It was the first time a pope attended the annual summit, which brings the leaders of the world’s wealthiest nations together to discuss some of the most urgent current issues.

Among the many topics the June 13-15 summit focused on were migration, climate change and development in Africa, artificial intelligence and the situation in the Middle East and Ukraine.

During the closed-door meeting between Biden and the pope, a short video clip released to the press showed the U.S. president greeting the pope and remarking immediately about what an impression the pope’s words made on his family when his son, Beau, died of cancer in 2015.

Biden presented the pope with a large square ceramic dish with a reproduction of the fresco visible through the oculus of the dome of the U.S. Capitol’s rotunda depicting George Washington exalted in heaven. “It’s not the Vatican, but…,” Biden said as the interpreters laughed.

In a clip showing the end of the meeting, the pope said, “Pray for me. I pray for you.” The president replied, “I promise I do.”

In addition to the G7 members — the United States, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain — the host nation, Italy, also invited a number of other heads of state, including the pope and the leaders of Ukraine, Argentina, India and Brazil. Russia had been a member of the group, but it was excluded in 2014 after it invaded eastern Ukraine and seized Crimea.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni greeted the pope who arrived by helicopter June 14. The pope then held a series of private bilateral meetings for about one and a half hours before he delivered a speech on the benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence, and called on political leaders to help make sure AI technologies would always be at the service of humanity.

In a long written communique summing up the G7 nations’ shared views and promises, the leaders said, “We are grateful for the presence of His Holiness Pope Francis and for his contribution.”

Pope Francis met first with Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy; French President Emmanuel Macron; and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Zelenskyy told the pope, “Thank you so much, thank you for your prayers for Ukraine, for Ukrainians, for peace in Ukraine, for Ukrainian children,” in a brief video clip sent to reporters before the start of their private meeting.

Later, on a post on X, formerly Twitter, Ukraine’s president said he also thanked the pope for “his spiritual closeness to our people, and humanitarian aid for Ukrainians.”

“I informed the Pope about the consequences of Russian aggression, its air terror, and the difficult energy situation. We discussed the Peace Formula, the Holy See’s role in establishing a just and lasting peace, and expectations for the Global Peace Summit,” the post said.

“I thanked the Holy See for its participation in the Summit and highlighted its efforts aimed at bringing peace closer, particularly returning Ukrainian children abducted by Russia,” the president’s post said.

Also posting on X June 14, Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau said, “I thanked His Holiness for taking up the work of Reconciliation, and I advocated for the next step — returning cultural belongings from the Vatican to Indigenous Peoples in Canada.”

Macron said on X that in his meeting with the pope, he reaffirmed France’s “shared commitment to have a world of greater solidarity and justice for people and the planet. Let us all work together to create the conditions for lasting peace.”

Georgieva expressed her gratitude for being invited to meet with the pope, posting on X: “It is so uplifting to experience @Pontifex’s kindness and listen to his message of peace, cooperation, and care for people in need.”

After delivering his speech and listening to the talks of other invited heads of state, the pope held a final series of bilateral talks with: Kenyan President William Ruto; Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi; Biden; Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan; and Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.

Modi said on X that he invited the pope to visit India. “I admire his commitment to serve people and make our planet better.”

Lula said on X that “We talked about peace, the fight against hunger” and reducing inequalities in the world. In a brief video clip of their encounter, also posted on X, the president of Brazil said he wanted to see if “we can campaign to make the world more humane,” to which the pope replied, “and you can do it, you can do it.”

Ruto said on X that “Kenya joins Pope Francis in calling for (an) urgent end to violence in all parts of the world including Sudan and DRC. We are encouraged that the Tumaini Initiative that is co-sponsored by the Sant’ Egidio Catholic Community in Rome, Italy, and the government of Kenya is yielding fruits in bringing lasting peace in South Sudan.

“We are confident that the warring groups will agree to stop the fighting and give peace a chance,” the Kenyan president posted.

The Vatican press office confirmed that the scheduled bilateral meetings took place and that each one lasted 10-15 minutes. However, it did not comment on Pope Francis’ encounters with the leaders.

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World needs urgent political action to guide AI, pope tells G7

By Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service

[Vatican City – CNS] – Political leaders have a responsibility to create the conditions necessary for artificial intelligence to be at the service of humanity and to help mitigate its risks, Pope Francis told world leaders.

“We cannot allow a tool as powerful and indispensable as artificial intelligence to reinforce such a (technocratic) paradigm, but rather, we must make artificial intelligence a bulwark” against the threat, he said in his address June 14 at the Group of Seven (G7) summit being held in southern Italy.

“This is precisely where political action is urgently needed,” he said.

Many people believe politics is “a distasteful word, often due to the mistakes, corruption and inefficiency of some politicians — not all of them, some. There are also attempts to discredit politics, to replace it with economics or to twist it to one ideology or another,” he said.

But the world cannot function without healthy politics, the pope said, and effective progress toward “universal fraternity and social peace” requires a sound political life.

The pope addressed leaders at the G7’s special “outreach” session dedicated to artificial intelligence. In addition to the G7 members — the United States, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and Great Britain — the forum included specially invited heads of state, including the leaders of Argentina, India and Brazil.

The G7 summit was being held in Borgo Egnazia in Puglia June 13-15 to discuss a series of global issues, such as migration, climate change and development in Africa, and the situation in the Middle East and Ukraine. The pope met privately with 10 heads of state and global leaders in bilateral meetings before and after his talk, including U.S. President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Because of time limits set for speakers during the outreach session, the pope read only a portion of his five-page speech, although the full text was made part of the official record. The Vatican provided a copy of the full text.

In his speech, the pope called artificial intelligence “an exciting and fearsome tool.” It could be used to expand access to knowledge to everyone, to advance scientific research rapidly and to give “demanding and arduous work to machines.”

“Yet at the same time, it could bring with it a greater injustice between advanced and developing nations or between dominant and oppressed social classes, raising the dangerous possibility that a ‘throwaway culture’ be preferred to a ‘culture of encounter,'” he said.

Like every tool and technology, he said, “the benefits or harm it will bring will depend on its use.”

While he called for the global community to find shared principles for a more ethical use of AI, Pope Francis also called for an outright ban of certain applications.

For example, he repeated his insistence that so-called “lethal autonomous weapons” be banned, saying “no machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being.”

Decision-making “must always be left to the human person,” he said. Human dignity itself depends on there being proper human control over the choices made by artificial intelligence programs.

Humanity would be condemned to a future without hope “if we took away people’s ability to make decisions about themselves and their lives, by dooming them to depend on the choices of machines,” he said. In his text, he specifically criticized judges using AI with prisoner’s personal data, such as their ethnicity, background, education, psychological assessments and credit rating, to determine whether the prisoner is likely to re-offend upon release and therefore require home-confinement.

The pope also cautioned, students especially, against “generative artificial intelligence,” which are “magnificent tools” and easily make available online “applications for composing a text or producing an image on any theme or subject.”

However, he said, these tools are not “generative,” in that they do not develop new analyses or concepts; they are merely “reinforcing” as they can only repeat what they find, giving it “an appealing form” and “without checking whether it contains errors or preconceptions.”

Generative AI “not only runs the risk of legitimizing fake news and strengthening a dominant culture’s advantage, but, in short, it also undermines the educational process itself,” his text said.

“It is precisely the ethos concerning the understanding of the value and dignity of the human person that is most at risk in the implementation and development of these systems,” he told the leaders. “Indeed, we must remember that no innovation is neutral.”

Technology impacts social relations in some way and represents some kind of “arrangement of power, thus enabling certain people to perform specific actions while preventing others from performing different ones,” he said. “In a more or less explicit way, this constitutive power dimension of technology always includes the worldview of those who invented and developed it.”

In order for artificial intelligence programs to be tools that build up the good and create a better tomorrow, he said, “they must always be aimed at the good of every human being,” and they must have an ethical inspiration, underlining his support of the “Rome Call for AI Ethics” launched in 2020.

It is up to everyone to “make good use” of artificial intelligence, he said, “but the onus is on politics to create the conditions for such good use to be possible and fruitful.”

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© OSV News / Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. 2024 – from CNS Vatican bureau, used with permission.