowledge”. The question, hovered over the entire day, what remains of the human person when technology learns to simulate even relationships?
In the panel “To Be or to Pretend to Be: Simulating Relationships and Reality”, Marijana Grbeša Zenzerović, who is a professor at the University of Zagreb and Vice-Chair of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Experts on Online Safety, spoke about the risk of a reality increasingly manipulated by deepfakes and artificially generated content. Alongside her, Kashmir Hill, technology reporter for The New York Times, brought the debate into everyday life by describing the transformations brought about by surveillance systems and facial-recognition technologies.
In the panel devoted to the inequalities generated by artificial intelligence, moderated by Nataša Govekar, who is the theological and pastoral director of the Dicastery for Communication, Paola Ricaurte Quijano, who is a professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey and associate researcher at Harvard, warned of the risk that algorithms may end up reproducing the very economic and cultural injustices already embedded in society. She was followed by Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League and one of the leading scholars of algorithmic bias, who explained how alongside the closure schoolsmany facial-recognition systems continue to discriminate against women and Black people, which makes it clear that technology, too, often bears the imprint of the prejudices of those who design it.
Moderating the panel “A Possible Alliance” was Sister Nina Krapić, who is the Vice Director of the Holy See Press Office. During the discussion, Mitchell Baker, who is co-founder of the Mozilla Project, stressed the need to develop a more open and collaborative form of artificial intelligence, one that is not left under the exclusive control of major technology corporations.
In the afternoon, the discussion turned to education and critical thinking. Rayen Condeza Dall’Orso of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Divina Frau-Meigs, media sociologist at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, and Adeline Hulin of UNESCO emphasized the importance first and foremost of teaching young people to not delegate to machines their capacity for discernment, doubt, and independent thought.
More than simply a conference on artificial intelligence, the gathering at the Urbaniana became a laboratory of questions about what it means to be human. These questions were posed in the conviction that the digital future cannot be governed by technology alone, but requires critical awareness, responsibility, and a genuine care for human relationships
L’Osservatore Romano
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