COMECE contributed to the public consultation on Digital Ethics launched by the European Data Protection Supervisor in order to understand how new technologies are shaping our life and which elements are needed to regulate new technological developments.
AI robot tutor helping a student with homework, they are sitting on the couch. (Photo: Stock-Asso/Shuttertock)
Engaged to the social teaching of the Church, in its contribution COMECE underlined the unlimited equal value of each human life and pointed out the need for a rights-based and person-centered approach in the context of facing the challenges of digital technologies.
The contribution touched five different fields: Robotisation of life, Future of work, Civil law rules on Robotics, General Data Protection Regulation, and EU Defense.
Robotisation of life
Promoting a person-centered ethical approach, COMECE stressed that the principle of human responsibility must always accompany the eventual recourse to machines. Human intervention, submitted to the principles and mechanisms of the rule of law, is essential.
Future of work
COMECE is monitoring intensively the changes of digitalisation and robotisation on the labour market: increasing polarisation of the labour market, vanishing of job security for young people and new risks for balancing family/social and work life.
Civil laws on robotics
A key starting point: ethics should be still and exclusively referred to the human person and not directly to robots, which should always remain objects under the responsibility of human persons.
General Data Protection Regulation
A rigorous application of the General Data Protection Regulation is necessary for the area of robotics and artificial intelligence, with particular reference to the principles of Art. 5 GDPR and with the provisions on consent of the data subject.
EU Defense
The development of new defense technologies should go together with the elaboration of a common ethical and anthropological framework and be strictly bounded to the respect for the rule of law and fundamental human rights.
Rooted in the principles of the Catholic social teaching (personality, solidarity, subsidiarity and common good), the COMECE contribution states the fundamental and equal value of all people, who must be recognised in the context of the new technological developments of the modern digital society.