The first Catholic IT conference started in Medjugorje, which gathered around 70 participants from the USA, Spain, Slovakia, Switzerland, Austria, Romania, Italy, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The conference will last until Sunday, March 10, and most of the programs will be held in the hall of St. John Paul II. The participants will also celebrate at Holy Masses every day in the church of St. James, and participate in the prayer on Apparition Hill and Cross Mountain. The conference will be attended by well-known experts and speakers such as Davor Pavuna, Stjepan Aurelien Kovač, Luis Mariano Colón Colón, Igor Letica, Jure Babić, Dražen Alpeza, Vedran Šimunović, Tomislav Volarić, Goran Kujundžić and some other interesting faces from the world of IT.
The conference was inspired by the Pope’s words about the need to adapt the Church to modern means of technology, and the goal of the conference is to gather experts willing to apply their skills in projects that combine the technological world with spirituality and the contribution of spreading evangelization.
The official opening of the conference began at 3 pm in the hall of St. John Paul II. when Br. Zvonimir Pavičić, parish priest of Međugorje, and Br. Danko Perutina, president of the Mir Međugorje Information Center, addressed the participants. After those introductory greetings and expressions of welcome, the first introductory lecture was held by Dr. Davor Pavuna on the topic of the challenges of transhumanism and the artificial intelligence.
“This is a Catholic conference on information technologies and technologies in general that dominate our society now, you all saw on the Internet and over the phone what is happening, and while there are 8 billion of us, there are many more billions of these devices and huge amounts of money are circulating. Now some new trends are appearing, and it’s called transhumanism, and it was officially announced by Elon Musk, that people are chipped. It happened before, but now you have a human with a chip embedded in it, you have children who are crazy for games, you have so-called artificial intelligence, which is not real yet, but it doesn’t matter, it works anyway and literally creates artificial worlds and puts wrong information on the Internet and everything else works, and that’s that area. In that area, the problem is the following, that this artificial intelligence can develop on the scale of approximately one generation and become on average more intelligent than a human. At that moment, the robots that will be present, and Elon Musk is making one billion of them, we will have billions of robots that will be on average more intelligent than us and they will no longer need us. What are you going to do with people when you are robots, all you need is energy. You will put solar cells from Medjugorje to Mali, to Saudi Arabia and you will live from the sun, you will eliminate humanoids. According to Darwinism, you eliminate species that are useless to you. And that is called the so-called singularity and it should happen, if God does not exist and if we have no awareness of defense, it should happen in this century”, said Dr. Davor Pavuna, adding that it is possible that “entities, which we call artificial intelligence and transhumanism, take over this planet”.
“And that is possible according to Darwinism. The key question is who has consciousness? Man has consciousness. Whatever it is, it has consciousness. You hear my consciousness, I hear myself, I know that I am conscious, I know that I am alive. Whether robots have it, whether artificial intelligence will have it, the answer is not clear for now, but as far as we know no. And then you have a parallel, on the one hand you have dear God who is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. So, the highest level of intelligence that is everywhere in the universe, and they do not have it yet, they have yet to develop, if it is true that they can have consciousness and conscience. We don’t have those answers. So, in a strictly scientific and technological system, we do not know, and the precise answer is if three percent of people, people who have consciousness and consciousness awakes to the reality that we are conscious beings of love, compassion and communion, then we will win. That’s what Jesus Christ announced, that’s what Our Lady is saying here, and that’s why the conference is Catholic, and that’s why the Holy Father Pope encourages us because we matter. Dear God lives in us and then these other entities cannot defeat us”, concluded Dr. Davor Pavuna.
After the program in the hall of St. John Paul II, the participants took part in the evening prayer program in the church of St. James, they prayed the rosary from 5 p.m., participated in the Holy Mass at 6 p.m. which was celebrated by Fr. Danko Perutina, then the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament followed. The first day of the conference ended with the dinner and socializing in the Hall of John Paul II.
