| Honorific Prefix: | The Reverend |
| Honorific Suffix: | TOR |
| Birth Date: | 20 July 1973 |
| Birth Place: | Rome, Italy |
| Occupation: | theologian |
| Known For: | AI advisor to Pope Francis |
Paolo Benanti, TOR (born 20 July 1973) is an Italian Catholic priest, theologian and academic. He is a member of the Third Order Regular of St. Francis. He teaches at the Pontifical Gregorian University and is advisor to Pope Francis on issues of artificial intelligence and technology ethics.[1]
Born in Rome on 20 July 1973, the son of engineer Angelo Benanti and teacher Andreina Albani. In 1986, his family moved to Frascati, a comune in Lazio.
After having matured his vocation, in 1999, he left the university and entered the Third Regular Order of Saint Francis, in the convent of Massa Martana, where he spent the probationary year and the novitiate. On 16 September 2001, he got his Franciscan habit. He was ordained a priest on 23 May 2009. He served as the first councilor general and prosecutor general of the Order for the six-year period 2013–2019.[2] In his baccalaureate studies in theology at the Theological Institute of Assisi (2001-2006), he had as a teacher the moralist Giovanni Cappelli.
At the Pontifical Gregorian University, he obtained his licentiate in 2008 and his doctorate in moral theology in 2012. His doctoral thesis is entitled Italian: The Cyborg. Corpo e corporeità nell'epoca del postumano, (The Cyborg: Body and Corporeality in the Post-Human Era) and won the Bellarmino-Vedovato Award as the best doctoral thesis in public and social ethics in 2012.[3]
In 2013 and 2014, he attended The Intensive Bioethics Course at the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Institute of Ethics of the Georgetown University.
Since 2008, he works as a professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Theological Institute of Assisi, and at the Pontifical College Leoni d'Anagni.[4] In addition to the institutional courses on sexual morality and bioethics, he deals with neuroethics, technology ethics, artificial intelligence, and post-human intelligence.[5] Since 2015, he has tried to apply and develop an ethical framework for artificial intelligences by developing the concepts of algorithm and algocracy.[6] Since 2020, in collaboration with Sebastiano Maffettone, a political philosopher, he has explored the vital, relational, social and communicative, labor and economic dimension, seen as the result of an interaction, with complex ethical implications, between the resources offered by the virtual and interactive reality and social and individual existence. This path leads him to the recognition of the creation of a hybrid reality, between utopia and dystopia, which takes the name of paraferno. These concepts are studied in depth through a series of editorials jointly signed between the two authors published in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.[7]
In 2018, Vincenzo Paglia named him a corresponding member of the Pontifical Academy for Life with a particular mandate for the world of artificial intelligence.[8]
In February 2019, he was appointed Provincial Minister of the Religious Province of Saint Francis of Assisi of the Third Regular Order of Saint Francis after an assembly convened in Assisi.[9]
On 4 November 2019, Pope Francis appointed him Councilor of the Apostolic Penitentiary (the oldest dicastery of the Curia and the first of the tribunals of the Roman Curia. On 11 November 2019, the Pontiff appointed him Consultant of the Pontifical Council for Culture whose regent is Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi and which aims to "foster relations between the Holy See and the world of culture, especially promoting dialogue with different cultures" of our time, so that the civilization of man is more and more open to the Gospel, and that lovers of science, literature and the arts feel recognized by the Church as people at the service of the true, of the good and beautiful".
On 12 February 2021, he was appointed by Pope Francis as an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.[10]