PopeFrancis

Quora Answer : Why is it that Pope Francis is urging followers to pray that AI and robots "always serve mankind"?

Nov 13

Pope Francis's job is to be spiritual leader to a major religious group.

As such he should be telling them about the real world and its issues. And giving them guidance.

While I agree with Paul Brocklehurst that prayer won't make a blind bit of difference. That is basically the parameters of the job of being Pope. So I'm not going to complain about that.

Within those slightly bizarre parameters, Francis is a pretty cool Pope. Who pays attention to what's going on in the world, cares about people, and cares about giving good advice to the people who follow him.

So ... he's

• a) aware that AI is massively coming thing in the world,
• b) he's aware that it can be a force for good or for evil,
• c) he's telling people to make it a force for good rather than evil.

All of those are messages that I can get behind. And I think it's great that a 70+ something year old religious leader is so clued in that he's thinking about and talking about this stuff.

Yeah, I'm with Paul that praying isn't going to do any good. But there's no point complaining that the Pope's a Catholic. That's a given.

But Francis is saying this because he pays attention and he cares. Which is great.