Faster, Please! · Economics & Policy
TIER 4 Wed, 27 May 2026 23:47:25 +0000
Where Leo's vision for AI aligns with the Up Wing project--and where it parts ways ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- _This is a free edition of_ _**Faster, Please!**_ ,_my regular newsletter about creating a better America and world by accelerating scientific discovery, technological progress, and commercial innovation. (And creating a pro-progress culture.) If you enjoy it and find it helpful in any way, please consider buying a subscription to the twice-weekly regular issues that include in-depth essays, Q &As with smart people, and summaries of relevant news stories. _ Upgrade to paid * * * # ✝️✨ On Pope Leo's AI encyclical letter ### Where Leo's vision for AI aligns with the Up Wing project--and where it parts ways | | James Pethokoukis --- | May 27 --- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- | | ---|---|--- **My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:** The aspects of Pope Leo's _Magnifica Humanitas_ that resonated most with me did so as a Christian Up Winger. The parts that made me sigh were those that irked me as a market- and growth-oriented analyst. Let's start with the former. The more-than-42,000-word encyclical laid out a vision for keeping humanity at the center of the Age of AI. As I explain in my book, the term "Up Wing" is a philosophical framing from futurist writer F. M. Esfandiary, He's widely considered the godfather of modern transhumanism, a movement seeking to use technology to enhance our current biological capabilities and then transcend them. This would be a redesigned species of limitless potential. Technology would allow humanity to outgrow old political systems, old social institutions, and eventually even old biological limits. The pope's rejection of that view, even as updated in today's Silicon Valley, shouldn't be surprising. For most Christians, authentic transcendence doesn't come from AI-enabled human optimization project but through a relationship with God. From the encyclical: > We can embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities, provided that we do not abandon the very essence of our humanity, namely the capacity for relationship and love. This leads to a crucial question: if an authentic 'more than human' exists, where is it to be found? The Christian faith answers that question by pointing to a fulfillment that does not arise from a technological divinization, but through God's grace received in Christ. That works for me, both as a Christian (though not a Roman Catholic) and as a techno-optimist. My Up Wing project isn't a utopian effort to create some perfected, evolved humanity. It's far less grandiose: the use of public policy--responding to the preferences of society operating through a liberal democratic government and market economy--for the exact goals the pope stated: the alleviation of suffering and the unlocking of new possibilities. In that project, technological advances will often play a big role in achieving a wealthier, healthier world, though not a perfect one. Recall my idea for a Genesis Clock, the Up Wing counterpart to the Doomsday Clock. Instead of suggesting how close humanity is to the Midnight of our existence, this symbolic timepiece would suggest how close we are to the Dawn of a new age of abundance and opportunity. And instead of vibes, the Genesis Clock would have more substantive metrics: How close are we to extending the average human lifespan to 120? Do we have a cancer vaccine and a cure for Alzheimer's? Can we deflect a larger asteroid or comet headed toward Earth? Is even the poorest nation no poorer than the average economy of 2000? Is even the least free nation as free as the average nation of 2000? I don't think the pope would have problems with any of those goals of less suffering and more opportunity. * * * I am, however, less enamored with how _Magnifica Humanitas_ ultimately reflects a far more cautious--and at times skeptical--view of economic growth and the dynamism that drives it. The pope consistently presents AI-driven automation through the lens of social disruption and moral risk. He warns that a society with high technological sophistication but insufficient employment risks "human and cultural impoverishment" and insists that "the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs." Is that the most likely scenario? The document gives too little weight to the historical pattern whereby disruptive general-purpose technologies--steam power, electrification, the PC, the internet--eventually created new industries, new forms of work, and dramatically higher living standards despite sometimes painful transitions. My baseline expectation is that we will see a repeat of that pattern. And it's not just me. A recent survey of economists and AI experts found that both groups, assuming a rapid-AI scenario, anticipated a richer, faster-growing economy but neither one of science-fictional abundance nor mass unemployment. This was still a recognizable world that required a recognizable policy toolkit to address societal problems. Pope Leo also raises concerns with a Down Wing intellectual pedigree that has proven quite harmful to the aforementioned alleviation of suffering and the unlocking of new possibilities for more than half a century. > Having considered the issues of responsibility and governance of AI, we must now return to our central question: what does it mean to safeguard our humanity? The risk extends beyond the misuse of certain technologies. 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. Both that passage and a few other sections reminded me of the "Mega-Machine," technology philosopher Lewis Mumford's term for modern technological civilization--a vast, hierarchical, centralized system in which humans become mere components, much like the laborers who built the pyramids. (Pope Leo frets about a technocratic paradigm in which workers become "mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.") Mumford saw postwar America--with its military-industrial complex, corporate bureaucracies, and technocratic management--as the latest and most powerful incarnation of this ancient pattern. But the Mega-Machine thesis underestimated how disruptive and decentralizing capitalism could be. Mid-century critics like Mumford imagined giant bureaucratic systems steadily absorbing freedom and dynamism. Instead came personal computing, the internet, startup culture, and repeated waves of creative destruction that toppled incumbents from IBM to AT&T. As others have said--and I agree--the Vatican should hire better economists. Upgrade to paid Share * * * **On sale everywhere by James Pethokoukis:**_**The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised**_ | | ---|---|--- You're currently a free subscriber to Faster, Please!. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid --- | | | Like --- | | Restack --- (C) 2026 James Pethokoukis 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe