No Model Will Save Us: Pope Leo, the Miserostat, and AI’s Woke Coders – William M. Briggs

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Briggs

June 3, 20264 Comments

I don’t know who wrote Magnifica Humanitas, the Vatican’s new encyclical on "safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence", but he (or it?) appears to not have had much time in which to do so. If he had, he would have written something shorter. Some autist at Less Wrong (the "rationalists") wrote more words than anybody would care to read to claim that AI "wrote" the document. Those pesky em dashes, you see. Which, regular readers will attest, I enjoy and have been using for years—decades, even.

Pope Leo signed off on it as Official Author, so to him goes the credit. Whoever or whatever produced the document, the words and arguments stand and must be judged as they are (this is what I take such great pains to teach in the Thursday Class about any model, even human models).

There is a lot of fluff in Magnifica, common these days, passive language about "dialogue" and "dignity" and "equality" and "synodality". That last is a neologism from synod, a meeting (of bishops). In practice, it’s a word without boundaries, meaning whatever its user wants it to mean, mostly finding ways to excuse sin and overthrow tradition.

There’s even, Lord help us all, "journeying." Everything is now a "journey". No one can do the simplest task without it being a "journey". Women "journey" for every damned thing they do. I looked up a bread recipe and it featured the words "your sourdough journey." I had a paper accepted and the publisher said here is the paperwork to complete your "publishing journey."

On our spiritual journey to review this document, and not that some of these subjects aren’t important, but we must turn a blind eye to all of it lest we miss our point. Which is our relation to technology.

Ratcheting Up

Now technology means tools, a far less scary word, which Leo understands: "Technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity." And "In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity’s problems, just as it is not inherently evil." Tools become antagonistic, or sympathetic, by the hands that wield them.

The problem is, as it ever is, not tools, but people. There’s a some good, and a lot wrong, with people. Including forever forgetting, in the rush for "progress", the undefeated Doctrine of Unexpected Consequences: "New technologies open up a horizon extending in directions that are imaginable but not yet fully predictable."

On that unpredictability, here’s David Stove in the opening to "Why You Should Be A Conservative":

A primitive society is being devastated by a disease, so you bring modern medicine to bear, and wipe out the disease, only to find that by doing so you have brought on a population explosion. You introduce contraception to control population, and find that you have dismantled a whole culture. At home you legislate to relieve the distress of unmarried mothers, and find you have given a cash incentive to the production of illegitimate children. You guarantee a minimum wage, and find that you have extinguished, not only specific industries, but industry itself as a personal trait. You enable everyone to travel, and one result is, that there is nowhere left worth travelling to. And so on.

This is the oldest and the best argument for conservatism: the argument from the fact that our actions almost always have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. It is an argument from so great and so mournful a fund of experience, that nothing can rationally outweigh it. Yet somehow, at any rate in societies like ours, this argument never is given its due weight.

The good old DUC has already hit AI, which was promised to "revolutionize"—does nobody ever remember revolutions are to be eschewed?—how companies work, bringing vast savings (notice the em dashes!). Predictions of our bright AI future were many. But it was recently revealed (of many similar stories, like rampant cheating in universities):

A company spent $500,000,000 on Claude in one month because nobody set usage limits…Uber burned their entire 2026 budget by April. Their COO said he can’t connect any of it to consumer features…Microsoft canceled most Claude Code licenses because the token bill spiraled…Companies are now laying people off to pay the AI bill. Not because AI replaced the work. Because the bill replaced the headcount.

Science Is Amoral

Pope Leo starts (para 12) with a truth almost completely forgotten, or if not forgotten then actively denied:

[B]uilding for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected. Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of...