0320 15 March 2020 Monthly Year 4 Artificial Intelligence and Social Justice: A Challenge for the Church The Berlin Conference and Civil War in Libya The Beginning of the Universe and .03 the Question of God O Our Concern for the Future: One year on from the signing of the Human Fraternity Document OLUME 4, N 4, OLUME V Protection of Minors:The pope’s steps forward after the February 2019 2020 2020 Meeting Women and Men in the Church Abandoning the Myth of Nuclear Deterrence Three Biblical Cities The Culture of Tolerance Terrence Malick’s ‘A Hidden Life’ BEATUS POPULUS, CUIUS DOMINUS DEUS EIUS Copyright, 2020, Union of Catholic Asian Editor-in-chief News ANTONIO SPADARO, SJ All rights reserved. Except for any fair Editorial Board dealing permitted under the Hong Kong Antonio Spadaro, SJ – Director Copyright Ordinance, no part of this Giancarlo Pani, SJ – Vice-Director publication may be reproduced by any Domenico Ronchitelli, SJ – Senior Editor means without prior permission. Inquiries Giovanni Cucci, SJ, Diego Fares, SJ should be made to the publisher. Francesco Occhetta, SJ, Giovanni Sale, SJ Claudio Zonta, SJ Title: La Civiltà Cattolica, English Edition Federico Lombardi, SJ ISSN: 2207-2446 Emeritus editors Federico Lombardi SJ ISBN: Giandomenico Mucci SJ 978-988-79391-3-9 (ebook) GianPaolo Salvini SJ 978-988-79391-4-6 (kindle) Published in Hong Kong by Contributors UCAN Services Ltd. Drew Christiansen SJ (USA) Fernando de la Iglesia Viguiristi SJ (Spain) P.O. Box 69626, Kwun Tong, Joseph You Guo Jiang SJ (China) Hong Kong Friedhelm Mennekes SJ (Germany) Phone: +852 2727 2018 David Neuhaus SJ (Israel) Fax: +852 2772 7656 www.ucanews.com Vladimir Pachkov SJ (Russia) Arturo Peraza SJ (Venezuela) Publishers: Michael Kelly, SJ and Marc Rastoin SJ (France) Robert Barber Jean-Pierre Sonnet (Belgium) Production Manager: Paul Soukup SJ (USA) Grithanai Napasrapiwong Marcel Uwineza SJ (Rwanda) Andrea Vicini SJ (USA) CONTENTS 0320 15 March 2020 Monthly Year 4 1 Artificial Intelligence and Social Justice A Challenge for the Church Antonio Spadaro - Paul Twomey 11 The Berlin Conference and Civil War in Libya Giovanni Sale, SJ 25 The Beginning of the Universe and the Question of God Gabriele Gionti, SJ 40 Our Concern for the Future: One year on from the signing of the Human Fraternity Document Laurent Basanese, SJ 50 Protection of Minors The pope’s steps forward after the February 2019 Meeting Federico Lombardi, SJ 62 Women and Men in the Church Federico Lombardi, SJ 72 Abandoning the Myth of Nuclear Deterrence Drew Christiansen, SJ 83 Three Biblical Cities Pino Stancari, SJ 89 The Culture of Tolerance Giancarlo Pani, SJ 101 Terrence Malick’s ‘A Hidden Life’ Jean-Pierre Sonnet, SJ LCC 0420: APRIL APRIL TITLES • Seven Years Of The Pontificate. 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The explosion of AI is having a notable impact on our present rights and future opportunities, 1 determining the decision-making processes that affect all in today’s society. Enormous technological change is occurring. It promises great benefits and poses insidious risks. The proportion of risks to benefits will become apparent, depending on the pioneers and creators of this technology, and, in particular, on the clarity of their vision of the common good and on how correct is their understanding of the nature of human experience.1 We need to understand that Artificial Intelligence is a challenge and an opportunity for the Church. It is a social justice issue. In fact, the pressing, greedy and non-transparent search for 2 big data, i.e. the data needed to feed machine learning engines, can lead to the manipulation and exploitation of the poor: “The poor in the 21st century, as well as the cash poor, are the ignorant, the naive and the exploited in a data-dominated world.”3 La Civiltà Cattolica, En. Ed. Vol. 4, no. 03 art. 1, 0320: 10.32009/22072446.0320.1 1.Cf. G. Cucci, “For a digital humanism” in Civ. Catt. 2020 I 27-40. 2.Big data indicates a collection of data so extensive that it requires specific technology and analytical methods for the extraction of value or knowledge and the discovery of links between different phenomena and the prediction of future ones. 3.M. Kelly - P. Twomey, “Big Data and Ethical Challenges” in Civ. Catt. En. July, 2018. https://www.laciviltacattolica.com/big-data-and-ethical-challenges/ ANTONIO SPADARO - PAUL TWOMEY Moreover, the same purposes for which AI systems are geared can lead them to interact in unpredictable ways to ensure that the poor are controlled, monitored and manipulated. Presently the creators of AI systems are increasingly the arbiters of truth for consumers. But the philosophical challenges of understanding truth, knowledge and ethics multiply as AI capabilities grow toward and surpass human cognitive limits.4 As the 21st century progresses, the Church’s experience and formation should be essential gifts to populations to help them to formulate an approach to controlling rather than being controlled by AI. The Church is called to reflect and to work. In the political and economic spheres where AI is fostered, there is 2 a need to introduce an ethical and spiritual framework. AI is a discipline and a community hungry for evangelization in the 21st century. The Church’s response to this new era has to be one of informing and inspiring the hearts of many thousands of people involved in the creation and formulation of artificial intelligence systems. In the final analysis, it is ethical decisions that determine and frame what problems an AI system should address, how to write code, and how to collect data to feed the machine learning. The code which is written today will be the foundation of future AI systems for years to come. What we identify as the challenge of the evangelization of AI represents a combination of Pope Francis’ emphasis on the importance of seeing the world from the periphery and the experience of 16th century Jesuits whose pragmatic approach to influencing the influential could be reworded today as sharing discernment with data scientists. What is artificial intelligence? The definition and dream of AI has been with us for over sixty years. It is the ability of a computer, or a computer- 4.Cf. A. Spadaro - T. Banchoff, “Artificial intelligence and the human person. Chinese and Western perspectives” in Civ. Catt. En. July, 2019. https:// www.laciviltacattolica.com/artificial-intelligence-and-the-human-person- chinese-and-western-perspectives ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE controlled robot, to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings, such as reasoning, discovering meanings, generalizing or learning from past experiences. AI’s long development is the evolution of thinking about how machines can learn, accompanied by a recent radical improvement in computing capacity. The first idea was AI, then followed machine learning, and more recently we have neural networks and deep learning. Basic Machine Learning is the first level of AI. It provides for the traditional input of data into handwritten software with a specific set of instructions to carry out a particular task. In other words, it employs algorithms to sort large amounts of data, builds a mathematical model from this data; and then makes determinations or predictions about certain tasks without 3 specific instructions. The result is still a specific task – so it is called “Narrow AI” – but the task is mostly performed better than humans can. Examples of Narrow AI include activities such as image classification or face recognition. Neural networks are a set of algorithms, modeled broadly after the human brain, that process data through discrete layers and connections to recognize patterns and provide predictive analytics. Deep learning is where vast numbers of neural networks are connected together, and trained with huge amounts of data so that it can automatically learn representations from data without human input. Benefits Silently but quickly, AI is reshaping our entire economy and society: how we vote and how government governs, predictive policing, how judges pass sentences, how we access financial services and our credit scores, the products and services we purchase, our housing, the media we consume, the news we read, automatic translations of texts and speech. AI increasingly designs and helps drive and navigate our cars, determines how we get a loan to buy our cars, decides which roads should be repaired, identifies if we have broken the road rules and even determines whether we should be imprisoned if we have.