More than 200 leading academics, Nobel laureates and such today ended three days of deliberations over Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas and its calling of “humanity toward an ‘unarmed and disarming peace.” They signed a declaration entitled the “Rome Declaration on an Unarmed and Disarming Peace in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear and Autonomous Weapons, New Digital Protocols, and Emerging Models of Digital Development.”
The deliberations made clear that mankind must rule the technological advances that it makes. It called upon “governments, corporations, and international organizations to enable coordinated slowdown of frontier AI development. We call for urgent, sustained, and good-faith negotiations leading, within an agreed and time-bound framework, to the verifiable and irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons... We must disarm the next arms race, both AI and nuclear, before they define the next century as well.”
At today’s session, the Vicar General of Rome, Cardinal Baldo Reina, said of the Rome Declaration: “It comes at a time marked by rapid transformation and profound risks: artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, geopolitical instability, the crisis of multilateralism, and the temptation to entrust security to fear, deterrence, and mutual threats.” He emphasized that we stand at a “pivotal moment” in history. “Scientific and technological progress offers extraordinary opportunities for healthcare, education, public health, environmental protection, the fight against poverty, and the building of peace. Yet the same progress, if detached from ethics, responsibility, and respect for the dignity of the human person, can become an instrument of domination, exclusion, and even destruction.”
He added: “The Declaration presented today reminds us with great clarity that no machine, no algorithm, and no autonomous system can be placed at the center of decisions upon which the survival of humanity depends.” Rather, “decisions concerning life and death, peace and war, and the future of peoples and generations yet to come must remain under full, responsible, and meaningful human control.”
