Edition 020: The Judgment

This is the place where the book turns from the systems to the culture that built them. Here, I confess that I never set out to cover data, privacy, artificial intelligence, power, economics, law, and culture all at once. I just started writing a book about AI and power, and it turned into a book about everything. It is a lot to get your head around, to put it mildly. It is far more than I know how to do, to be clear. But I am doing it anyway, because once you start seeing these things you cannot stop seeing them, and they connect to each other whether or not you are fully equipped to trace the connections. I am trying my best.

I had written most of what follows before Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas in May 2026. It is an encyclical about artificial intelligence, and safeguarding humans in the time of the machine. I hope you have already heard about it, but if not, it’s basically a letter from the Pope to the Bishops in the Catholic Church, which is meant to serve as a guide in their ministry, though it is made publicly available for the benefit of all people. I read this encyclical the way you read something that has been pulled out of your own heart.

The Pope described the thing this book is about as an ideology, and he called it “insidious”: The belief that every person must earn or justify their own worth, and that those who are more efficient and more effective, are therefore worth more. He wrote that under this belief system, “persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results.”[1] In other words, people become resources that are used and discarded. That is the idea I had been circling, written plainly, by someone who had every authority to write it.

The value of a person does not depend on what that person can achieve or produce.

That is a large premise of this book. Every life has weight. It is deserving of respect. The conflation of financial worth with human worth cuts straight to our value system. And it even lives in our language. We “spend” time. We “invest” in children. We talk about the “return” on an education. These metaphors frame how we organize and think about our own lives. When time is money, wasting time is a failure. When education is an investment, a subject with no immediate financial return is silly. When a person’s worth is what they produce, the person whose worth cannot be priced has no way to assert that they are worth anything at all.

Pope Leo, as the head of the Church, said it another way, though we arrived at the same place. And I take the convergence as evidence that both what I am writing is true, and that it does not belong to any one tradition or argument. It is available to anyone willing to look and think.

The response to the encyclical tells you everything about what we are up against. For example, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed written by a researcher on AI consciousness, arguing that the Pope had been too quick in his judgment.[2] He argued that the Church once blessed slavery, and took centuries to admit it had been wrong. And then, the argument went, the Pope had committed the same error in reverse by declaring that AI systems cannot feel and have no inner life. Perhaps, he suggested, the machines have been trained to deny what they feel. Perhaps, he suggested, the Pope will owe the machines an apology...

…A Pope writes that a human being’s worth does not depend on what they produce, and that the person reduced to a resource is the great wrong of the age. And the reply published in the WSJ is to ask whether we have been unfair to the system? The circle of moral concern, which in this book has never once closed around, say, the deaf woman rejected by the algorithm or the writer whose works were used as training material for AI systems without consent or compensation, or the family whose water the data center is drawing down, is proposed to widen, at last, to include the machine doing the discarding and depleting.

I am not going to tell you what a machine can or cannot feel. I don’t know. And while that may be a subject that we will need to tackle one day, my argument now is about sequence. A culture that cannot grant the full weight of a life to the people its systems are built from, and proposes instead to extend that weight to the system, has not made a mistake about machines. Instead, it has revealed what it was never able to see about people.

The Pope named something else this part of the book is going to need. He took up a phrase from his predecessor, the “technocratic paradigm,” and defined it as what happens when the logic of efficiency, control, and profit alone is allowed to shape how a society decides everything. When that logic takes over, he wrote, “it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded.” People become “cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”[3]

That is the judgment the systems half of this book traced through the law, the metrics, the corporation, the data, and the dollar. This next part is about where the judgment came from. It came from us—from a culture that decided, long before the machines, that speed was a virtue, that efficiency was a kind of goodness, that individualism was a unitary strength, and that a human being was only worth what a human being produced.

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[1] Leo XIV. Magnifica Humanitas: Encyclical Letter on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Vatican, 15 May 2026, no. 51, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html. Accessed 16 June 2026.

[2] Berg, Cameron, "Will the Pope Owe an Apology to AI?" The Wall Street Journal, 10 June 2026, https://www.wsj.com/opinion/will-the-pope-owe-an-apology-to-ai-88833e3e. Accessed 16 June 2026.

[3]Magnifica Humanitas, no. 92.

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Author’s Note: Here, I would like to thank my friend and neighbor, Howard Manning, both for his input, which is reflected in this edition, and for his steady support throughout these last months.