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Technology and Artificial Intelligence in the Garden

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First disclosure – a real person (me) wrote this article, not Artificial Intelligence (AI).  Second disclosure – I am not a technology expert.  In fact, I often say that I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the computer age, but… It started at a public park.  I was in Albuquerque visiting my daughter and her […]

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Humanists pass global declaration on artificial intelligence and human values

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Luxembourg was the host city for the 2025 general assembly of Humanists International

Representatives of the global humanist community collectively resolved to pass The Luxembourg Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Human Values at the 2025 general assembly of Humanists International, held in Luxembourg on Sunday 6 July. 

Drafted by Humanists UK with input from leading AI experts and other member organisations of Humanists International, the declaration outlines a set of ten shared ethical principles for the development, deployment, and regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. It calls for AI to be aligned with human rights, democratic oversight, and the intrinsic dignity of every person, and for urgent action from governments and international bodies to make sure that AI serves as a tool for human flourishing, not harm.

Humanists UK patrons Professor Kate Devlin and Dr Emma Byrne were among the experts who consulted on an early draft of the declaration, prior to amendments from member organisations. Professor Devlin is Humanists UK’s commissioner to the UK’s AI Faith & Civil Society Commission.

Defining the values of our AI future 

Introducing the motion on the floor of the general assembly, Humanists UK Director of Communications and Development Liam Whitton urged humanists to recognise that the AI revolution was not a distant prospect on the horizon but already upon us. He argued that it fell to governments, international institutions, and ultimately civil society to define the values against which AI models should be trained, and the standards by which AI products and companies ought to be regulated.

Uniquely, humanists bring to the global conversation a principled secular ethics grounded in evidence, compassion, and human dignity. As governments and institutions grapple with the challenge of ‘AI alignment’ – ensuring that artificial intelligence reflects and respects human values – humanists offer a hopeful vision, rooted in a long tradition of thought about human happiness, moral progress, and the common good.

Read the Luxembourg Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Human Values:

Adopted by the Humanists International General Assembly, Luxembourg, 2025.

In the face of artificial intelligence’s rapid advancement, we stand at a unique moment in human history. While new technologies offer unprecedented potential to enhance human flourishing, handled carelessly they also pose profound risks to human freedoms, human security, and our collective future.

AI systems already pervade innumerable aspects of human life and are developing far more rapidly than current ethical frameworks and governance structures can adapt. At the same time, the rapid concentration of these powerful capabilities within a small number of hands threatens to issue new challenges to civil liberties, democracies, and our vision of a more just and equal world.

In response to these historic challenges, the global humanist community affirms the following principles on the need to align artificial intelligence with human values rooted in reason, evidence, and our shared humanity:

  1. Human judgment: AI systems have the potential to empower and assist individuals and societies to achieve more in all aspects of human life. But they must never displace human judgment, human reason, human ethics, or human responsibility for our actions. Decisions that deeply affect people’s lives must always remain in human hands.
  2. Common good: Fundamentally, states must recognise that AI should be a tool to serve humanity rather than enrich a privileged few. The benefits of technological advancement should flow widely throughout society rather than concentrate power and wealth in ever-fewer hands. 
  3. Democratic governance: New technologies must be democratically accountable at all levels – from local communities and small private enterprises through to large multinationals and countries. No corporation, nation, or special interest should wield unaccountable power through technologies with potential to affect every sphere of human activity. Lawmakers, regulators, and public bodies must develop and sustain the expertise to keep pace with AI’s evolution and respond to emerging challenges.
  4. Transparency and autonomy: Citizens cannot meaningfully participate in democracies if the decisions affecting their lives are opaque. Transparency must be embedded not only in laws and regulations, but in the design of AI systems themselves — designed responsibly, with clear intent and purpose, and full human accountability. Laws should guarantee that every individual can freely decide how their personal data is used, and grant all citizens the means to query, contest, and shape how technologies are deployed.
  5. Protection from harm: Protecting people from harm must be a foundational principle of all AI systems, not an afterthought. As AI risks amplifying existing injustices in society – including racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism – states and developers must act to prevent its use in discrimination, manipulation, unjust surveillance, targeted violence, or the suppression of lawful speech. Governments and business leaders must commit to long-term AI safety research and monitoring, aligning future AI systems with human goals, desires, and needs. 
  6. Shared prosperity: Previous industrial revolutions pursued progress without sufficient regard for human suffering. Today we must not. Technological advancement cannot be allowed to erode human dignity or entrench social divides. A truly human-centric approach demands bold investment in training, education, and social protections to enhance jobs, protect human dignity, and support those workers and communities most affected.
  7. Creators and artists: Properly harnessed, AI can help more people enjoy the benefits of creativity — expressing themselves, experimenting with new ideas, and collaborating in ways that bring personal meaning and joy. But we must continue to recognise and protect the unique value that human artists bring to creative work. Intellectual property frameworks must guarantee fair compensation, attribution, and protection for human artists and creators.
  8. Reason, truth, and integrity: Human freedom and progress depend on our ability to distinguish truth from falsehood and fact from fiction. As AI systems introduce new and far-reaching risks to the integrity of information, legal frameworks must rise to protect free inquiry, freedom of expression, and the health of democracy itself from the growing threat of misinformation, disinformation, and deliberate deception at scale.
  9. Future generations: The choices we make about AI today will shape the world for generations to come. Governments, civil society, and technology leaders must remain vigilant and act with foresight – prioritising the mitigation of environmental harms and long-term risks to human survival. These decisions must be guided by our responsibilities not only to one another, but to future generations, the ecosystem we rely on, and the wider animal kingdom.
  10. Human freedom, human flourishing: The ultimate value of AI will lie in its contribution to human happiness. To that end, we should embed shared values that promote human flourishing into AI systems — and be ambitious in using AI to maximise human freedom. For individuals, this could mean more time at leisure, pursuing passion projects, learning, reflecting, and making richer connections with other human beings. Collectively, we should realise these benefits by making advances in science and medicine, resolving pressing global challenges, and addressing inequalities within our societies. 

We commit ourselves as humanist organisations and as individuals to advocating these same principles in the governance, ethics, and deployment of AI worldwide.

We affirm the importance of humanist values to navigating these new frontiers – only by prioritising reason, compassion, dignity, freedom, and our shared humanity can human societies adequately navigate these emerging challenges. 

We call upon governments, corporations, civil society, and individuals to adopt these same principles through concrete policies, practices, and international agreements, taking this opportunity to renew our commitments to human rights, human dignity, and human flourishing now and always.

Previous Humanists International declarations – binding statements of organisational policy recognising outlooks, policies, and ethical convictions shared by humanist organisations in every continent – include the Auckland Declaration against the Politics of Division (2018), Reykjavik Declaration on the Climate Change Crisis (2019), and the Oxford Declaration on Freedom of Thought and Expression (2014). Traditionally, humanist organisations have marshalled these declarations as resources in their domestic and UN policy work, such as in Humanists UK’s advocacy of robust freedom of expression laws, or in formalising specific programmes of voluntary work, such as that of Humanist Climate Action in the UK.

Notes

For further comment or information, media should contact Humanists UK Director of Public Affairs and Policy Richy Thompson at press@humanists.uk or phone 0203 675 0959.

From 2022: The time has come: humanists must define the values that will underpin our AI future.

Humanists UK is the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people. Powered by over 150,000 members and supporters, we advance free thinking and promote humanism to create a tolerant society where rational thinking and kindness prevail. We provide ceremonies, pastoral care, education, and support services benefitting over a million people every year and our campaigns advance humanist thinking on ethical issues, human rights, and equal treatment for all.



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Artificial Intelligence is putting humanity at a crossroads, says Pope Leo – Crux | Taking the Catholic Pulse

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Artificial Intelligence is putting humanity at a crossroads, says Pope Leo  Crux | Taking the Catholic Pulse



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5 Top Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks Ready for a Bull Run

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While there is still uncertainty surrounding the implementation of tariffs by the Trump administration, at least one sector — artificial intelligence (AI) — is starting to regain its momentum and could be set up for another bull run. The technology is being hailed as a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and the early signs are that this could indeed be the case.

With AI still in its early innings, it’s not too late to invest in the sector. Let’s look at five AI stocks to consider buying right now.

Nvidia

Nvidia‘s (NVDA -0.22%) stock has already seen massive gains the past few years, but the bull case is far from over. The company’s graphics processing units (GPUs) are the main chips used for training large language models (LLMs), and it’s also seen strong traction in inference. These AI workloads both require a lot of processing power, which its GPUs provide.

The company captured an over 90% market share in the GPU space last quarter, in large thanks to its CUDA software platform, which makes it easy for developers to program its chips for various AI workloads. In the years following its launch, a collection of tools and libraries have also been built on top of CUDA that helps optimize Nvidia’s GPUs for AI tasks.

With the AI infrastructure buildout still appearing to be in its early stages, Nvidia continues to look well-positioned for the future. Meanwhile, it has also potential big markets emerging, such as the automobile space and autonomous driving.

AMD

While Nvidia dominates AI training, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD 3.87%) is carving out a space in AI inference. Inference is the process in which an AI model applies what it has learned during training to make real-time decisions. Over time, the inference market is expected to become much larger than the training market due to increased AI usage.

AMD’s ROCm software, meanwhile, is largely considered “good enough” for inference workloads, and cost-sensitive buyers are increasingly giving its MI300 chips a closer look. That’s already showing up in the numbers, with AMD’s data center revenue surging 57% last quarter to $3.7 billion.

Even modest market share gains from a smaller base could translate into meaningful top-line growth for AMD. Importantly, one of the largest AI model companies is now using AMD’s chips to handle a significant share of its inference traffic. Cloud giants are also using AMD’s GPUs for tasks like search and generative AI. Beyond GPUs, AMD remains a strong player in data center central processing units (CPUs), which is another area benefiting from rising AI infrastructure spend.

Taken altogether, AMD has a big AI opportunity in front of it.

Image source: Getty Images.

Alphabet

If you only listened to the naysayers, you would think Alphabet (GOOGL -0.91%) (GOOG -0.86%) is an AI loser, whose main search business is about to disappear. However, that would ignore the huge distribution and ad network advantages the company took decades to build.

Meanwhile, it has quietly positioned itself as an AI leader. Its Gemini model is widely considered one of the best and getting better. It’s now helping power its search business, and it’s added innovative elements that can help monetize AI, such as “Shop with AI,” which allows users to find products simply by describing them; and a new virtual try-on feature.

Google Cloud, meanwhile, has been a strong growth driver, and is now profitable after years of heavy investment. That segment grew revenue by 28% last quarter and continues to win share in the cloud computing market. The company also has developed its own custom AI chips, which OpenAI recently began testing as an alternative to Nvidia.

Alphabet also has exposure to autonomous driving through Waymo, which now operates a paid robotaxi service in multiple cities, and quantum computing with its Willow chip.

Alphabet is one of the world’s most innovative companies and has a long runway of continued growth still in front of it.

Pinterest

Pinterest (PINS -1.98%) has leaned heavily into AI to go from simply an online vision board to a more engaging platform that is shoppable. A key part of its transformation is its multimodal AI model that is trained on both images and text. This helps power its visual search feature, as well as generate more personalized recommendations. Meanwhile, on the backend, its Performance+ platform combines AI and automation to help advertisers run better campaigns.

The strategy is working, as the platform is both gaining more users and monetizing them better. Last quarter, it grew its monthly active users by 10% to 570 million. Much of that user growth is coming from emerging markets. Through the help of Google’s strong global ad network, with whom it’s partnered, Pinterest is also much better at monetizing these users. In the first quarter, its “rest of world” segment’s average revenue per user (ARPU) jumped 29%, while overall segment revenue soared 49%.

With a large but still undermonetized user base, Pinterest has a lot of growth ahead.

Salesforce

Salesforce (CRM -1.62%) is no stranger to innovation, being one of the first large companies to embrace the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. A leader in customer relationship management (CRM) software, the company is now looking to become a leader in agentic AI and digital labor.

Salesforce’s CRM platform was built to give its users a unified view of their siloed data all in one place. This helped create efficiencies and reduce costs by giving real-time insights and allowing for improved forecasting.

With the advent of AI, it is now looking to use its platform to create a digital workforce of AI agents that can complete tasks with little human supervision. It believes that the combination of apps, data, automation, and metadata into a single framework it calls ADAM will give it a leg up in this new agentic AI race.

The company has a huge installed user base, and its new Agentforce platform is off to a good start with over 4,000 paying customers since its October launch. With its consumption-based product, the company has a huge opportunity ahead with AI agents.



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