The Archbishop of Canterbury has joined Pope Leo XIV in calling for AI to be the servant of humanity rather than its replacement.
Speaking in the House of Lords, Sarah Mullally, described AI as “a remarkable product of human creativity” that has opened up tremendous opportunities in many fields of life.
However, she also warned that the exponential rate of technological change could be proceeding faster than humanity’s moral, spiritual and philosophical capacity to handle it.
AI, she said, should not “diminish” our humanity. She also cited Pope Leo, who in a recent encyclical on the issue, said that “humanity – in all its grandeur and woundedness, must never be replaced or surpassed”.
In his encyclical, the Pope warned about the use of AI for military purposes: “AI does not remove the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict; indeed, it can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal, lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defence into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data. In this way, it will accustom us to the idea that violence is inevitable and needs only to be optimized.”
In an apparent callback to her nursing days, Mullally said that AI was already helping to make childbirth safer, but also said that AI could never stand in for a human nurse giving difficult news to a patient or providing the benefits of eye contact, touch and emotional intelligence.
The Archbishop also questioned the role that AI is having on human relationships, with many people turning to chatbots in times of loneliness. More concerning, she said, was evidence that some chatbots are being used to roleplay incest, child sexual abuse and rape, which Mullally warned risks “the normalisation and the legitimisation of such abuse”.
Concluding her speech, Mullally said all of society needed to be involved in determining the place AI holds within it.
“Technology this revolutionary must not simply be unleashed on our societies: it must be developed with us and for us - at a human pace, with human objectives," she said.
"Above all, we must put people - our common, glorious humanity - ahead of profit, convenience or technological progress at all costs.
"To ensure that we harness AI to serve humanity, to be an extraordinary tool in the creation of a more just, abundant and hope-filled world.”
