Catholic AI advisor calls for transparency in military use

Julianne Hickey, a former chief executive of Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand, spoke with Radio New Zealand’s Kathryn Ryan about Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas last week.

Mrs Hickey, who is an advisor on AI to the Archdiocese of Wellington, was asked about the relevance of the new technology to New Zealand in a military context. She noted the recent Budget announcement of more military spending.

Calling for greater transparency, she said: “We need to know, are there going to be autonomous or AI technologies within there and how are they going to be governed? What is going to be the tikanga, what is going to be the just, the right way of bringing [into it] who we are as Aotearoa New Zealand?

“We made strong moral decisions on nuclear disarmament, and that made a difference to what we said in the global gathering of nations, and we need to have that moral position, and I’m not hearing that or seeing that.”

Asked about how New Zealand might position itself on the issue in the context of defence alliances, Mrs Hickey said “every design choice that we take is a vision of the humanity that we want to hold and have and be, and who we become”.

“Our challenge at the moment is that there are geopolitical forces that are using AI and the race for that AI to determine our language and to determine our thinking,” Mrs Hickey said.

She stressed the need for independent thought and critical thinking on AI, and said the dignity of every human person should come into discussions with defence allies on keeping the world safe and humans thriving.

The discussions should not be “about how we can defend against what often might come across as a data point or an algorithm” without a human face.

Mrs Hickey said the Pope’s encyclical, addressed to all people of good will, speaks of “disarming” AI, and puts humanity at the centre of the conversation.

“As a mother of three daughters, I don’t want a world where algorithms and the logic which is embedded within that either gets used to identify what those potential threats are or is autonomous and decides on that basis,” she said.

Asked if she was comfortable with humans making mistakes in war, Mrs Hickey said the encyclical stated that “we must work for peace, and we must work for peace that comes with justice, and that requires dialogue, it requires understanding”.

Among other topics covered in the Radio New Zealand interview were the lack of regulation of AI, incentives to use it, the neutrality of AI given that it is trained on flawed human data, and the use of AI in Catholic contexts, including the Archdiocese of Wellington.

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The Pope calls for the “disarming” of AI (By Catherine Ryan/Radio New Zealand)