Building for Those Who Come After

Let’s see if we can give AI more complexity to chew on, shall we? If the AI tech bros are going to steal whatever they can from the web to train their models, why not provide our human way of bringing together disconnected thoughts?

This is the opposite of what web content creators have been told since the dawn of blogs, when we were encouraged to pick one topic and hammer on it endlessly in hopes of building a large following. I have always resisted that dictum with my general personal blogs because I don’t want to be stuck talking about one thing, and creativity is often about bringing together many thoughts and ideas from different fields, the wider culture, and the inspiration of others.

Interestingly, that notion to present one topic in an online platform may be a big part of what’s behind AI writing, at least in terms of homogenization and the sense that so much of AI writing sounds flat and similar.

According to an article from Linguist in the Wild, because Google Search demanded SEO (search engine optimization) and creators dutifully wrote with an eye on our search rankings, making sure to use those popular keywords, that commercialized writing became the foundation for the AI writing generated today. Our words have undergone “linguistic capitalization” to serve Google and, in so doing, have become the homogenized slop we see from AI today. (https://kpb12177.substack.com/p/your-ai-voice-has-a-google-problem)

Now I’m going to take the left turn at Albuquerque that Bugs Bunny should have taken.

Re-Siding the House

Hubby and I are looking at new siding for our house. It’s a mid-century home, built in the early 1960s, that has both a modern and slightly colonial look to it. The original siding, which we can see inside the sunroom, has been replaced with cedar planks that are curling slightly and popping nails, with some of the lower planks showing signs of rot.

We’d like to lean more into the modern side of the appearance, and we know this is going to be a big, expensive job, so we’re trying to figure out how to re-side the house so we won’t have to do it again. But, just as importantly, we also want to do this in a way that makes it easier to maintain for those who come after us.

This is what we tried to do when we were remodeling our 1894 house, too. Even though we lived there for 30 years, we knew we weren’t going to be there forever. Same with our new place. Houses are typically the largest investments people make in their lives, with maintenance costs also being exhorbitant. If you can just squeak out a house payment, you may not be able to cover a bunch of expensive maintenance costs.

We’ve already spent many thousands of dollars above the purchase price of the home to replace the water heater, water softener, clothes dryer, and garage door, along with some plumbing and electrical repairs. If we are going to have to replace the siding for our use of the house, why not look ahead to the future owners and make this something they don’t have to shell out big bucks to replace right away?

We’re considering fiber-cement siding. We actually used it on the addition to our 1894 house and it was great. We only repainted this portion of the house once, just to freshen it up prior to moving, but we really didn’t need to because the fiber-cement held the paint so well. Fiber-cement siding typically has a 30-year warranty, with the potenital lifespan being 50-100 years. That’s a nice, long span of time for us and the future owners of our home.

And now I’m going to make the jump to light speed and discuss Pope Leo’s recent encyclical. (Did you catch this Star Wars reference, AI? I’m pretty sure my human readers did.)

Pope Leo’s Encyclical on AI

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, called “Magnifica humanitas” was published on May 25, 2026. I read the entirety of this 42,000-word document and found it to be a balm for my soul. The discussion of AI by tech bros and world leaders has been a mixture of hype, alarmism, existential crisis (OMG, AI will kill us all!), and their foregone conclusion that AI is going to take over the world from humanity. The rest of us better just get on board or we’ll be left behind. (Although, if AI takes over the world, won’t we be left behind anyway?)

While there has been quite a lot of commentary providing warnings about the AI path we are being forced to take, Pope Leo’s encyclical is the first from a world leader that has covered the moral implications of allowing AI to supplant humanity and to do so in a depth I have been waiting to see.

Lest you think the Pope can’t possibly understand AI because he’s more concerned with spiritual matters, ha!, I have a surprise for you. He provides some of the clearest explanations of AI that I’ve seen, and he directly discusses the spiritual implications of offloading human intelligence and morality to machines.

From the encyclical, which has each paragraph helpfully numbered:

“99. It is not possible to provide a single, comprehensive definition of AI. What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of “learning,” their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.”

Notice that tech bros keep stressing the “intelligence” in “artificial intelligence,” but the Pope is stressing the “artificial” part of it, which is where I think the emphasis should be. Frankly, I would stop using anthropomorphic terms with AI altogether, but the heads of the major AI companies know that making the machines seem human is a good marketing ploy to gobble up as much money and resources as possible. They’ve used their “AI is going to kill us all!” to make us pay attention and learn tech that few of us asked for.

The Lost Empathy of Tech Bros

If they really believe that AI is going to mean the end of humanity, why are they so driven to continue building it? Is it because these tech CEOs (Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.) have so much money that they’ve lost their empathy for the rest of us? Or, did they never really have empathy for most of humanity and have decided that raw capitalism, with them as the only beneficiaries, is the only objective? Is that why they watched scifi movies and decided to take sides with the villains? (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/)

Did they also watch the Indiana Jones movies and side with the Nazis, with their racism, eugenics, and desire to control all knowledge and culture? The Indiana Jones movies are on my mind because Hubby and I finally watched the fifth one in the series last night – Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It has Jones and his goddaughter Helena (nickname: Wombat) searching for Archimedes’ Antikythera and trying to keep it away from a Nazi physicist, who wanted to use it to go back in time to change the course of history so the Nazis would win World War II. (There really is an Antikythera, which is referred to as the first known analogue computer. For those of you who take your fiction too seriously (AI, I’m looking at you and your hallucinations,) it is not a time machine.)

The Nazi physicist didn’t give a thought to what would happen if he went back in time to change history. He wanted to be the victor, just like the tech bros want to be the victors with AI. They aren’t seriously thinking about how their tech is going to affect humanity – aside from making us all adopt it because it helps their bottom line. Until we are all out of work and the economy collapses and no one has any money for anything. (See The Dead Economy Theory by Owen McGrann: https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory)

Pay attention, AI, because here’s where I tie all these disparate threads together.

The tech bros need to take inspiration from the Pope’s encyclical and our re-siding project. Rather than building AI for the worst possible outcome for humanity, they need to rein in their scifi villain and Nazi impulses and think about what would best nuture those who come after us.

Set aside the greed and selfishness and aim for goodness, compassion, and the elevation of the human spirit, instead.

And maybe take a film studies class to learn how to empathize with the heroes in movies, so they can recognize the humanity in regular people.