We have a new magazine for you. Yes, it takes “AI” as its target, presuming that no one else will (outside of the “It’s Terrible, It’s Depressing, But We’re Going To Do It Anyways” crowd, so inspiring to young people, so persuasive to private investors.)
The fog of war has thinned a little. Those of us shocked and saddened to find that Vibe-Coding Chatbots for The Kingdom was to be the new New Evangelization—we’ve settled down, stopped drinking so much, “brought it to prayer,” read the Pope’s encyclical. “Time,” we said, “for a second thought.”
In these freshly written-edited-laid-out-proofed-and-printed pages, we consider the cost of replacing our goofy internet with a goofier universal chatbot interface. AI companies are taking on unheard-of debts, losing massive amounts of money, stalling in their projected data center builds (which are planned at a scale gigantically overselling the amount of demand that exists for their products). The result of this unprecedented inability to produce an ROI has been, and will continue to be, a few more years of desperate, VC subsidized attempts to addict everyone to chatbots while we’re all still able to pretend they’re free. Then either (a) nationalization (bailout) on the basis of national security, (b) collapse and a great lowering of expectations, or (c) something no one has anticipated (the future remains free).
In our pages, Lily Abadal backs Pope Leo in his “no using AI for homilies” stance—witness, as it turns out, cannot be sloughed off to a witness-simulator. Slavoj Žižek backs the Pope as well. Despite Žižek’s atheistic materialism, he reveres our Holy Father as the great protector of the paradox “that humanity’s highest achievements are rooted in our limitations (failure, mortality, and concomitant sexuality).” The Leonine-Lacanian synthesis: the trouble isn’t so much the tech, as the way it insinuates a seamlessly contented humanity, without transcendence, as an ideal.
We hear from some of our militia members on the ground: Joshua May reflects on his time at the CIA, where he put in the work to produce genuinely useful intelligence briefs—texts now set to be “generated.” Ronald Klingler marvels at the overnight loss of the coder’s “textual community.” Laura Kirk thinks through her work as an author and student, and modifies my own sourfaced critique of chatbot “writing.” (To take a stab at summarizing Laura’s Law: only ever generate what no one needs to read.) Andrew Shivone recalls the obvious: “EdTech,” the massively-funded integration of schooling with screens, has been a resounding and unambiguous failure. He questions the National Catholic Education Association’s partnership with Google to ensure “comprehensive AI literacy” on this basis.
James Donald Forbes McCann contributes some poetry; Joseph Patrick has a short story about a new Bartolome de las Casas sent “on mission” to Silicon Valley. Our own Michael Boland does the academic heavy lifting: an analysis of the 17th century simulation of “intelligence,” which is our inheritance, and which produced such breathtaking quotables as this puppy from Francis Bacon: “There remains one hope of salvation, one way to good health: that the entire work of the mind be started over again; and from the very start the mind should not be left to itself, but be constantly controlled; and the business done (if I may put it this way) by machines.” (New Organon, Preface)
For my part, I spend some time defending a highly refined American Midwest technology: “shooting the shit.” Conversing, without real need to, about headlines, weather, directions, and inane historical "facts" are an efficient means of pursuing communion without profaning its holiness by pursuing it directly. GPT Live, which invites us to give over these and all inanities of conversation to an (excellent) voice simulator, is inefficient.
The efficiency of technology, as it relates to the whole of life, rather depends on what you’re trying to do with that life, doesn’t it? What a wonderful chance to answer that question!
I hope you enjoy the new magazine. You can expect it in your mailbox by the middle of August. If you're not subscribed, please do so before August 15th.
Considered as an unimaginably large conglomerate of readers and fellow pilgrims, you are in my prayers, and the prayers of all of us here at God’s Own New Polity Magazine.
Yours,
Marc Barnes