The Pontiff released a 42,300-word document outlining the dangers (and benefits) of AI. Pope Leo XIV has taken a stronger stand against AI. On Monday, Leo released his first papal encyclical -- an almost 400-year-old tradition in which the Catholic Church shares its perspective on an issue. In this case, over about 42,300 words (in the English version), the Pope warned of the misconception of equating this type of'intelligence' with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence.

Stories about artificial intelligence have been with us for decades, even centuries. In some, the robots serve humanity as cheerful helpers or soulful lovers. In others, the machines eclipse their human makers and try to wipe us out. "The Creator," a sci-fi film that hits theaters Friday, turns that narrative around: The United States is intent on wiping out a society of androids in Asia, afraid the artificially intelligent beings threaten human survival. Do any of these stories reflect our real-life future?

Joi Ito, director of MIT's Media Lab thinks the term "AI" is tainted by the assumption that humans and machines should be in opposition.

The suspended Google software engineer at the center of claims that the search engine's artificial intelligence language tool LaMDA is sentient has said the technology is "intensely worried that people are going to be afraid of it and wants nothing more than to learn how to best serve humanity". The new claim by Blake Lemoine was made in an interview published on Monday amid intense pushback from AI experts that artificial learning technology is anywhere close to meeting an ability to perceive or feel things. The Canadian language development theorist Steven Pinker described Lemoine's claims as a "ball of confusion". "One of Google's (former) ethics experts doesn't understand the difference between sentience (AKA subjectivity, experience), intelligence, and self-knowledge. The scientist and author Gary Marcus said Lemoine's claims were "Nonsense". "Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.

From the very earliest times in recorded human history, new technologies have been used for both positive and negative reasons. Scientists such as Robert Oppenheimer, whose work ultimately led to the development of nuclear weapons, have been only too aware of how technology can be harnessed by society in ways that raise ethical challenges. Our experience with computers is no different. New technologies have made life easier in many ways, yet we can see that when controls are lacking it can lead to unforeseen societal outcomes. We are now on the threshold of a new computer technology era more powerful than anything that preceded it: the age of quantum computing.

Google.org is today releasing a report that details how social impact startups, nonprofits, government policymakers, and academics can use machine learning to address some of humanity's biggest problems. The assessment is the result of analysis of more than 2,600 applications -- from 119 countries -- to the $25 million Google AI Impact Challenge, a global open call for projects that aim to use AI to serve humanity. Google used AI to arrive at its conclusions about how human-centered organizations can better use AI -- tapping natural language processing and clustering analysis techniques to review applications and internal assessment of applications. The AI analysis was supplemented by interviews with impact challenge applicants and recipients. Today's assessment of how civil society can improve AI implementations appears to be the first such report from a tech giant.

And yet the field finds itself in a precarious position. Issues of bias, civil rights, workforce displacement, and even the power and perception of Silicon Valley's largest tech firms–all on display in Facebook's recent public scolding in Washington–threaten AI's ability to thrive. Without steps to solve for these issues, the budding field could spend years held back from its transformative potential, functioning as a mere business efficiency tool instead of a catalyst in solving some of the world's most intractable problems. Here are five steps we can take now to ensure AI achieves the heights it should, and serves humanity in the process. Machines are already driving trucks, flipping burgers, and beating world chess champions.

For as long as labor has existed, there has been a fear that technology will kill jobs. Scribes were pissed at the printing press. Lumberjacks and weavers thought life was over after the creation of mechanical axes and looms. Yet, life and labor have gone on. Not only has life continued, it's thrived.

Earlier this week, striding across the stage at Apple's annual developer conference in front of a crowd of thousands at the San Jose Convention Center, Tim Cook was animated and gushing, an evangelist for a series of new products and features. Among them: the HomePod smart speaker (see "Apple Is Countering Amazon and Google with a Siri-Enabled Speaker") and new ways developers can build artificial intelligence into apps. By Thursday morning, the Apple CEO was on the other coast, sitting on a gray couch next to a yellow emoji pillow (a happy face) at the MIT Media Lab's Affective Computing Group listening to Rosalind Picard talk about depression. Cook, who will give this year's MIT commencement address, is spending the day before learning more about research on campus, much of it involving sensors and AI. Picard, an expert in using wearable devices and phone data to measure human emotions, is researching how data pulled from cell phones might help identify and perhaps even predict depression, a problem expected to be the second leading cause of disability in the world by 2020.