Pope Leo XIV probably isn’t the first person you picture when conversation turns to Artificial General Intelligence doomsday scenarios. But last month, AGI researcher John-Clark Levin found himself inside the Vatican on a mission to put those concerns in front of the pope.
Levin hasn’t been acting alone. In the past year, he has been quietly assembling a loose network of roughly three dozen academics, scientists, policy researchers, and priests — a group he half-jokingly calls the “AI Avengers” — who meet virtually to strategize how to get the Vatican thinking more seriously about AI’s more extreme possibilities.
His main worry is that the pope will take too long to realize the risks of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a goal pursued by some of the world’s biggest tech companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta. “If you wait for perfect certainty, it’s going to be too late to act to stave off the very severe danger that appears to be just several years away,” he tells The Verge.
The Vatican’s AI moment
AGI is, to put it mildly, a divisive idea. There is no consensus on what AGI is or when it may arrive, even among the communities that fully buy into it. At its core, it usually refers to AI that matches or exceeds human performance across all measurable cognitive domains. It’s in the details where things get messy. Depending on your definition — and there are many — AGI might already be here, is just around the corner, or may never arrive. The expected impacts of AGI are equally diverse, ranging from enormous economic abundance and unprecedented scientific and medical breakthroughs to widespread inequality, geopolitical unrest, and catastrophic threats like nuclear wars and pandemics.
For those who care about these risks, reducing them is a top priority that will require buy-in across industry, government, and civil society worldwide. Unsurprisingly, a lot of lobbying has focused on China and the US — where most frontier AI labs are based and many experts believe AGI would be most likely to emerge — but the Vatican is becoming an increasingly important stop on the lobbying circuit too.
While the Vatican is clearly not a major world power when it comes to its tiny size, military, and economy, it wields a tremendous amount of soft power. As the head of the Catholic Church, the pope’s moral and spiritual authority cuts across borders, industries, and ideologies and shapes global opinion. Directly, there are 1.4 billion Catholics and a vast network of religious, diplomatic, and cultural institutions worldwide and history suggests this influence reaches far beyond the Church too. This, alongside its almost-unique position as a neutral entity in global affairs, gives the Vatican almost unparalleled connections and convening power that could prove decisive in mediating discussions on AGI, particularly given the tensions and arms-race dynamic between China and the US.
There are also some special things about Leo when it comes to AI that could prove particularly useful in shaping global AI discussions. He’s American — a papal first — which could make it easier for him to engage with many of the frontier AI labs racing to develop AGI, which are overwhelmingly US based. He’s also got a degree in mathematics and, reportedly is relatively tech savvy — also something of a papal novelty — meaning he would be more comfortable than most on addressing the more technical aspects of AI too.
Putting AGI on the agenda
Nobody is expecting Pope Leo to referee the AGI debate or even to pick a side. As one might expect for a centuries-old institution, the Vatican is not normally a swift actor on new technologies and will typically launch lengthy consultations with outside experts before beginning to develop its position. The ask for the Vatican is simpler: acknowledge AGI as a possibility, consider it seriously, launch a consultation, and scrutinize the risks and benefits on its own terms. That’s the message Levin has been trying to get in front of Leo for months.
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