Paolo Benanti, friar and AI expert: ‘It is urgent to agree on an ethical guardrail’

Rome (Italy), May 22 (EFE) - Paolo Benanti combines his life as a friar in a Roman monastery with his profound knowledge of algorithms and technologies, as one of the UN experts following the advent of Artificial Intelligence: ‘It is urgent to agree on an ethical guardrail’ so that it does not derail, he alleges in an interview with EFE, calling not to deify or fear this prodigious tool.

‘We are behind schedule and perhaps we are somewhat ineffective, because the point is that if these instruments do not have solid ethical guardrails, they will be difficult to contain by an external code of ethics’, he predicts.

CAMERA: DANIEL CÁCERES

FOOTAGE OF FR PAOLO BENANTI, PRESIDENT OF THE ITALIAN GOVERNMENT'S COMMISSION ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR INFORMATION.

SOUNDBITES IN ITALIAN OF BENANTI.

Translation of Paolo Benanti, President of the Artificial Intelligence Commission for Information of the Italian Government:

1.- ‘Given the speed at which artificial intelligence is developing, it is important that we equip ourselves with tools that at least do not go too slowly with respect to artificial intelligence, because if we need a 20-year process to agree on something like this, it is clear that we are out of control of artificial intelligence’.

2. ‘If these systems do not have this ethical guardrail in place internally, it will be very difficult to contain them through an external code of ethics.

3. ‘We need to focus above all on principles and principles that find common agreement. This is part of the task of this ‘soft law’, which is the ethical approach that accompanies the essentially ‘hard law’ approach in the realisation of these ‘guardrails’ that try to keep the car on the desired road’.

4- ‘60,000 years ago we were living in caves, the first time we picked up a club? Was it a tool to get more coconuts or a weapon to open more skulls? So the idea of risk of and advantage is not just an idea that concerns artificial intelligence, it concerns the tool or at least the technological artefact since time immemorial.... And so, in this sense, the perspective that we have to have is that any tool based on artificial intelligence, any technological artefact, can, to some extent, become a weapon made harmful or made lethal.

5.- Ethics is about seeking good rather than fearing evil. So if we are trapped in a hermeneutic of seeking evil or protecting evil, of blocking evil, we can do the minimum to make them tools to do the good that we think they can do, we have to change our perspective a little bit.

6. ‘Right now we are not the best functioning species biologically, but this unique spiritual quality that we are, which is called intelligence, will allow us to adapt a tool like artificial intelligence to the best uses, if we want to, for the human species.

7. ‘We have a Spanish brother, or rather, I should say a Mallorcan brother, called Ramon Llull, who in 1300 wrote what is the Ars Magna, which was the text that Leibniz used to make his logic, which is the basis of the computer’.

8. ‘The whole Franciscan order demonstrates this. We have had great scientists... Bacon, Sir Bacon’.

9. ‘From the point of view of faith, reason is a gift of God, so everything that agrees with reason is not contrary to God. The problem is to live it as a constant search for this, to discover what reality puts in front of us’.

10. ‘Artificial intelligence, in the capacity to create it, is linked to natural intelligence, which is a gift from God. In the capacity to use it, there is also the will, which as we know can be, let me use these very ecclesial terms, also very sinful... there is a mystery of evil.

11.- ‘There is an old science fiction novel in which a man interrogates an artificial intelligence with a question that has always crossed the human heart, does God exist? Here, the author makes the artificial intelligence answer with a sculpted sentence: ‘Now, yes’.

12. ‘The real question he asks us, even before he asks us about God, is about what it means to be human and to live out choices in a way that may be fallible but is profoundly human. Because there is a big difference between the machine that works and the man that exists. It is not just the goal, but the journey itself that makes the difference’.