The Question of AI During the Papacy of Pope Francis: A Philosophical and Theological Analysis

The papacy of Pope Francis, like other previous papacies, addressed several contemporary global issues, of which the questions of climate change, global poverty, war, and artificial intelligence (AI) were given recurrent emphasis. There were four elaborate documents dedicated to the question of AI design and development with respect to their ethical, philosophical, theological, and socio-political implications. The aim of this study is to philosophically analyze the philosophical and theological intuitions that underpin the urgency and the cogency that inform the pontification over the subject matter, AI. Additionally, it aims to examine the exhaustiveness and cohesiveness of the scientific and technological epistemological foundations that ground the argumentations of the documents and theoretical unification that underpins Pope Francis’s ecclesiology of AI. This will help to evaluate its contribution to the ongoing discourse on AI ethics and governance and expound the humanistic imagination on the reality of the co-existence of humans and AI as cognitive systems.