This is an element of Leo’s argument, of course—he is, after all, head of the Catholic Church—but he also makes clear that humanity, as he describes it, should be exalted because of its “woundedness” just as much as its “grandeur.” Our limitations are the key to understanding what makes humans special. “We must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them,” he writes. You don’t even need to believe in God to appreciate that our uniqueness derives from the friction produced by our “vulnerability, suffering and failure.” To smooth out this roughness would be to get rid of what is most essential about us. Along those lines, this is maybe my favorite passage from the encyclical:
The Pope Is Now the World’s Most Famous Humanist – DNYUZTo eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well. Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering; and over the years, we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars, the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments. It is only thanks to the interplay of these elements that the wonders of the soul occur within us, allowing us to sense the richness of our humanity. To renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid, in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human.
Month: May 2026
Pope Leo XIV – Man of the People
“When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.”
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. – J.R.R. Tolkien”
– Pope Leo XIV
Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
Pope Leo XIV invoked Gandalf when addressing artificial intelligence in his first encyclical.
Pope Leo XIV published his landmark encyclical on artificial intelligence “Magnifica Humanitas” May 25, comparing the attempt to build an AI future that excludes God to the “Tower of Babel” and underlining the need to safeguard human dignity as it is “threatened by new forms of dehumanization.”
“The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise,” Pope Leo wrote in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”
“In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace,” he said.
There is a LOT of great stuff in here. Worth a nice long read.
We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise.
…
More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.
AI’s Token Bang for Big Bucks
Many companies have embraced AI and have pushed staff to use it just because it’s there.
He said that, based on talks with Uber’s senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features.
“That link is not there yet, right?” he said. “I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25% more useful consumer features.'”
Uber’s COO Says It’s Getting Harder to Justify the Money Spent on AI – Business Insider
On one hand, I kinda smirk at the idea of Uber getting caught up in the SAAS “sell it for super cheap and at a loss to destroy the competition and hook the buyer and then kick up those prices” business model that, well, made Uber.
On the other, this makes total sense when you consider the costs of AI at scale for companies like Uber, Duolingo, Microsoft, etc. Many companies have embraced AI and have pushed staff to use it just because it’s there.
Duolingo, for instance, walked back its decision to include AI usage in performance reviews after employees asked whether they had to use AI for the sake of using it.
“It felt like, rather than being held accountable for the actual outcome, we were trying to just push something that in some cases did not fit,” Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said in a podcast interview in April.
For a person using it at home on the free level generating funny lyrics or images, AI is a neat little toy. For companies looking to use it across the company for coding or as AI assistants, every little ask adds up in ways we’re not trained to look for. I mean, how much does it cost to Google something?
Add on the seemingly random token consumption* newer models of Claude or ChatGPT require to do even rudimentary tasks and it gets real tough to see the bang for buck.
* I say “seemingly random” because the use makes sense. In some ways the new models are pulling back the curtain on how they’re thinking behind the scenes, in others it’s tweaks that make them work better. But there’s no real method of measuring exactly what a query is going to cost until you commit, and when you’re paying by the token for hundreds or thousands of employees, that can run away from you real fast.
I’m curious if we have any real examples yet of AI usage seeing a net positive ROI across all players – company using AI sees profits from its use, AI provider is making enough money to more than cover its costs, etc.
Counting is hard.
Starbucks is sunsetting its AI inventory program after it reportedly miscounted and mislabeled store items.
Another common mistake the AI program made was mixing up different types of milk or skipping them altogether. The program was only active for nine months, according to Reuters.
“With a quick scan using a handheld tablet, partners can instantly see what’s in stock — ensuring cold foam, oat milk, or caramel drizzle are always available,” a now-deleted blog post explaining the AI program read. “Customers can enjoy beverages their way, every time — and partners [Starbucks’ term for its employees] spend less time in the backroom and more time crafting and connecting.”
Starbucks retires AI inventory program after just nine months
Welcome to the personal software revolution | The Verge
The rise of AI coding tools like Claude Code — and OpenAI’s Codex, and GitHub Copilot, and Cursor, and Lovable, and Replit, and a thousand others — is already changing the way software developers work. They’re also giving way to an entirely new kind of software: the software we make just for ourselves. Not to raise venture capital for, not to eventually sell to Google. The era of personal software is upon us, and it is changing our relationship with technology forever. It has certainly already changed mine.
AI lets us make apps the way we used to make lists and spreadsheets. Managing the family budget? Do it in a hand-built app with every feature you need and exactly zero you don’t. Can’t make a to-do list app stick? Roll your own. Rather than triangulate a dozen schedules for the next family trip, whip up a custom meal planner (with built-in grocery assigner). Use it forever, use it once, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t come with a subscription fee or send you marketing emails once a day for the rest of your life. It’s your software. And there’s never been anything like it before.
— Read on www.theverge.com/tech/928905/vibe-code-personal-software-revolution
The Last Days of Butter Ridge
He had auctioned more than 50,000 cows as he traveled across the country during the dairy sell-off of the past decade. Some were corporate herds of 1,000 or show cattle that brought up to a million dollars, but often Fraley had been the last visitor at family barns like the Watsons’, where he auctioned cows, machinery and sometimes even the property itself for a 10 percent cut. The average Pennsylvania family dairy farm was earning about $20 for every 100 pounds of milk — and that same amount now cost more than $30 to produce. He’d seen farmers who tried to hang on by neglecting their equipment, underfeeding their cows, extending their hours and borrowing tens of thousands they could never repay.
His career had unfolded against a steady backdrop of bankruptcies, accidents and tragedies: the New York farmer who shot all 51 of his dairy cows and then turned the shotgun on himself; an Amish father who suffocated with his two sons after becoming trapped in their grain silo. In 2018, a Wisconsin farmer had sold his cows at auction, taken a part-time job at a grocery store and then killed himself with a note in his pocket. “I’m a dairy farmer,” it read. “I want my old life back, but I can’t get it anymore. Everything I do fails.”
Give your ideas some legs
Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after. In Experiment 1, while seated and then when walking on a treadmill, adults completed Guilford’s alternate uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking and the compound remote associates (CRA) test of convergent thinking. Walking increased 81% of participants’ creativity on the GAU, but only increased 23% of participants’ scores for the CRA. In Experiment 2, participants completed the GAU when seated and then walking, when walking and then seated, or when seated twice. Again, walking led to higher GAU scores. Moreover, when seated after walking, participants exhibited a residual creative boost. Experiment 3 generalized the prior effects to outdoor walking. Experiment 4 tested the effect of walking on creative analogy generation. Participants sat inside, walked on a treadmill inside, walked outside, or were rolled outside in a wheelchair. Walking outside produced the most novel and highest quality analogies. The effects of outdoor stimulation and walking were separable. Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity.
Give your ideas some legs: the positive effect of walking on creative thinking – PubMed
Writing is thinking
Writing scientific articles is an integral part of the scientific method and common practice to communicate research findings. However, writing is not only about reporting results; it also provides a tool to uncover new thoughts and ideas. Writing compels us to think — not in the chaotic, non-linear way our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner. By writing it down, we can sort years of research, data and analysis into an actual story, thereby identifying our main message and the influence of our work. This is not merely a philosophical observation; it is backed by scientific evidence. For example, handwriting can lead to widespread brain connectivity1 and has positive effects on learning and memory.
This is a call to continue recognizing the importance of human-generated scientific writing.
mRNA-based COVID vaccines accidentally fight cancer?
The discovery that mRNA vaccines were powerful immune activators came from research conducted by Grippin during his graduate work at the University of Florida in the lab of Elias Sayour, M.D., Ph.D. While developing personalized mRNA-based cancer vaccines for brain tumors, Grippin and Sayour found that mRNA vaccines trained immune systems to eliminate cancer cells, even when the mRNA didn’t target tumors directly.
This finding led to the hypothesis that other types of mRNA vaccines might have the same effect, and the approval and use of mRNA-based COVID vaccines created an opportunity to test this hypothesis. Lin and Grippin initiated a major effort to retrospectively study if MD Anderson patients who received mRNA COVID vaccines lived longer than those who did not receive these vaccines.
ESMO 2025: mRNA-based COVID vaccines generate improved responses to immunotherapy | UT MD Anderson
The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’ – The Atlantic
When I make a list of tasks for the day, I put fewer items on it. I had been underestimating the cost of switching, so I was chronically overestimating what I could actually get done in a day. (This pervasive cognitive bias is known as the planning fallacy.) The result was that I would end up trying to multitask to keep up with my list, which meant that I both performed worse and took longer. I would then carry over unfinished tasks to the next day’s list, until it got so long that I gave up and threw it in the trash. Then the cycle would begin again. Now I start my daily list with a single task that, if accomplished, will mean it was a good day
— Read on www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/05/monotasking-inside-the-box-excerpt-david-epstein/687015/