Pope Francis has met with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, at the Vatican. No, Zuckerberg offered up a model of the Aquila, Facebook’s massive drone created to beam internet to people who might otherwise not have access.
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The drone, called Aquila, is a small boomerang-shaped device that is small enough to fit in Zuckerberg’s hand and is now helping developing countries get hooked up to the internet.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told Italian students how the social media site gave €500,000 to the Italian Red Cross following Wednesday’s devastating natural disaster in central Italy. As reported by Fast Company, Zuckerberg, for his part, made a post on the social media platform showing an image of him presenting the Pope with his gift.
Holy See Press Office director Greg Burke said the pope and Zuckerberg discussed new ways that communications technology can help poor people.
The Aquila drone, which will be considerably larger in relation to the model pictured, lately finished its first flight.
Zuckerberg wrote: “We shared our work with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to help people around the world”.
‘Here Priscilla and I are with the Pope looking at a book we gave him with stories of people who are using the internet in fantastic ways, ‘ he wrote.
As The Atlantic pointed out, Zuckerberg was raised in a Jewish home but identifies as an atheist, though he has also found interest in Buddhism.
Pope Francis is often regarded as an incredibly progressive figurehead and he has showed that time and again.
Earlier on Monday, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan had a private audience with Pope Francis.
Zuckerberg is the latest Silicon Valley heavyweight to meet the Pope.
Asserting that Francis is “aggressively anti-technology and anti-modern in the sense that he actively warns against the belief that technological tools can be used to redeem or fix the world”, The Atlantic Monday offered analysis of why the meeting occurred and what it may achieve. In January the Pontiff met with Apple CEO Tim Cook, just a few days after hosting former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
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“I’ve been looking at speech recognition and face recognition and I’ve loved sharing this with Facebook engineers and seeing one day how far that’s going to go”, he said.
