The Battle for Civilization is Raging
The verdict should be in soon.
In the past few weeks two very powerful men have spoken on the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The Pope
A few weeks ago, Pope Leo XIV issued his encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, in which he warned of the dangers of AI, comparing the technology to the biblical Tower of Babel.
The encyclical echoes Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 “Rerum Novarum,” which addressed the challenges of the Industrial Revolution. The modern Pope Leo sees AI as a similar society shaping force.
Leo IV emphasizes that AI must respect human dignity, protecting workers, children and other vulnerable populations. He calls on our leaders to put the right safeguards around AI, including regulation and oversight to ensure that society has a say in how the technology is used. He fears that as was the case in the industrial revolution, if profit is the only guide, human suffering will be too great to justify whatever is gained. That sounds a lot like what Leo XII would have been saying over 140 years ago.
The modern encyclical calls specifically for “disarming” of AI, which would mean not using it for military, economic, and cognitive competition, and preventing monopolistic control.
The pope acknowledges AI’s potential to help in medicine and education, but warns us to guard against believing that AI, or any technology can replace human consciousness or act in appropriately moral or empathetic ways.
The Master of Finance
Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock simply looks at AI and sees money to be made.
At the end of May, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink told a crowd at a speech at Texas State Technical College in Waco that he expects the pension savings of America will fund the trillions of dollars required for AI data centers.
Fink is bullish on AI and sees it as an investing opportunity that Americans need to get behind. He said as much in his speech:
“If we can get more and more Americans to think about growing with the United States, we will have far [more] than enough money to invest in this infrastructure.”
He doesn’t think that this is a bad thing. He is only alerting people to what he sees necessary for Ai investment to continue.
The lesson from the Industrial Revolution
It is no accident that Pope Leo IV used the writing of Pope Leo XII to frame his own encyclical.
We are at an inflection point in the history of Earth. Great advancements can be made in the coming years. That work can be done faster by using more energy and resources, which is in aggregate bad for the human species - but it is still a technological advancement. A technological advancement that hastens your species demise, is still a technical advancement, even if it is unwise to advance in that direction.
Some voices warn against the dehumanizing impacts that technology can have, while some warn that other nations will take the lead in that technical advancement if we don’t - so we must do it.
How did that argument work out in the wake of the industrial revolution? It raised many people out of poverty, created fantastic wealth and ushered in an age of “advancement” in which some people on Earth could have more than generations had ever dreamed. But many did not have more, the biosphere has been badly damaged beyond repair in any kind of human lifetime, and the benefits of “advancement” are very concentrated among a relative few people.
The story we have been told is that those developments were good because they led to growth, they led to advancement.
But things were lost.
Self-determination was lost. As the resources of Earth became increasingly enclosed, we had to sell our labor to work with that steam engine so that we could have more of the more piling up around us. If we didn’t, we were left behind.
Our environment degraded, but it happened relatively slowly so we didn’t notice. When we didn’t notice, we had to earn a living to have more, so we had to keep working more, to produce more and consume more.
Decades later, advertising developed to convince us that our wants were really our needs.
Soon after that, GDP was invented to prove that producing more was virtuous.
Decades later, capitalism “won” as the wall came down and the only other system to choose from was vanquished.
So how come, nothing tastes good?
The knowledge we have now.
At the dawn of the industrial revolution, workers had little to no power to stop the dehumanization that was called “progress”. You may feel you have no power now, but you have infinitely more than your ancestors did 150 years ago.
You have the knowledge of the ages at your fingertips and you can organize with someone halfway around the world to change how things are run.
Those who control this system have to work very hard and spend a lot of money to keep you docile. In the end they will fail, they always do. It is just a matter of whether enough people are inspired by the words of Leo IV and act, or if they feel the words of Larry Fink are inevitable.
We can wait until things get so bad that those in power can’t fool people any more, or we can get a critical mass of people building a new system that those in charge will have less in charge of every day - until we can totally ignore them.
We might be able to do so sooner than you think.
Someone I follow on LinkedIn (Patrick Galey | LinkedIn) pointed this out:
Everyone please enjoy this graphic from a recent FT article on how AI isn’t generating any value.
It shows how everyone is using agentic AI to make apps that… no one is using.
Generative AI makes More Stuff, sure. It’s just Stuff no one can use or fix or give a toss about.
The era of abundance, then.
Those billions that Larry Fink says we need to take from your pensions to invest in AI are producing some useful things yes, but oftentimes - dreck that no one wants. Few if any of them are producing things worth paying for.
At some point, likely soon, the smart money will head for the exits on the AI bubble express. Technology companies currently make up a little over one-third of the US stock market valuation as measured by the S&P 500 - and they are only worth that much because the people holding those companies believe the hype that the AI revolution will make them rich.
Look at the chart. It will not.
That money has largely been made. AI companies are rushing to have initial public offerings so that they can cash in and leave the unsuspecting public holding the bag.
When that happens - and it will soon - more people will be listening to Leo than Larry.
Yes, the more of more, Matt. More for the sake of quantity which GDP measures, and less of the things of quality that matter. Movie theater GMO popcorn slathered with GMO corn based butter and sugar for our souls. We have to redefine abundance. Our trade of our time to make things which do not make people happy is a fundamental split for the worker. I read a story about a factory worker in China who asked what they were making--it was a 'salad spinner' for QVC. What does it do, he asked. It spins the water off of lettuce after you wash it. He asked if water was bad for lettuce, and then asked who would buy such a thing? The world is chock full of these things and we will never get our energy or materials or our time back for having made them.