The friar who became the Vatican’s go-to guy on AI

Rome: Before dawn, Father 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.

“It was a wonderful meditation on what is going on inside,” he said, stepping onto the street in his friar robe. “And outside too.”

There is a lot is going on for Benanti, who, as both the Vatican’s and the Italian government’s go-to artificial intelligence ethicist, spends his days thinking about the Holy Ghost and the ghosts in the machines.

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 AI oblivion, and met with Vatican officials to further Pope Francis’ aim of protecting the vulnerable from the coming technological storm.

At a conference organized by the ancient Knights of Malta order, he told a crowd of ambassadors that “global governance is needed, otherwise the risk is social collapse,” and he talked up the Rome Call — 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.

The author of many books (“Homo Faber: The Techno-Human Condition”) and a fixture on international AI panels, Benanti, 50, is a professor at the Gregorian, the Harvard of Rome’s pontifical universities, where he teaches moral theology, ethics and a course called “The Fall of Babel: The Challenges of Digital, Social Networks and Artificial Intelligence.”

For a church and a country looking to harness, and survive, the coming AI revolution, his job is to provide advice from an ethical and spiritual perspective. He shares his insights with Francis, who in his annual World Day of Peace message 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.

Those concerns reflected those of Benanti, who does not believe in the industry’s ability to self-regulate and thinks some rules of the road are required in a world where deepfakes and disinformation can erode democracy.

He is concerned that masters of the AI 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 “despair.” This, he said, raises enormous questions about redistributing wealth in an AI-dominant universe.

But he also sees the potential of AI.

For Italy, with one of the world’s most aged and shrinking populations, Benanti is thinking hard about how AI 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. “This is a spiritual question,” he said.

After his morning meditation, Benanti walked, with the bottom of his bluejeans peeking out under his black robes, to work. He passed the second-century Trajan’s column and carefully stepped into one of Rome’s busiest streets at the crosswalk.

“This is the worst city for self-driving cars,” he said. “It’s too complicated. Maybe in Arizona.”

His office at the Gregorian is decorated with framed prints of his own street photography — images of down-and-out Romans dragging on cigarettes, a bored couple preferring their cellphones to their baby — and pictures of him and Francis shaking hands. His religious vocation, he explained, came after his scientific one.

Born in Rome, his father worked as a mechanical engineer, and his mother taught science in high school. Growing up, he loved “The Lord of the Rings” and Dungeons and Dragons but wasn’t a shut-in with games, as he was also a Boy Scout who collected photography, navigation and cooking badges.

When his troupe of 12-year-olds visited Rome to do charity, he met Monsignor Vincenzo Paglia, who was then a parish priest, but who, like him, would go on to work for the Italian government — as a member of the country’s commission on aging — and the Vatican. Now Paglia is Benanti’s superior at the church’s Pontifical Academy For Life, which is charged with grappling with how to promote the church’s ethic on life amid bioethical and technological upheavals.

Around the time Benanti first met Paglia, an uncle gave him a Texas Instruments home computer for Christmas. He sought to reengineer it to play video games. “It never worked,” he said.

He attended a high school that stressed the classics — to prove his antiquity credibility, he burst out, while walking to work, with the opening of the Odyssey in ancient Greek — 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’t enough.

“I started to feel that something was missing,” he said, explaining that advancing in engineering erased the mystique machines held for him. “I simply broke the magic.”

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 “not stop questioning life.”

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.

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’s IT ethics guy.

“He is convened by many institutions,” said Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, who used to run the Vatican’s culture department, where Benanti was a scientific adviser.

In 2017, Ravasi organized an event at the Italian Embassy to the Holy See where Benanti gave a talk on the ethics of AI. Microsoft officials in attendance were impressed and asked to stay in touch. That same year, the Italian government asked him to contribute to AI policy documents, and the next year, he successfully applied to sit on its commission for developing a national AI strategy.

Then, in 2018, he reconnected with now Cardinal Paglia, a favorite of Francis, and told him, “Look, something big is moving.” Soon after, Benanti’s contacts at Microsoft asked him to help arrange a meeting between Francis and Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith.

Benanti, as part of the Vatican delegation, translated technical terms during the 2019 meeting. Francis, he said, didn’t at first realize what Microsoft really did but liked that Smith took out of his pocket one of the pope’s speeches on social media and showed the pontiff the concerns the business executive had highlighted and shared.

Francis — who Benanti said has become more literate on AI, especially after an image of the pope sporting an AI-designed white puffer coat went viral — then became more animated. The pope liked when the discussion was less about the technology, Benanti said, and more on “what he can do” to protect the vulnerable.

Last month, Benanti, who said he receives no payment from Microsoft, participated in a meeting between Gates, the company’s co-founder, and Meloni, who is worried about AI’s impact on the workforce. “She has to run a country,” he said.

She has now appointed Benanti to replace the leader of the AI commission on Italian media with whom she was displeased.

“Obedience to authority is one of the vows,” Benanti said as he fiddled with the knots on his robe’s corded belt signifying his Franciscan order’s promise of obedience, poverty and chastity.

That commission is studying ways to protect Italy’s writers. Benanti believes that AI companies should be held liable for using copyrighted sources to train their chatbots, though he worries it is hard to prove because the companies are “black boxes.”

But that mystery has also, for Benanti, once again imbued the technology with magic, even if it is the dark kind. In that way, it wasn’t so new, he said, arguing that as ancient Roman augers turned to the flight of birds for direction, AI, with its enormous grasp of our physical, emotional and preferential data, could be the new oracles, determining decisions and replacing God with false idols.

“It’s something old that probably we think that we left behind,” the friar said, “but that is coming back.”