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When economists debate the future of work, they often ask the question: what will humans’ comparative advantage be? I think the key to understanding what the future of work looks like is not, How can humans race against the machine, how can we generate slop faster than the machines can generate slop? but rather, What are the human strengths, and how can we understand what skills are going to go down in value now that AI has made them commoditized, versus what skills are going to go up in value because they are still scarce and because the machines simply aren’t very good at them yet? I’m going to introduce four ideas, or provocations, that have shaped the way that I think about AI and my own media career.

While John Brown sat in the Jefferson County Jail awaiting his execution in 1859 after his failed attempt to spark an uprising at Harpers Ferry, a local Catholic priest visited him. The priest tried to persuade Brown of slavery’s legitimacy. After all, he told Brown, in St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, “we are informed that [St. Paul] sent back the fugitive slave Onesimus from Rome to his master.”

Brown was not persuaded. But the priest’s view was typical. Reform-minded Catholics abolished slavery in the early nineteenth century in countries such as France (1794, until Napoleon reinstated slavery in French colonies in 1802), Haiti (1804), and Mexico (1829). More ultramontane nineteenth-century Catholics, though, committed to Roman authority and, suspicious of the individualism and anti-Catholicism they detected beneath some abolitionist rhetoric, defined slavery as one among many hierarchical relationships. New York’s archbishop John Hughes saw no real difference between “the relations and obligations of those who own slaves, and those who are masters of hired servants, or the parents of children.” In the United States, France, Cuba, the Philippines and much of Latin America, those Catholics rarely became abolitionists. Pope Gregory XVI declared the slave trade immoral in 1839, but slavery itself remained theoretically permissible. The Holy Office matter-of-factly noted that slavery did not contravene “natural or divine law” as late as 1866.

Leo XIII, Leo XIV’s namesake, condemned slavery in the encyclical In plurimis (1888) just after predominantly Catholic Brazil became the last major nation to abolish the institution. He did so with a theological sleight of hand, declaring that the Church had always been opposed to slavery in principle, but had been wisely working toward its abolition over eighteen centuries. He contrasted this shrewd and patient amelioration with a putative tolerance of slavery within Islam. 

This checkered history makes the two paragraphs on the Church and slavery in Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, all the more remarkable. The pope refers to the Catholic toleration of slavery as a “wound in Christian memory” and expresses “deep sorrow” for Catholic “complicity and blindness.” 

William Gibson’s The Peripheral time is the best novel of his late period, and in my view, the best novel that he’s ever written. It doesn’t have the shock value of Neuromancer (which blew my mind when I read it at the age of fifteen, in a small provincial town in Ireland). However, it’s a much better novel. The Sprawl books are all opaque and dazzling mirrorshades – the surfaces of high-gloss people reflecting the surfaces of high-gloss objects that reflect the surfaces of high-gloss people. The not-quite-science-fiction novels he was writing for a decade or two take the givens of the Sprawl books as a problem, engaging in a kind of archeology of objects and brand names, and how they reflect both the vast systems around us and our individual desires. I like them (they combine the intelligence of Don DeLillo with much of the warmth of Philip K. Dick), but I like his short book of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor even better (it’s a book full of insights, which, like Borges’ version of Kafka, generates its own predecessors). The Peripheral returns to science fiction – but a science fiction that very clearly reflects present day concerns.

Researchers have prototyped an AI-powered internet worm.