Artificial intelligence raises profound moral questions — for all of humanity to answer
Artificial intelligence raises profound moral questions — for all of humanity to answer
Publish Date: 2026-06-16 13:21:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
Will you be flagged at the border? Will your mortgage application be approved? During wartime, whose neighbourhood would a weapon system target? These are moral choices — about harm and fairness — and they used to be made by people.
Now moral choices like these are made by artificial intelligence (AI) and by the companies developing it. Not government, not the public, but corporations.
Chris Olah, co-founder of the AI company Anthropic and a self-described atheist, recently sat beside Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican and said his own industry cannot be trusted to govern itself. “Some might believe that matters of AI are best handled by computer scientists like myself,” he said. “They are mistaken.”
Olah was echoing the Pope’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, which warns that AI must serve humanity rather than concentrate power.
Anthropic co‑founder Christopher Olah speaks at the launch of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.
It is clear that AI needs an independent regulator with the power to say no in the same way that authorities can refuse a new drug or block a nuclear reactor. Ordinary people, not just technical experts, need to set the moral standards this regulator enforces.
Morality at speed
Developers are not necessarily careless or cynical. Our research shows many AI developers deeply question the moral aspects of their work while acknowledging the pressures that can make these concerns more peripheral.
It is hard to hold a moral line inside a company built to move fast.
As digital technology researchers, we have a name for the staff hired to manage this tension: “ethics owners.” These are the people tasked with responding to outside criticism while remaining wholly inside the company that provokes it.
Scholars of technology ethics…
