From Signal magazine: How the Vatican is thinking about AI in a changing world

1. The chance to push philanthropy further "Our mission and style of tackling problems [at the Trevor Noah Foundation] have definitely changed over the years. We have learned that the things that we thought learners and teachers would want did not necessarily line up with what they actually needed. We wanted to give people, say, fancy tech labs and many of them were just saying 'We actually need gates that lock' or 'We need a fence so that wild animals can't come in'. So we've gotten a lot better at listening to the needs of the community.

We've just launched an innovators' fund, finding people with innovative ideas in and around Africa, and then helping fund those ideas and projects to assist with everyday problems. We're particularly interested in ideas around education, development and construction, anything that overlaps in the Venn diagram of improving infrastructure and communities.

In terms of long-term goals, we try to pilot programs and pass along those that show success to the government [to develop further], because we can't scale like a government can. We want to create programs and ideas that last long after we've left a community or enable them to do things beyond us. We ask, how do they make more money? How do they create new opportunities? How do they create entire ecosystems? The people that will have fascinating ideas on how to change the community are from the community itself."

2. A revolution in healthcare "There's a lot of focus on AI but, for me, we speak about it a little too broadly. There's one side of AI that's all speculation, and then there are others where we've already struck gold, and I don't think we're spending enough time in those departments. Healthcare is one of them. I went to Johns Hopkins University and saw how they've been able to improve the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer in patients through large language models which are looking through scans and predicting whether or not somebody's going to have breast cancer, sometimes five years sooner than a doctor would. That is also decreasing how many women have to have biopsies unnecessarily. It's not just the missed positives [that are being addressed]; it's all the false positives or the possible positives that lead to negative outcomes in people's health.

There's another AI program where doctors can dictate their notes and have them written up automatically. So much of the work that's in healthcare right now, especially in the US, is just in administration and it's not helping anybody, it's just everyone covering their butts and making sure that everything is done in triplicate. If we get systems that take care of it, that improves lives here and now.

3. A return to context "People are starting to remember the value of context. If I'm in a room with people, the context is maintained and the veracity of what we're speaking about is really held securely. It's very hard for people to lose context. So, when I'm online, I've tried to pivot a little more to long-form as the context is more important than ever before. There was once a mad dash to have everything be as short as possible; our record was six seconds when it was [defunct social media app] Vine, but now for myself and for many people, there's a new direction. We're saying, 'Let's stretch this out, let's have a longer conversation, let's have something that breathes so that as much context is maintained as possible.'"

4. A rethink in education "Education is another one of those areas where there's an opportunity because there is no place I've been where there are enough teachers for the learners. There is no world I've seen in which every student has an equal opportunity to as much education as they need. I think that the place that AI is already at, especially in a closed system, can provide infinite resources with an LLM that's trained on all the textbooks and all the information that the kids and teachers need contained within it: lesson plans, marking, student-specific instruction, guidance.

I don't see a downside, because education has been stagnant for such a long time and so many learners are coming out of school lacking the skills and the tools that they need in the modern world and teachers have borne the brunt of this. They're up against it. They're at school trying to teach, and they're going home and then marking papers until midnight. Then, they've got to come in and do it all again. So, AI in education is a massive opportunity, and the risk is contained because you're doing it within one sphere and always under the supervision of a teacher. It has a wonderful amplifying potential that we sorely need in education all over the world."

5. Increased understanding of AI "I think people should learn as much as they can about the tech, and not just by reading but by doing. I've enjoyed building my own agents and would suggest everyone gives it a try. I'm actually shocked at how many CEOs I speak to who are shaping their entire companies in and around AI, and then when I ask them if they've used it personally, the answer is no. Maybe some of them have done a cursory search using one of the LLMs, but none of them have actually dug into it. And I always say to them, 'If you don't take the time to try to understand this thing, how can you shape your organization around it?'

Building agents has helped me understand that an LLM has its limitations. It is fantastic at processing insane amounts of data, but it really is limited when it comes to its multimodal inputs and outputs. That's where humans still have a really interesting edge over technology, in that we're good at collecting inconsistent, dirty information across different spheres and somehow making it make sense. Our organizations aren't as clean as we'd like to believe in terms of information flowing from one side to another and neither is the world. And in the same way that self-driving cars have shown how difficult it actually is to drive, we take for granted how easily we transfer information and make use of it in the world."

6. An evolving job market "There are a lot of AI evangelists who would have us believe that every job is going and everything will be taken over. From everything I've seen this isn't the case - all AI has really done is promote us to being managers of our own work. Everyone still has to supervise the work. So, your legal AI is only as good as the lawyer who knows how to supervise it and understand whether or not the cases it's citing are actually real. Your coding AI is only as good as the software engineer who looks at it and can say, 'This is good code'. Because, at the end of the day, the output is meant for humans, and so humans are still going to have to judge it in some way, shape or form. So, I do think there'll be an evolution, definitely, of how people work and what they do. But I don't think we're at this critical point that a lot of people are talking about with AI. I think right now the tool is more interesting than this omnipresent, all-knowing work machine [that some present it as being]."

7. An opportunity for inclusion "A lot of people in very powerful positions underestimate how much knowledge and information is stored in the people they are trying to help. That's the shift that we need to see in how we think we can change the world. If we can shift the way we think about solutions - whether it's in policy, philanthropy or technology - from top-down to bottom-up, we can find ourselves making massive leaps forward. No matter what it is we're building, it's important to remember that the answers can often lie with the people, the communities, the countries, the places where the problem actually lies. Just because the problem is there doesn't mean the solution is not there as well. It just means they may not have access to the tools that can help them to solve it."

8. The World Cup "The World Cup is definitely a cause for optimism. It is not a perfect event, but it's something that I don't take for granted. We're living in a world where fewer and fewer things bring people together into the same space to resonate at the same frequency. We now live in a world where we've created an audience of one, where my 'for you' page is totally different to yours. The upside of that is that everyone can enjoy whatever niche they want to be in. The downside is that we're living in different realities, and when people live in different realities, it's a lot harder for them to see their similarities.

That's why something like the World Cup, and any sports event really, is such a powerful tool, a whole group of people coming into one space together to share the same story, the same experience. It brings the whole world together too, in a way that is sorely needed. How often does Haiti get to interact with the United States in a level way? Despite where you've come from and what your fortunes are supposed to be, when that first whistle is blown, anything is possible. It's really the stuff of dreams. So, I'm genuinely excited about the World Cup because I think it's going to bring a lot of people into America, and it's going to bring America to a lot of people in a different way."

This is a digital version of a sample feature from Issue 3 of Signal magazine. To explore the full issue, view the complete flip book here.