I think watching your toaster melt cheese is way more exciting than watching Sundar. When the toaster is done … you get to eat melted cheese. Love this post, man.
Tx much Michael! Appreciate you reading! Really not the best analogy because I catch myself watching the cheese start to burble and brown and do the Pavlov dog thing. Last night my wife had made egg salad — and she throws in capers and that mustard with the seeds so its really good — and then there was an unexpected bagel in the freezer from Boichick Bagles (as an LA transplant it is *hard* to find a good bagel up in the Bay Area and it’s boichick hands down). So the egg salad went on the bagel and for the topper we had Costco Mancheco which is ridiculously good. Screw you Sundar!
IT makes me think of fixing printers and I hate printers possibly more than I hate Zuckerberg. At least a printer does something useful once in awhile 🤣
I still love tech - really I do, I think that’s why I have to point out when it get’s stupid.
I attended I/O once and came away with two conclusions -
1) engineers are optimists, and 2) nobody can predict which demo will matter five years later.
I have a theory about the glasses.
People will tolerate a lot from a phone because it stays in their pocket. Glasses sit on your face and become part of your identity. That's a much higher bar.
perhaps a little pin like the red shirts on star-trek used to wear will be THE NEW AMAZING THING!
Remember in Office Space, Jennifer Aniston had to have a minimum 15 pieces of flair on her suspenders? Who doesn't like a little flair? I feel like the bar is lower the farther down on your body it is.
I was at Google when Glasses 1.0 came out. A few people had them (not me). You could tell it was not catching on even within the company.
"The Singularity" might have been reinterpreted as "the machines are smarter than we are" (true for many years) instead of what Kurzweil meant, which was "we will BE machines."
Our whole beings were going to be uploaded to the Cloud and then we'd be immortal.
I feel like the first round of Google Glasses were juiced by a high dose of hubris from Sergey. Did you have any interactions with Sergey when you were there?
The Pope's encyclical on AI is 82 pages. So like any lazy nerd I asked Claude to give me a summary.
I think its a good thing and I'm impressed it was launched with one of Anthropic's founders but I doubt our Silicon Valley Tech Bros pay it much mind.
--
**Magnifica Humanitas — "Magnificent Humanity"**
*Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, released May 25, 2026*
**The Big Frame**
The core argument is that AI poses "not a technological challenge, but an anthropological one." The question isn't whether the machines work — it's what happens to humanity if we let them replace what makes us human.
**The Structure (5 chapters)**
The arc moves from diagnosis to foundation to prescription: an introduction framing the question as "Babel vs. Jerusalem" (does technology unify or fragment us?), then chapters on Catholic social doctrine as a living tradition, foundational principles like human dignity and the common good, practical applications around truth/work/children, and finally a chapter on warfare, disarmament, and multilateral governance.
**Key Arguments**
*On technology:* Paragraph 9 states the encyclical's disposition precisely: "Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice." Then the line that underpins the entire governance argument: "Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it."
*On deepfakes and synthetic media:* The encyclical argues that when machines synthesize the signals through which humans form trust, intimacy, and relationship, something happens to human communication itself — it's not just a misinformation problem, it's a categorical intrusion into something that belongs to personhood.
*On workers:* The Rerum Novarum parallel is explicit. Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical argued that factories couldn't treat workers as interchangeable inputs. Leo XIV makes the same argument about AI: it addresses the displacement of writers, coders, analysts, and others, warning against "passive consumers of unthought thoughts."
*On weapons:* The encyclical calls for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons systems operating without meaningful human oversight — not as a case-by-case ethics question, but as a categorical moral position. The Vatican's reasoning: decisions to end human life cannot be delegated to systems that cannot understand the moral weight of what they are deciding.
*On children:* The Pope argued for the preservation of a specific capacity — independent thought — that AI-saturated environments may undermine. His formulation to a stadium of teenagers: use AI "in such a way that if it disappeared tomorrow, you would still know how to think."
**The Anthropic Connection**
Chris Olah's presence on stage is legible if you know what interpretability is — he built the field of mechanistic interpretability, the attempt to understand what's actually happening *inside* AI systems. The encyclical's governance argument implicitly rests on whether AI systems can be understood well enough to govern. Olah represents the research community grappling with exactly that question.
I think watching your toaster melt cheese is way more exciting than watching Sundar. When the toaster is done … you get to eat melted cheese. Love this post, man.
Tx much Michael! Appreciate you reading! Really not the best analogy because I catch myself watching the cheese start to burble and brown and do the Pavlov dog thing. Last night my wife had made egg salad — and she throws in capers and that mustard with the seeds so its really good — and then there was an unexpected bagel in the freezer from Boichick Bagles (as an LA transplant it is *hard* to find a good bagel up in the Bay Area and it’s boichick hands down). So the egg salad went on the bagel and for the topper we had Costco Mancheco which is ridiculously good. Screw you Sundar!
Everything I liked about IT is turning to mush
IT makes me think of fixing printers and I hate printers possibly more than I hate Zuckerberg. At least a printer does something useful once in awhile 🤣
I still love tech - really I do, I think that’s why I have to point out when it get’s stupid.
Here’s some good news - AI can now solve the really hard math problems and that’s a peak into a future where it is a truly useful tool for science https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-math-solves-erdos-problem-openai-c4029e84?st=v7tQWi
I attended I/O once and came away with two conclusions -
1) engineers are optimists, and 2) nobody can predict which demo will matter five years later.
I have a theory about the glasses.
People will tolerate a lot from a phone because it stays in their pocket. Glasses sit on your face and become part of your identity. That's a much higher bar.
Happy Friday, Andrew.
perhaps a little pin like the red shirts on star-trek used to wear will be THE NEW AMAZING THING!
Remember in Office Space, Jennifer Aniston had to have a minimum 15 pieces of flair on her suspenders? Who doesn't like a little flair? I feel like the bar is lower the farther down on your body it is.
oooh - maybe a big shiny I/O belt buckle.
I remember lol
Honestly, a belt buckle might be the only form factor people haven’t managed to make socially awkward yet. Give it time.
I was at Google when Glasses 1.0 came out. A few people had them (not me). You could tell it was not catching on even within the company.
"The Singularity" might have been reinterpreted as "the machines are smarter than we are" (true for many years) instead of what Kurzweil meant, which was "we will BE machines."
Our whole beings were going to be uploaded to the Cloud and then we'd be immortal.
Never going to happen, if you ask me.
I feel like the first round of Google Glasses were juiced by a high dose of hubris from Sergey. Did you have any interactions with Sergey when you were there?
No. I saw him many times, and even pointed him out to my cousin when she came to visit. But never spoke to him.
I did speak to Eric Schmidt, though.
Eric seems very measured. I listened to a bit he did before he become CEO of Relativity Space.
oh dang, just looked him up and he was one of the commencement speakers that got booed last week for talking about AI
Thanks for writing a piece that even this Luddite found compelling. But can’t wait to get the new glasses!
How about reading the Pope’s AI thing and then letting us know what you think?
You would look marvelous in them 🤓
The Pope's encyclical on AI is 82 pages. So like any lazy nerd I asked Claude to give me a summary.
I think its a good thing and I'm impressed it was launched with one of Anthropic's founders but I doubt our Silicon Valley Tech Bros pay it much mind.
--
**Magnifica Humanitas — "Magnificent Humanity"**
*Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, released May 25, 2026*
**The Big Frame**
The core argument is that AI poses "not a technological challenge, but an anthropological one." The question isn't whether the machines work — it's what happens to humanity if we let them replace what makes us human.
**The Structure (5 chapters)**
The arc moves from diagnosis to foundation to prescription: an introduction framing the question as "Babel vs. Jerusalem" (does technology unify or fragment us?), then chapters on Catholic social doctrine as a living tradition, foundational principles like human dignity and the common good, practical applications around truth/work/children, and finally a chapter on warfare, disarmament, and multilateral governance.
**Key Arguments**
*On technology:* Paragraph 9 states the encyclical's disposition precisely: "Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice." Then the line that underpins the entire governance argument: "Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it."
*On deepfakes and synthetic media:* The encyclical argues that when machines synthesize the signals through which humans form trust, intimacy, and relationship, something happens to human communication itself — it's not just a misinformation problem, it's a categorical intrusion into something that belongs to personhood.
*On workers:* The Rerum Novarum parallel is explicit. Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical argued that factories couldn't treat workers as interchangeable inputs. Leo XIV makes the same argument about AI: it addresses the displacement of writers, coders, analysts, and others, warning against "passive consumers of unthought thoughts."
*On weapons:* The encyclical calls for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons systems operating without meaningful human oversight — not as a case-by-case ethics question, but as a categorical moral position. The Vatican's reasoning: decisions to end human life cannot be delegated to systems that cannot understand the moral weight of what they are deciding.
*On children:* The Pope argued for the preservation of a specific capacity — independent thought — that AI-saturated environments may undermine. His formulation to a stadium of teenagers: use AI "in such a way that if it disappeared tomorrow, you would still know how to think."
**The Anthropic Connection**
Chris Olah's presence on stage is legible if you know what interpretability is — he built the field of mechanistic interpretability, the attempt to understand what's actually happening *inside* AI systems. The encyclical's governance argument implicitly rests on whether AI systems can be understood well enough to govern. Olah represents the research community grappling with exactly that question.