Pope Francis, in the first appearance by a pontiff at a G7 summit, used his moral authority on Friday to warn presidents and prime ministers that unregulated artificial intelligence, not just war and climate change, pose a great threat to fair, secure and equal societies.

In a long speech delivered on the second day of the summit about leading industrialized countries online dispensary in southern Italy, Francis argued that AI was a tool that lacked human values of mercy, morality, compassion, and forgiveness. He called for the “ethical moderation of algorithms and artificial intelligence programs,” to prevent injustices and dangers such as AI-powered weapons deciding who to kill.

“Indeed, we must remember that no innovation is neutral,” he said. “In order for them to be instruments for building up the good and a better tomorrow, they must always be aimed at the good of every human being. They must have an ethical inspiration.”

The G7′s host, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, invited the Pope to the summit. While she was probably playing to her broadly Catholic voter base, which propelled her Brothers of Italy party to victory in last week’s European Union elections, she has also made AI one of the signature themes of her two-year premiership. She has expressed concern about the economic and social consequences of AI, including job losses in a country with traditionally high youth unemployment.

Francis’s appearance at the G7 reinforces his image as a distinctly unconventional pont weed iff, one who is happy to use unusual events to broaden his influence among Catholics and non-Catholics.

On Friday morning, before he travelled to the G7 by helicopter from Rome, Francis met more than 100 comedians at the Vatican, where he said th buy weed online canada at laughing at God “is not blasphemy” and that humour is a gift “in the midst of so much gloomy news.” The majority of the comedians were Italian, but a few high-profile foreigners, including Chris Rock, Jimmy Fallon and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, were on the invitation list.

While popes have been invited to G7s and G20s in the past, all of th online dispensary em have declined to attend. The Vatican’s implicit argument was that no pope needs a summit to reach a global audience, since the Church has some 1.2 billion Catholic members and every pope has been followed closely by the media. A few, like Poland’s John Paul II, became global superstars.

Francis entered the G7′s round table session on Frid online dispensary ay in a wheelchair and greeted the G7 leaders and their guests, including Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and Brazilian President Lula da Silva.

The Pope embraced the new Argentine President, Javier Milei, who is known as libertarian, free-market economist. The two native Argentinians have sharply divergent views on how to eradicate poverty, which has reached crisis levels in Argentina. Mr. Milei once described Francis as an “imbecile” who “promotes communism,” though the two seem to have repaired their divisions, at least publicly.

“Artificial intelligence is a fascinating tool, but a terrifying one,” Francis said at the start of his talk, adding later that, “no machine should ever decide whether to take the life away from a human.”

John Kirton, director of the University of Toronto’s G7 Research Group and a veteran of dozens of G7 and G20 summits, said the Pope’s presence added a new dimension to the Italian summit. “This summit needs a powerful message to put ethics first and that can only come from the Pope,” he said. “I cannot remember any G7 leader at a summit who has said that they must always put ethics first in all they do.”

The Pope did not make concrete recommendations on how to ensure AI is not misused, and made no mention of the organizations set up to do this, among them Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, an initiative launched by Canada and France at the 2018 G7 summit. Nor did he make a plea for G7 leaders to fund ethical standards for AI.

“The Pope could have argued for funds to research AI safety to prevent AI from being used in harmful ways,” said Jess Rapson, a Canadian machine-learning engineer who was attending the G7.

Francis was to have one-one-one meetings with the G7 leaders and their guests after the round table talk. He was expected to raise the issue of climate change, another high-profile theme of his. Francis has called Earth “our garden home” and has called its destruction “an offence against God” and a “structural sin” that endangers humanity.

Preventing potentially catastrophic global warming seems to have dropped off the priority list at the Italian G7 summit, though it will probably be mentioned in the final communiqué, to be released Friday evening. Environmental groups at the summit said they do not expect the G7 to build on the momentum of last year’s climate conference, COP28, where most countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels.