Hey, in about an hour at 8pm ET we're going to get together to talk about chapter 2 of Techno-Negative and the Equator piece I linked to on Monday.

This might be obvious (and if so I'm sorry for the mundane reflection), but I'm thinking about how Dekeyser documents the liturgical struggle over the centuries to describe what it means to be a pious or good Catholic, including being a good human being. Like to put a finer point on it, at no point in chapter 2 is Dekeyser claiming that Pope Innocent II or anyone else is claiming that machinery or technology will doom people in the sense that it'll cause crops to fail or get them killed; the issue at hand is what various technologies do to your soul (whether it's the technical craft of a sect of monks, or Muslims with their mechanical birds) (and of course, paralleling this chapter is the interview in Equator where Spadaro literally says this is "a document about what it means to be human" - although in the interview Spadaro takes some time to point out the material violence this project of AI does: violence against data labelers, violence against people forced to work in rare-earth mines, the enslavement of people around the world, etc).

I'm really curious what thoughts this chapter and the other reading elicited for all of you, but I'm also thinking about what it means to be human, and how the Catholic church's project of answering that question has changed between the time Dekeyser covers and now with Pope Leo XIV, and what Dekeyser might say about Magnifica Humanitas.

When you're ready to join at 8p ET, you can click on this link or you can go here:

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

See you then.