Italian president warns new technologies risk jeopardizing human centrality

Italian President Sergio Mattarella warned on Monday that new technologies could jeopardize the centrality of human beings in a letter to Pope Leo for his birthday.

"New technologies are opening up unprecedented possibilities, but they also risk jeopardizing the centrality of the human being, widening existing social and economic disparities," Mattarella said, according to the ANSA news agency.

He recalled that the world is going through a "complex and troubled historical period."

"The threat, if not the use, of force is once again prevailing, while contempt for rules, growing inequalities and the multiple harmful consequences of climate change are causing suffering for many innocent people," Mattarella noted.

He said people of good will around the world look up to Pope Leo’s teachings, "which continues to call peoples and nations to responsibility, to the acceptance of human limits and fragility, ‘without considering them an error to be corrected' as the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas warns.”