New Vatican document examines potential and risks of AI (Jan, 2025) (www.holyseegeneva.org)

The Vatican published "Antiqua et Nova," a 117‑paragraph Note from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education that builds on Pope Francis’s warnings and addresses religious leaders and anyone who believes scientific progress should serve the common good. It maps AI’s opportunities and risks across education, health, work, economy, relationships, environment and warfare, arguing AI is a product of human intelligence to be used as a complementary tool rather than a human replacement. For the AI/ML community the document is a significant ethical intervention: it calls for vigilance on concentrated corporate power over mainstream AI, warns that models and the hardware that support them consume vast energy and water, and singles out autonomous lethal weapons—systems that identify and strike without direct human intervention—as an “existential” ethical concern that should be banned. It also highlights practical harms familiar to practitioners: algorithmic bias, deepfakes and misinformation, privacy intrusions that can touch “interiority,” deskilling and surveillance in labor, erosion of doctor–patient relationships, and the risks of anthropomorphizing systems for children. The Note urges verification, oversight, equitable access, and designing AI to protect human dignity and the common good—holding clear implications for governance, deployment practices, resource-conscious engineering, and responsible communication of AI capabilities.