“Catholic social teaching says that companies, that investors and management, owe care to the workers,” said Cardinal Michael Czerny, head of the Vatican’s Commission on AI.
Leaders of artificial intelligence commissions at the Vatican and U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) called on the technology industry not to pursue profit or victory in the AI race at the expense of workers.
In a Sept. 25 interview with Montse Alvarado on “EWTN News In Depth,” Cardinal Michael Czerny, who leads the Vatican’s Commission on AI, and San Jose Bishop Oscar Cantú, who heads the USCCB’s Task Force on Preserving Human Dignity formed in response Pope Leo XIV’s call for cooperation in Magnifica Humanitas, discussed how AI may reshape the workforce.
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Two days before Czerny and Cantú spoke on “EWTN News In Depth,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made an urgent appeal to the U.N. Security Council for international standards to curb risks from rapid AI development.
Czerny said: “Catholic social teaching says that companies, that investors and management, owe care to the workers.”
“They are not to be used, exploited simply as part of the production process,” Czerny continued. “They are not just cogs in the machine, they are human beings who are living out their dignity in this very, very important field of work.”
He called leaders in the AI industry to care for its people and employees, and not to “pursue profit or win the AI race at the expense of human dignity.”
Amid fears that AI will result in the loss of jobs, Czerny said: “I think we are treating it as a zero-sum game in an unhelpful sense.”
“Maybe we should say, ‘No, the question isnʼt whether jobs will be lost, the question is how much is AI going to help us to create more meaningful and more human beneficial work among its achievements?’” he said. “This has to be one of its goals, not just us protesting against job loss.”
Touching on the labor issue as well, Cantú said he hopes the reports from labs that he has met with are true in that they don’t anticipate significant job loss.
“But I think we should be prepared, and we should go into this wide-eyed and continuing to put forward for the lab developers that at the center needs to be human dignity and the common good,” Cantú said.
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