Quote of the Day (Laurence Sterne, on Error and Human Nature)

“The laws of nature will defend themselves;⁠—but error⁠…error, Sir, creeps in thro’ the minute holes and small crevices which human nature leaves unguarded.” —Anglo-Irish novelist and clergyman Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759)

And these days, with all the attempts to make human labor obsolete, error creeps into AI, too. 

Quote of the Day (Damon Beres, on a New, ‘More Actively Anti-Social’ Digital Era)

“[W]hat is now unfolding...is the beginning of a new digital era, more actively anti-social than the last. Generative AI will automate a large number of jobs, removing people from the workplace. But it will almost certainly sap humanity from the social sphere as well. Over years of use—and product upgrades—many of us may simply slip into relationships with bots that we first used as helpers or entertainment, just as we were lulled into submission by algorithmic feeds and the glow of the smartphone screen. This seems likely to change our society at least as much as the social media era has.”— American tech journalist and editor Damon Beres, “Dispatches: Get a Real Friend,” The Atlantic, December 2025

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Pope Leo XIV, on ‘Standards for Discernment’ in Evaluating AI)

“We cannot condone naive enthusiasms, nor fuel unfounded fears. Instead, let us establish standards for discernment — the dignity of the human person, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, care for our common home and peace — and let us translate these standards into practices.”—Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), https://www.vatican.va/, released May 15, 2026

In my post two weeks ago on Pope Leo’s apology for the Church’s stand on slavery over the centuries, I promised to discuss his much-anticipated encyclical, or formal papal pastoral letter, on artificial intelligence. That time has arrived.

When you consider the upcoming stakes for AI (one analyst I heard this past said it had greater potential to affect humanity than space exploration), there has been precious little time devoted to how to ensure it serves rather than degrades humanity.

By reminding tech lords, legislators, and ordinary citizens of that basic principle, Leo’s examination of this new force in our lives can potentially kick-start and even frame the debates that should be taking place now in the public square.

Fully cognizant of AI’s potential benefits, Leo is anything but a technological Cassandra. (Though predictably, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has turned up its nose at the pope’s urging to install brakes on the runaway technology, with op-ed contributor Louise Perry snidely asking, “Does the Pope Use Air Conditioning”?)

At the other end of the political spectrum, some have written that Leo has not gone far enough in denouncing the ills now becoming apparent in AI.

But his caution only enhances his case that this new technology cannot develop without safeguards that rest on human morality, and in particular on the Catholic Church’s notions on the market economy, technology, and social justice dating back to the groundbreaking encyclical of his predecessor and namesake Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891).

Leo XIV has called for measures ensure the dignity of work in the face of AI, including regulating private companies’ AI development and retraining workers whose jobs are threatened. He has also advocated for critical thinking education about the technology.

It’s not just the danger to livelihoods that concerns the Vatican, however, but also AI’s potential misuse for modern warfare:

“The growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control. This violates the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defense. For this reason, the development and use of AI in warfare must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms.”

In addition, the encyclical raises the alarm about transhumanism, or enhancing human beings through technologies, and posthumanism, which, imagines “a hybrid of human beings, machines and the environment.”

The ultimate impact of these two forces, according to the encyclical, could be to make it “easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy…placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species.”

As Fordham Univ. papal expert David Gibson’s op-ed last month in The New York Times observed, Magnifica Humanitas has arrived at a “propitious moment,” when “The disruptions of the post-liberal world and the threats posed by A.I. have led many cultural conservatives to make economic justice a priority.”

Even President Trump, who early in his second term likened placing limits on high tech to restricting the growth of a baby, felt compelled to sign an executive order early this month calling for AI companies to voluntarily provide the federal government access to “covered frontier models” for a cybersecurity review up to 30 days before their planned release to “other trusted partners.” It came amid sudden alarm that some powerful AI models autonomously identify and exploit hidden vulnerabilities in real-world software.

It will be up to the tech barons whether they will enter into dialogue with the pope and other advocates for a more deliberate, regulated AI pace or if they will continue to proceed with no guardrails. But Leo has spelled out the moral stakes in no uncertain terms.

Quote of the Day (Josh Tyrangiel, on AI and Irresponsible American Elites)

“America would be better off if its elites could act responsibly without being terrified. If CEOs remembered that citizens are a kind of shareholder, too. If economists tried to model the future before it arrives in their rearview mirror. If politicians chose their constituents' jobs over their own. None of this requires revolution. It requires everyone to do the jobs they already have, just better.”—American journalist Josh Tyrangiel, “What’s the Worst That Could Happen? AI and the Future of Work,” The Atlantic, March 2026

Quote of the Day (John Webster, on the Treacherous Nature of Prosperity)

“Prosperity doth bewitch men, seeming clear;

  But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near.”—English Jacobean playwright John Webster (c. 1578 – c. 1632), The White Devil (1612)
 
Only a couple of years after William Shakespeare’s younger colleague in the London theater community, John Webster, passed away, Europe witnessed what is believed to be the world’s first speculative “bubble”: the Dutch Tulip Mania, in which investors bought flowers not for their beauty, but for the thought that their prices would continue their upward climb.
 
If only Webster, with his concern for intrigue, corruption, and revenge, could have lived to see that! But he might have had even more material for his macabre tragedies if only he could see how corporate CEOs are now gauging the possibilities associated with high tech, including robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and cryptocurrency.
 
As the American journalist and podcaster Derek Thompson noted in early October, it’s estimated that tech companies will spend about $400 billion in 2025 on infrastructure to train and operate AI models. Investor and author Paul Kedrosky told Thompson that he expected that AI would represent “a diversion of capital away from manufacturing in the United States” similar to the impact of the telecom industry on manufacturing in the 1990s.

Yesterday, Alex Carchidi of The Motley Fool, observing that recent troubles faced by Bitcoin don’t yet qualify as a “crash,” still pointed to disquieting trends that have fueled bearish forecasts, including the Trump administration’s trade policies, naggingly high inflation, the government shutdown, and the uncertainty resulting from the government’s late release of critical economic data.

Even if all the productivity gains predicted in the wake of AI come to pass, who will buy the resulting goods and services if people are out of work? An August blog post from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests that “we may be witnessing the early stages of AI-driven job displacement. Unlike previous technological revolutions that primarily affected manufacturing or routine clerical work, generative AI can target cognitive tasks performed by knowledge workers—traditionally among the most secure employment categories.”

In Donald Trump, tech billionaires have a President ready to do whatever he can to loosen oversight that they believe unduly restrains them. They may come to regret deeply their unruly greed.

Quote of the Day (Jonathan Zittrain, on Problems With AI Being ‘Excited and Very Agreeable’)

“They have been tuned to be really nice and really excited and very agreeable, which means they will agree with almost anything. … This way of being, it has no recollection — it’s stateless. … It is trusting the user to be honest about what happened, and then it goes up to something it didn’t do, and provides an explanation for the thing it didn’t do with all of the gravity that it can for a fable, and this is pervasive.” — American professor of Internet law Jonathan Zittrain quoted by Liz DeLillo, “Jonathan Zittrain Discusses Governance, Eccentricities of AI,” The Chautauquan Daily, Aug. 21, 2025

I thought of Zittrain’s warning (which I heard while on vacation at the Chautauqua Institution last month) when I came across a New York Times article from early August about how chatbots can go into a delusional spiral.

A “sycophantic improv machine” led, Kashmir Hill and Dylan Freedman reported, a Canadian corporate recruiter with no history of mental illness to believe for a while that he had “discovered a novel mathematical formula, one that could take down the internet and power inventions like a force-field vest and a levitation beam.” This is exactly the kind of “really nice and really excited and very agreeable” mechanism that Zittrain spoke about.

Who knows what will happen with people less skeptical and more open to illusions?

I have problems with "Real Time" host Bill Maher, but I nodded in agreement when last month he took to task those who love this new state of affairs:

"People don't read anymore, they ask their Chatbot the question and sometimes it's right and sometimes it isn't. But what it always is, is a f--king a-- kisser. You literally can not ask it a question so stupid it won't respond 'great question.' 'Can I drink milk if it's lumpy? Great question!'"

(The image of Jonathan Zittrain accompanying this post was taken at Cambridge on Dec. 1, 2018, by Joi Ito and posted on Flickr.)

Quote of the Day (Peggy Noonan, on the Fallout From the Growth of AI)

“My very human prediction: The spectacular costs associated with AI [i.e., unemployment, shifts in insurance and retirement income] will force a debate on the sharing of its profits. The wealthy and powerful who own the AI companies won’t like that. But those who wished and failed to see the social media companies declared a public utility 10 years ago, and who drew support from the populist left and populist right—they would like that a lot. This will become one of the great political battles of the late 2020s and beyond.”—Former Presidential speechwriter and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Peggy Noonan, “AI Is Here, and a Quiet Havoc Has Begun,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 9-10, 2025

Quote of the Day (Sam Altman, on AI and the Future of Jobs)

“A lot of people working on AI pretend that it's only going to be good; it's only going to be a supplement; no one is ever going to be replaced. Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop."— OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quoted by Ross Andersen, “Inside the Revolution at OpenAI,” The Atlantic, September 2023

Will someone please tell me what’s going on here?

I’m not talking about AI as such—most of the people I know are at least cautiously concerned about its implications, even its advocates—like Sam Altman, who, in his interview with Ross Andersen, didn’t know exactly where it would lead to except “a new kind of society.”

No, I’m talking about what is going on with Altman himself and the company he turned into a Wall Street darling.

This past Friday, its board of directors explained on a blog post that he had not been “consistently candid in his communications.” It seems that, while fully expecting that other people would be losing their jobs because of the technology he pioneered, he’d be out of his own much sooner.

In the current climate of corporate upheaval, more than a few people reading the board’s cryptic but dangerous-sounding mistake might be forgiven for speculating that Altman had inflated current financial results or projections, or, like so many testosterone-turbocharged executives in recent years, had started a personal relationship with an employee and thus violated norms evolved in the wake of the #MeToo movement. 

Evidently this wasn’t the case—the company’s chief operating officer sent a note to staff on Saturday that no “malfeasance” was involved.

But if those scenarios didn’t lead to Altman’s ouster, what did?

Oh, yes—and about that ouster? That expectation, it turns out, may be slightly premature. 

According to a report airing less than 48 hours later from The New York Times, Altman is talking about staying on as CEO, even if it means a restructuring of the group that forced him out and disrupted a tech industry that can’t stop talking about how it’s going to disrupt everything.

I tell you, I haven’t done such a double-take over news since George Steinbrenner got rid of Billy Martin (the first of five times The Boss canned him or forced him to quit!) as manager of the New York Yankees, only to have him introduced four days later at Old Timers’ Day as the team’s rehired skipper for the 1980 season. (You can read all the details of those doings from The Bronx Zoo in my blog post from a decade ago.)

Altman has vowed, MacArthur-like, to return. But to reconquer what he lost, he’ll have to execute something faster than the general’s island-hopping strategy. Maybe AI has a ready-made plan for him?

(The image accompanying this post, showing Sam Altman during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 at Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, was taken on Oct. 3, 2019 by TechCrunch.)

Quote of the Day (J.J. Cooper, on the Prospect of Artificial Intelligence in Baseball)

“Baseball is a sport where dozens of professional teams around the world, hundreds of colleges, thousands of high schools and various other organizations are all looking for an edge. AI will be a tool in a savvy team's toolbox. Or more accurately, it will be a full tool shed. It's the next step in the revolution that has already transformed baseball.”—J.J. Cooper, “The Coming Revolution,” Baseball America, May 2023

As soon as I read Cooper’s article, I wanted to shout “No-o-o-o!!!!” with the same force as characters in the Star Wars saga do when they witness the violent death of heroes. Because I’m afraid that artificial intelligence (AI) will result in the demise of my favorite sport.

As Cooper notes, AI is the next logical step in the data-analytics disruption of baseball in the last two decades. You know: the one that gave us launch angle, exit velocity, spin rates, induced vertical breaks, vertical approach angle, and other terms too numerous and awful to mention. (Just typing these gives me vertigo.)

You know what followed after baseball handed the game over to Oakland A’s “Moneyball” wizard Billy Beane and the band of byteheads who followed in his wake: lower stolen base totals, fielding shifts, more sluggers with embarrassing strikeout totals, starting pitchers lucky to last five innings, more relievers inserted at will—in short, a longer, slower, duller game.

This past winter, the Lords of Baseball took the game back a step from the brink with new rules that encouraged base stealing, increased batting averages, and reduced the likelihood of interminable contests.

But now, I read in Cooper’s piece that AI has the potential to affect America’s Pastime in multiple areas on and off the field, including:

*biomechanics

*pitching coordination

*computerized vision models

*player valuation

*statistical projections

*draft interviews

*medical reports

*psychological testing

*marketing

*ticket pricing

*scouting

(With that last use, just think: In the not-so-distant future, if Hollywood remakes Clint Eastwood’s Trouble With the Curve, his cranky old scout will see his job endangered not by failing eyesight but by AI.)

Baseball is a sport in which men’s deeds create mighty myths. Do we really want all that replaced by machines?

(For more information on AI—including a groan-inducing, ChatGPT-created Q and A on player evaluation capabilities—see Adam Salorio’s February post from Medium.)

Quote of the Day (Josh Cohen, on How AI and Robotics Subvert Work’s Value)

“The rise of robotics and AI raises the urgent question of how to live without work. What makes this prospect so daunting is that we've come to equate our humanity with the capability for productivity and purposeful motion. The concept that the value and which means of our existence is barely validated by what we obtain is what makes it so troublesome to expertise an actual sense of peace. We really feel embarrassed and self-conscious to be seen doing nothing.” —Psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, “How to Avoid Burnout Over Christmas,” The Financial Times, Dec. 22-23, 2018