A selection of articles, op-eds, TV segments, and other media featuring Ethics Center staff and programs.
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“Moral formation has been a topic that religions have been talking about for thousands of years,” says Brian Green, director, technology ethics. “What insights can they give us that we can use to hopefully produce a model which will be better at doing what we want it to do, which is to be good and not do bad things?”
Brian Green, director, technology ethics, quoted by Scientific American.
When Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On the Protection of Human Dignity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” released last Monday, five Santa Clara University scholars, including several ethicists and faculty scholars from the Markklua Center for Applied Ethics, went straight to work reading, annotating, discussing, and debating the 42,000+ word document.
And then they held a public panel to share their findings with the SCU campus community.
Brian Green, director, technology ethics, says, “Right now, everyone’s not just talking about artificial intelligence. It’s artificial general intelligence, which is going to be as good as a human being. So what are the rest of us to do? Well, we get replaced. And what the Pope is saying is that that isn’t the future we’re aiming for. We’re not looking to replace people. We’re looking to have technology help us do things that are going to make a better future together.”
Ann Skeet, Ethics Center senior director of leadership ethics, shared, “The business community is offering up a vision of AI that a lot of people can’t relate to or don’t really want. And so here comes Pope Leo offering a much more palatable vision—one that puts us, the human, at the center of it.”
Brian Green, director of technology ethics, and Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics, quoted by Santa Clara News.
President Trump’s Truth Social platform announced last year that it was partnering with Crypto.com to bring prediction markets to the social media site.
“A president using the public power of the office to shape a regulatory outcome that directly benefits his son’s financial interests is, at minimum, a profound conflict-of-interest concern,” Davina Hurt, director of government ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said in a statement to The Hill.
“That is not a political attack — it is simply a description of the structure, the ethical risk, and why stronger guardrails matter.” said Hurt.
Davina Hurt, director, government ethics, quoted by The Hill.
In his Encyclical released this week, Pope Leo calls for more regulation and safeguards to protect humanity from the negative impacts of artificial intelligence.
Brian Green, Ethics Center director of technology ethics, says the encyclical aims at asking, "What is AI doing to us as human beings? Are we using AI for the right purposes?"
Green says the Pope has given a lot of people hope for something maybe perhaps happening when it comes to AI.
"There are ethical values that are more important than money."
Brian Green, director, technology ethics, interviewed by KQED.
Pope Leo XIV in his first encyclical, took aim at big tech. The Pope warns that artificial intelligence poses impact to inequality, democracy, and what it means to be human.
"This is a landmark opportunity for the world to look at a new technology and really think about what it is for," said Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
Brian Green, director, technology ethics, quoted by NPR.
The New York Times reports the Pope's document marks a powerful statement regarding the debate about the misuse or overuse of artificial intelligence.
Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics said some technology leaders “will have to take it seriously in a sense,” partly because it provides them with “a moral imperative” even as it recognized their autonomy.
The church, he said, “does not claim to supplant the responsibilities of politics or institutions, but offers itself as a foundation,” urging other institutions to “recognize and promote whatever serves the dignity of persons, the vitality of communities and the common good.”
Brian Green, director, technology ethics, quoted by The New York Times.
Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical on AI, set to be released May 25, will be released with Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic at his side.
According to Brian Green, director, technology ethics, in previous meetings between religious representatives and Anthropic, the Anthropic staff Green said, “became curious as to whether wisdom traditions such as Catholic ethics, Christian ethics or religious ethics more broadly might have some insights that could help them to think about how to develop their AI model Claude into acting better and maintaining its reliably ethical way of behavior.”
Brian Green, director, technology ethics, quoted by Religion News Service.
Christopher Olah, Co-founder of leading AI lab Anthropic joined the presentation of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"). The visit represents the latest in outreach to religious leaders for Olah.
"Of all the people in the world who work on AI that they could have chosen from industry, he's probably the right person," said Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics.
"It shows that the church is willing to talk to people across great divides of understandings of how AI should work in the world, ultimately bringing people together so they can talk about these sorts of things."
Brian Green, director, technology ethics, quoted by National Catholic Reporter.
