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An Upcoming Series of Webinars about AI and "Magnifica Humanitas"

This image shows a pixelated room, it looks like a typical bedroom or office. Most of it is heavily pixelated, but a shelf, table and plant, windows and clock can be recognised. These are all outlined in yellow boxes.

This image shows a pixelated room, it looks like a typical bedroom or office. Most of it is heavily pixelated, but a shelf, table and plant, windows and clock can be recognised. These are all outlined in yellow boxes.

Register and Join Us for a Series of Four Webinars

Irina Raicu

Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program (@IEthics) at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are her own.

"Teaching new generations that technological evolution does not follow a predetermined path, but can be guided by personal and collective responsibility, constitutes one of the most valuable services to the common good.” – Magnifica Humanitas #238

In May, the Vatican released an encyclical titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” which addresses the promises and challenges that have accompanied the integration of artificial intelligence into various aspects of many people’s lives. You can read the encyclical, or listen to an audio version of it.

Over the next four weeks, in 4 webinars, ethics center staff and other Santa Clara University faculty members will highlight the encyclical’s comments on several key topics: AI and education, AI and labor, AI and consciousness, and disarming AI. You can now register and join us for any or all of the webinars.

The discussions will be recorded, and we will post the recordings on the Markkula Center website as soon as possible.

For a broad introduction to the encyclical, you can read a summary of a prior multidisciplinary panel discussion held at Santa Clara University in May, or view a summary reel from the event.

We look forward to a series of interesting conversations! 

(Note: the Ethics and Society team at AI-hosting platform HuggingFace have also published an annotated version which links the encyclical to various relevant research and media resources: see https://huggingface.co/spaces/society-ethics/annotated-encyclical.)

Image: Elise Racine / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Jul 10, 2026
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