U.S. bishops echo Pope Leo’s concern of AI use in war

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) International Justice and Peace Committee released a statement reiterating the Holy Father’s call in Magnifica Humanitas to limit the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in war.

“In the age of artificial intelligence, the Church’s teaching on human dignity, pursuit of justice, and comprehensive social doctrine offers a path forward that transcends the logic of zero-sum escalation,” the bishops wrote in the statement.

The bishops said: “Pope Leo offers a new framework for an approach to how we must limit the use of technology in war.”

The pope insists that even in the age of AI the world must preserve strict limits on the use of force, keeping lethal decisions under accountable human authority with a clear chain of responsibility, never delegating killing to automated systems, and working together as a global community to build a shared framework that restrains the arms race and protects civilians and essential infrastructure, the bishops said.

‘Human control’ must remain present

The bishops urged that “judgments over life and death, the gravest of human challenges, must remain bound to our living consciences.”

In the age of AI, “by removing human agency, our ability to wage war has become more inhumane in its most fundamental sense,” the bishops wrote.

As the use of AI technologies in war increases, there is an “immense harm and loss of human life these weapons present,” they said.

The bishops specifically noted that lethal autonomous weapons systems are “a grave development of military technology,” which use AI to “identify, locate, and kill people or destroy infrastructure targets without human operational intervention.”

Unlike drones that are remotely controlled by humans, “autonomous ‘killer bots’ are preprogrammed with algorithms that search according to target profiles, and can, theoretically, make battlefield decisions independently from human control,” they said.

The bishops noted that use of AI technologies with the hope of “minimizing the risk to military personnel is a laudable goal.” But, employing them with no human agency “can create the illusion of lessening the cost of war, and thus reducing the conflict threshold.”

By creating the illusion that war is “less costly,” the bishops said it will make decisions to go to war “easier.”

“All people, soldiers, civilians, and leaders alike are harmed by a reality in which our actions are inherently less human, less connected to the embodiment of our human dignity that God himself ‘knit’ together,” the bishops said.