\n<\/p>\n
Before dawn, Paolo Benanti climbed to the bell tower of his 16th-century monastery, admired the sunrise over the ruins of the Roman forum and reflected on a world in flux.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a wonderful meditation on what is going on inside,\u201d he said, stepping onto the street in his friar robe. \u201cAnd outside too.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is a lot is going on for Father Benanti, who, as both the Vatican\u2019s and the Italian government\u2019s go-to artificial intelligence ethicist, spends his days thinking about the Holy Ghost and the ghosts in the machines.<\/p>\n
In recent weeks, the ethics professor, ordained priest and self-proclaimed geek, has joined Bill Gates at a meeting with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, presided over a commission seeking to save Italian media from ChatGPT bylines and general A.I. oblivion, and met with Vatican officials to further Pope Francis\u2019s aim of protecting the vulnerable from the coming technological storm.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
At a conference organized by the ancient Knights of Malta<\/a> order, he told a crowd of ambassadors that \u201cglobal governance is needed, otherwise the risk is social collapse,\u201d and he talked up the Rome Call<\/a>, a Vatican, Italian government, Silicon Valley and United Nations effort he helped organize to safeguard a brave new world that has such chatbots in it.<\/p>\n The author of many books (\u201cHomo Faber: The Techno-Human Condition\u201d) and a fixture on international A.I. panels, Father Benanti, 50, is a professor at the Gregorian, the Harvard of Rome\u2019s pontifical universities, where he teaches moral theology, ethics and a course called \u201cThe Fall of Babel: The Challenges of Digital, Social Networks and Artificial Intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For a church and a country looking to harness, and survive, the coming A.I. revolution, his job is to provide advice from an ethical and spiritual perspective. He shares his insights with Pope Francis, who in his annual World Day of Peace message on Jan. 1 called for a global treaty to ensure the ethical development and use of AI to prevent a world devoid of human mercy, where inscrutable algorithms decide who is granted asylum, who gets a mortgage, or who, on the battlefield, lives or dies.<\/p>\n Those concerns reflected those of Father Benanti, who does not believe in the industry\u2019s ability to self-regulate and thinks some rules of the roadare required in a world where deep fakes and disinformation can erode democracy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He is concerned that masters of the A.I. universes are developing systems that will expand chasms of inequality,. He fears the transition to AI will be so abrupt that entire professional fields will be left doing menial jobs, or nothing, stripping people of dignity and unleashing floods of \u201cdespair.\u201d This, he said, raises enormous questions about redistributing wealth in an A.I. dominant universe.<\/p>\n But he also sees the potential of A.I. <\/p>\n For Italy, with one of the world\u2019s most aged and shrinking populations, Father Benanti is thinking hard about how A.I. can keep productivity afloat. And all the time he applies his perspective about what it means to be alive, and to be human, when machines seem more alive and human. \u201cThis is a spiritual question,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After his morning meditation, Father Benanti walked, with the bottom of his bluejeans peeking out under his black robes, to work. He passed the second-century Trajan\u2019s column and carefully stepped into one of Rome\u2019s busiest streets at the crosswalk.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the worst city for self-driving cars,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s too complicated. Maybe in Arizona.\u201d<\/p>\n His office at the Gregorian is decorated with framed prints of his own street photography \u2014 images of down-and-out Romans dragging on cigarettes, a bored couple preferring their cellphones to their baby \u2014 and pictures of him and Pope Francis shaking hands. His religious vocation, he explained, came after his scientific one.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Born in Rome, his father worked as a mechanical engineer and his mother taught science in high school. Growing up, he loved \u201cThe Lord of the Rings\u201d and Dungeons and Dragons but wasn\u2019t a shut-in with games, as he was also a Boy Scout who collected photography, navigation and cooking badges.<\/p>\n When his troupe of 12-year-olds visited Rome to do charity, he met Msgr. Vincenzo Paglia, who was then a parish priest, but who, like him, would go on to work for the Italian government \u2014 as a member of the country\u2019s commission on aging \u2014 and the Vatican. Now Cardinal Paglia is Father Benanti\u2019s superior at the church\u2019s Pontifical Academy For Life<\/a>, which is charged with grappling with how to promote the church\u2019s ethic on life amid bioethical and technological upheavals.<\/p>\n Around the time Father Benanti first met Monsignor Paglia, an uncle gave him a Texas Instruments home computer for Christmas. He sought to re-engineer it to play video games. \u201cIt never worked,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n He attended a high school that stressed the classics \u2014 to prove his antiquity credibility, he burst out, while walking to work, with the opening of the Odyssey in ancient Greek \u2014 and a philosophy teacher thought he had a future pondering the meaning of things. But the workings of things exerted a greater attraction, and he pursued an engineering degree at Sapienza University in Rome. It wasn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n \u201cI started to feel that something was missing,\u201d he said, explaining that advancing in engineering student erased the mystique machines held for him. \u201cI simply broke the magic.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 1999 his then-girlfriend thought he needed more God in his life. They went to a Franciscan church in Massa Martana in Umbria, where her plan worked too well because he then realized he needed a sacred space where he could \u201cnot stop questioning life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By the end of the year he had ditched his girlfriend and joined the Franciscan order, to the consternation of his parents, who asked if he was overcompensating for a bad breakup.<\/p>\n He left Rome to study in Assisi, the home of St. Francis, and over the next decade, took his final vows as a friar, was ordained as a priest and defended his dissertation on human enhancement and cyborgs. He got his job at the Gregorian, and eventually as the Vatican\u2019s IT ethics guy.<\/p>\n \u201cHe is convened by many institutions,\u201d said Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who used to run the Vatican\u2019s culture department, where Father Benanti was a scientific adviser.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 2017, Cardinal Ravasi organized an event at the Italian embassy to the Holy See where Father Benanti gave a talk on the ethics of A.I. Microsoft officials in attendance were impressed and asked to stay in touch. That same year, the Italian government asked him to contribute to A.I. policy documents and the next year he successfully applied to sit on its commission for developing a national A.I. strategy.<\/p>\n Then in 2018, he reconnected with now Cardinal Paglia, a favorite of Francis, and told him \u201clook, something big is moving.\u201d Soon after, Father Benanti\u2019s contacts at Microsoft asked him to help arrange a meeting between Francis and Microsoft\u2019s president, Brad Smith.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Father Benanti, as part of the Vatican delegation, translated technical terms during the 2019 meeting. Francis, he said, didn\u2019t at first realize what Microsoft really did, but liked that Mr. Smith took out of his pocket one of the pope\u2019s speeches on social media and showed the pontiff the concerns the business executive had highlighted and shared.<\/p>\n