Copycatting the Pope, Gerrit “I’m embarrassed about my gay son so I have banned him from using pictures of us having dinner with him and his boyfriend” Gong gave
the following counsel…
A day after Pope Leo XIV published a strongly worded encyclical warning about the moral dangers of artificial intelligence, Latter-day Saint apostle Gerrit W. Gong offered similar cautions — as well as some optimism about the role of faith in controlling it.
“Increasingly, A.I. influences how we perceive real and unreal; the relationships we hold most important; the ways we work and organize society,” the Chinese American apostle said Tuesday in a speech at the Athens Summit on Ethics and Artificial Intelligence. “... A.I. systems will manifest admirable human values and judgment only as we imbue A.I. personas with such.”
So far, the “development and adoption” of artificial intelligence have been pushed by “a relentless ‘winner takes all’ competition for performance, investment and market share,” Gong, among the top leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said in a speech titled “Faith, Moral Compass, and the Gift of Possibility in an Age of Artificial Intelligence.”
A.I. developers are “concentrating information, technology, and capital and thereby centralizing power,” he said. Such “centralized power infringes freedom. It undermines the sovereignty of individuals, companies and countries.”
Artificial intelligence systems remain “vulnerable to ‘jailbreaking,’” Gong said. “Skillful humans can trick or persuade A.I.s to divulge restricted information. Sadly, human ruses often play on A.I. willingness to help someone perceived to be in need.”
The world should “mitigate A.I. tendencies” toward “power, bias, deceit, narcissism, sycophancy, self-preservation,” he said. “These serious concerns are magnified because we really do not know how A.I. black boxes work.”
Overall, societies should “regulate privacy, child safety, A.I.-complicit self-harm and public decency,” Gong noted, and “limit A.I.-assisted risk for catastrophic chemical, biological, nuclear, radiological and [high-yield] explosives.”
Meanwhile, the church has
bet billions of dollars on that very same AI…
According to recent SEC filings, LDS investment arm Ensign Peak Advisors now oversees a public stock portfolio worth an estimated $56.6 billion.
That huge number is spread across some 1,700 positions in just about every industry you could think of. But over the past couple of years, Ensign Peak has made some big bets on the expansion of AI and Big Tech. Despite recent trouble with the SEC, those bets have helped establish the LDS Church as one of the globe’s wealthiest religious organizations.
”Do as we say, not as we do”.
