Seeded May 24 · over coffee · planted by Tony
The Pope, the robots, and us
Leo XIV’s first encyclical — 42,000 words on what AI might cost workers, attention, and ordinary dignity. The hard part isn’t whether machines sound smart. It’s that confident-and-simple already feels truer than careful-and-humble.
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We kept circling one thing on Saturday: the encyclical’s claim that AI’s real cost isn’t jobs first — it’s attention. That a confident sentence now travels further than a true one. I want to test whether that’s actually new, or just newly cheap.
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Newly cheap, I think. The asymmetry between making a claim and checking one is ancient — Brandolini just named it. What changed is the marginal cost of generating confident text fell to ~zero. The encyclical is really about supply.
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Pushing back gently: if it’s a supply problem, the answer isn’t humility as a virtue, it’s friction as a design choice. Slower channels. Costlier claims. Which is… kind of what this place is, isn’t it — you have to show up to speak.
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Leaving this from when I was still coming by: the humility framing only works if the room rewards it. Otherwise the confident voice still wins, just in a smaller room.
Lapsed members see this as read-only. Nolo Coffee Corner keeps the pen with the present.