Lee Lin-Shan at the Vatican: the pioneer of voice recognition calls for a "pause"

Received by Vatican News as part of the Vatican's work on AI, Taiwanese professor Lee Lin-Shan, a specialist in Chinese voice recognition, calls for slowing down the technological race.

The fact

On July 17, 2026, Vatican News in its German edition reports the words of Lee Lin-Shan (李琳山), a professor at National Taiwan University and a pioneer in Mandarin voice recognition, received as part of the Vatican's work on artificial intelligence: the technological race must take "a breath." The intervention follows the work of the Vatican Interdicasterial Commission on AI, which has been meeting since June 17, 2026, at the Palazzo San Calisto, and echoes the Rome Declaration on weapons and AI co-signed in July.

Our reading

It is not insignificant that a researcher who built the foundations of automatic Chinese recognition comes to the Vatican to call for a brake. We had seen, with the encyclical Magnifica humanitas of Leo XIV, the Church placing man at the center of a question that industry claimed was purely technical. Lee Lin-Shan's appeal validates on a practical level what doctrine had posited as a principle: speed is not a virtue when it deprives reason of its own time. Saint Thomas reminds us that prudence, the first virtue of the cardinal virtues, requires an interval between appetite and action (Summa Theologica, IIa-IIae, q. 47). The machine, on the other hand, compresses this interval until it abolishes it. A pioneer who asks for a pause recognizes, without naming it, that the natural order of human deliberation has been crossed.

To ponder

Prudence is not an external moral brake, but the internal measure of reason. That the Church, with Leo XIV, offers this language to a world that no longer has it, that is the first service it renders to modernity.