The Future of Humanity

Vol. XXVI 2018 N.1 of the Dicastery's journal has its focus on the Future of Humanity.

This edition contains the Acts of the Council’s November 2017 Plenary Assembly that aimed to open a dialogue about the future of humanity following recent developments in the fields of genetics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, inter alia.

These developments have the potential to radically transform many aspects of human life and they oblige us to think again about how we understand human health and wellbeing, both physical and psychological; about our comprehension of human responsibility and free will and the interplay with determinism; and about the emergence of machines with potential for types of intelligence, language capacities and reasoning powers that we would previously have considered as being exclusive to human beings.

They call not only for moral evaluation but, more radically, also require us to re-examine the anthropological and ethical categories that traditionally have been employed to make such value judgements. It is this enquiry that lay at the heart of the Plenary whose acts are presented here.

See the index and note the original languages.

Other sections of the review look at the Courtyard of the Gentiles, the activities of the Sports Department and the world of Music.