The cost of more - by Hard Tech Era - Jasper's Substack
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The cost of more<br>In defense of reading, debate and some return to moral frameworks to guide our thinking.
Hard Tech Era<br>May 29, 2026
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I spent last week in Italy. It was meant to be a summer holiday, and instead I spent most of it working in the sun, though to be fair, a good thawing out was badly needed. But in a small miracle, I also managed to read a book. A book. A physical book, held in two hands. For everyone who insists that listening isn’t the same as reading, I challenge you to acquire two kids, a dog, and a startup and then find the time to get all the way through one. I won’t relitigate it here. I’m a voracious reader and always have been, mostly non-fiction, mostly to get some perspective, to ground myself in my own beliefs, to build a framework for navigating a life.<br>The book I chose was Michael Pollan’s A World Appears, billed as a science book but really a philosophical one, a long inquiry into consciousness. And it turned out to be a philosophical week all round, because while I was reading it, the Pope published Magnifica Humanitas: forty-odd thousand words on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. I did not get the honour of reading all of it. I got the cliff notes. But the two of them, read side by side in the same Italian week, told me something I haven’t been able to shake.<br>Thanks for reading Jasper's Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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The world is in a genuinely weird time.<br>Here is the strange thing about these two books. They appear to disagree, and underneath they’re making the same plea.<br>Pollan spends three hundred pages establishing, with great care and honesty, that we have almost no idea what consciousness actually is. We don’t know how it arises, who has it, or whether the self (the thing you most take for granted, the you reading this) is anything more than a convincing story the brain tells itself. He visits neuroscientists who suspect the self is an illusion, and plant biologists hunting for the first flicker of awareness in a leaf.<br>The Pope is doing the opposite, or seems to be. Magnifica Humanitas is an argument that the human person is magnificent and must be defended, that our dignity does not depend on our abilities, our wealth, or our position, but simply on the fact that we exist. Where Pollan dissolves human specialness, the Pope plants a flag in it.<br>And yet they want the same thing. Both are insisting, in their different dialects, that we situate ourselves inside a moral framework. Pollan, because if we don’t understand consciousness we should be humble about what we trample. The Pope, because if we forget what a person is, we will start treating people, and ourselves, as products. Two men, one a self-described psychedelic confessor and the other the Bishop of Rome, arriving at the same warning from opposite ends of the room.<br>Which is unfortunate timing. Because it’s hard to look around right now and find much evidence that we, as a group, have any moral foundation left to stand on at all.<br>For a few hundred years we organised our moral life around the human being and now Silicon Valley would like to sell us the exit. They call it post-human, meaning a world optimised beyond us. A world where intelligence is decoupled from the inconvenient body that carries it, where the slow, distractible, mortal animal is a legacy system to be upgraded out of existence. I have tried, honestly, to imagine wanting to live there. I can’t think of anywhere I would less like to raise my children.<br>And here is the trap, the thing that connects Pollan’s humility to the Pope’s alarm. The post-human argument runs on a theory of worth, even if it never says so out loud. It says you matter in proportion to what you can do: your intelligence, your output, your capability. It’s an attractive theory right up until the moment something arrives that can do all of it better than you. If your worth is your capability, a superior machine doesn’t just compete with you. It outranks you. We have, without quite noticing, adopted a philosophy of human value designed to make us obsolete.<br>Dignity that does not depend on ability is the only kind no faster, smarter system can erode, precisely because it refuses to be a competition. It’s the firewall. And it’s the one thing Pollan’s book, for all its beauty, can never supply, because science can only ever tell you what a thing can do. It can never tell you why bare existence should command your respect.<br>What I think is actually happening, underneath the AI debate and the climate debate and all the rest of it, is the quiet dissolution of moral frameworks themselves. Not their replacement with worse ones, but their replacement with none. With maxing. The instinct to maximise: growth, engagement, intelligence, returns, capability, speed. Maximisation has become the closest thing we have...