Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, opened the first meeting of a series of conferences dedicated to the special “Pope Francis” Chair, and organized by the Vatican School of “Library Science,” reported “Vatican News” in Italian on November 6, 2018.
“To maintain, enhance and transmit” are some of the tasks of the Library, which must be “the expression of a Church that goes forth,” affirmed Cardinal Parolin on opening the meeting.
The meeting, which is the first of a series of six, focused on the theme: “Digital Innovation and Artificial Intelligence: Ethical Challenges.”
“Only an active memory of our past can enable us to address the reality of the present and the problems of the future,” stressed the Cardinal. It looks like “a dive backward and on the other hand, it’s a forward dive,” he said in the promotion of a “culture in dialogue with technology.”
In the course of the meeting, in the presence, among others, of the Prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library, Monsignor Cesare Pasini, and of the Holy See’s librarian and archivist, Monsignor Jose Tolentino Calaca de Mendonca, scholarships were awarded to two students.
Reflecting on the theme of the first meeting, Franciscan Professor Paolo Benanti of the Pontifical Gregorian University said that the “veritable novelty is not so much the technological evolution but its diffusion,” a global propagation that shapes a generation of individuals immersed in the digital.” It’s about “diffusive and omnipresent systems that risk influencing social relations.” The algorithms “produce important changes in societies” and also trace “a worrying scenario for national security,” explained the Franciscan.
Translation by Virginia M. Forrester
