NFC technology"In transhumanism we have to distinguish science fiction from what we will be able to see."Omnes-CARF meeting addressed the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence"Create an international round table on new technologies". This is one of the proposals that came out of the General Assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Lifewhich concluded on Wednesday, February 22. It was formulated by the President, Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, during the presentation press conference held yesterday at the Holy See Press Office. On the table, he explained, is the reflection "on emerging and converging technologies, such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, algorithms, interventions on the genome, neuroscience: all topics that Pope Francis had already urged us to address in the Letter".Humana Communitas"I had written on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Pontifical Academy".
"The Academy had already faced the challenge posed to humanity by the frontier of Artificial Intelligence, which in recent months has made the headlines of many newspapers," Paglia stressed, recalling that "in February 2020 the Rome Call was signed in Rome and last January was also attended by leaders of Judaism and Islam."
Anthropology and technology
"Next year we will go to Hiroshima for the signing with the other religions of the world, at the same time that several universities of the planet, other institutions such as Confindustria, and the world of politics itself have joined," Paglia announced, pointing out that "in this Assembly the theme has been about the systemic interaction of these emerging and converging technologies that are developing so rapidly, which can indeed make an enormous contribution to the betterment of humanity, but at the same time can lead to a radical modification of the human being. We talk about posthumanism, empowered man, etc.
A few years ago, at the General Assembly where we were discussing robotics, the Japanese scientist Ishiguro Hiroshi spoke of humanity today as the last organic generation, the next would be synthetic. We would be facing the radical transformation of the human".
The Pontifical Academy for Life, therefore, 'felt the responsibility to face this new frontier that radically involves the human being, aware that the ethical dimension is indispensable to save, precisely, the common human being'.
The challenges of new technologies
Among the issues at the center of the international round table on the new emerging technologies, in response to questions from journalists, Paglia mentioned the possession of data, in which "governments themselves are challenged, because there are networks that run the risk of being more powerful than the States themselves. We cannot abandon the world to the drift of a savage attitude," warned the bishop, recalling also "the new frontier of space, in which Chinese, American and Russian scientists are working. I hope that there will be space conquests: will this fraternity be maintained in space, while on earth we make war on each other?".
Another issue to be approached with care: "Facial recognition, if there is no legal regulation there is a risk of creating imbalances", so, in Paglia's opinion, we are called to reflect on the need for "a new humanism, because we want to remain human, the transhuman does not send us to glory".
The commitment of the Pontifical Academy for Life, added Chancellor Renzo Pegoraro at the conference, moves from 'an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective, thanks to the contribution of the world's leading experts in these fields (a corpus of 160 scholars, on five continents), to grasp the positive effects - in the field of health, health care, the environment, the fight against poverty - that arise from converging technologies." However, in order to address the fears, risks and uncertainties and, at the same time, protect the value of the individual, his or her integrity and promote the pursuit of the common good, "governance is needed," Pegoraro continued, "to be developed through adequate and updated legislation, but also through information and education on the use of the technologies themselves."
Finally, Professor Roger Strand (University of Bergen, Norway) and Professor Laura Palazzani (Lumsa University, Rome) spoke. "My main message," said Strand, "is that converging technologies and the ethical issues they raise are linked to the structural characteristics of modern societies and must be addressed as such. Neither science nor technology arise in a vacuum, but are co-produced with the society in which they take place. Science and technology shape and are shaped by other institutions and practices, such as politics and economics. The ethical issues of converging technologies are intertwined with the political economy of technoscience, with the political agendas of innovation and economic growth, with market forces, ideologies and cultures of materialism and consumerism. They are entangled in what the Encyclical Laudato Si' aptly called the technocratic paradigm."
How, then, to orient technological trajectories towards the common good? "It is necessary to challenge - according to the Norwegian scholar - the technocratic paradigm and integrate it with concerns for human identity, dignity and prosperity. It may take generations to orient technoscience towards the common good. The world of converging technologies is reminiscent of a Brave New World, not necessarily totalitarian but totalizing in its approach. We should ask ourselves: can this or that sociotechnical trajectory help us remember what our lives can really be like and support us in living them?"
The bioethics debate
The theoretical debate, at its inception, outlined the division between technophilic bio-optimists who praise emerging technologies and technophobic bio-pessimists who demonize technologies. It is not a matter of choosing between the two extremes, Palazzani pointed out, but of reflecting, case by case, on each technology and application, to highlight within what limits progress can be permitted and regulated in a human-centered perspective (against technocracy and technocentrism), which places human dignity and the common good of society understood in a global sense at the center.
"The ethics -is the reflection of Lumsa's lecturer - is called for a "cautious" look. It is a matter of justifying the limits of techno-scientific development, especially in its radical, invasive and irreversible forms. The risk is that the desire for perfection may make us forget the constitutive limit of man who, playing at being God, forgets himself".
The Pope also spoke of the risks of a drift in questions of bioethics, in the audience granted to the Pontifical Academy for Life, last February 20. "It is paradoxical to speak of an 'augmented' man if one forgets that the human body refers to the integral good of the person and, therefore, cannot be identified only with the biological organism," Francis admonished, according to whom "a mistaken approach in this field ends up in reality not with 'augmenting' but with 'compressing' man." Hence "the importance of knowledge on a human, organic scale," also in the theological field.
