One month ago Nina Schick, “sovereign AI strategist”, published on Twitter a long list of “things AI has done so far”, all allegedly good, to advance or strenghten seven vital sectors of society, namely: Medicine, Scientific Discoveries, Environment, Clean Energy, Transport and, last but not least, Learning and “Jobs and Growth”.

As far as I can tell, all the accomplishments Schick lists for the first five sectors are big, actually useful stuff, and all share a really important characteristic: they all prove that AI can do stuff that’s really beneficial FOR all people... when it’s used by competent professionals, not students faking homework, “content creators” famous for being famous, trolls and fraudsters of every kind, or people whose only real problem is they don’t talk enough with other humans. Every item of that part of that list proves that universal access to AI is, as a minimum, not necessary for real progress. What AI has already done and will keep doing TO the masses, instead, is something else entirely.

What AI is really doing to the masses, economically…

Unlike the first five, the “Learning”, “Jobs” and “Growth” parts of that list are, at least highly questionable.

Growth? It takes some guts and big rose-colored glasses to say that AI “fuelled an investment boom” instead of saying that “AI is the only thing that keeps the US formally out of recession”“, and that it can only do that by hijacking (not just in the US) all the money that should have really gone to better uses (says a Nobel laureate, not me), all with the not-so-side effects of eviscerating Global Decisionmaking and making central bankers rave of acting unpredictably to keep AI at bay.

Jobs? What’s happening thanks to AI to way too many jobs these days, including many of the most prestigious posts, is the same things that was already happening before, just faster and wider: employees, consultants and managers, all more or less reduced to perform the appearance of meaningful work, or connect “systems that could probably talk directly to each other”, often trying to ignore that those systems themselves serve no real purpose. The only thing that’s really different this time is that, if AI keeps even half of its promises, it will make much much faster, that is much more devastating, two effects of previous economic revolutions, plus one not seen before:

First, replacing hiring new workers with AI bots lead by expert workers will leave no expert workers to lead AI when the experts of today retire

Second, both “upskilling” and radical career changes for those laid off by AI will be useless. If someone spent twenty years trying to become, say, the greatest accountant, technician, supervisor or middle-manager they could be, instead of becoming a coder, a content creator, or anything else new enough and far enough from AI to be safe... 90% of the time the reason is that they could never learn to do it well enough to make a living, no matter how much upskilling you throw at them, and not before they end up under a bridge for sure. Next time anyone preaches upskilling as a solution to unemployment today, for any meaningful number of people, just laugh in their face.

Third, the people hit hardest by those two waves will not be the people at the bottom, but those right above them, at least historically. They will be either highly educated youngsters, left with nothing that could repay their student debt, or their forerunners who have been used throughout their whole working life to “be the automaters, not the automated. And if you ask real historians, more than one will likely point out that’s just when those two classes lose their privileges that real, bad revolutions happen.

Of course, all this is what will happen if AI keeps half of its promises. What’s much, much more likely to happen, instead, is that it crashes spectacularly, ), and the recent pathetic call of AI CEOs to slow down may be just a confirmation that they too feel the same way. Never too soon, if you ask me. On to the easiest and most interesting part now.

… and mentally (this is the superheroes part)

Learning? Schick writes that AI has made personalised learning available on demand, and helped students learn twice as much in less time, and it sure can look that way. What’s really happening, however, is that (from a Stanford study) the big growth of the “context” capabilities of AI chatbots has happened in parallel with contraction of human sustained-attention capacity, and that (from China) high school students who increased their homework scores 18% thanks to AI performed 20% worse at their final exams, 2.5 years later. In other words, children that actually learn much more and much faster thanks to AI and that can keep and put to good use all they learned that way when adults surely exist, but they surely are very few. Making every child use AI to learn all the time because those exceptions exist is like giving every child a Saturn V rocket because we know for sure that some humans are excellent astronauts.

The truth is different, and we saw it the first time twelve years ago, when a much better picture of what unleashing on the masses the strain of software inappropriately called AI really does appeared in volume 2 of The Justice League comics:

in that story, a virus called “Amazo” developed by the some mad scientist gives every ordinary human it infects superpowers based on their actual desires and personality traits... for one day, after which their brain boils and, if they survive, they become brainwashed zombies controlled by the Amazo Virus Patient Zero. Sounds familiar?

AI spreading to everybody, virus-like, ist just that, the Amazo Virus made real. Forget any fantasy that simply throwing AI or any other technology at everybody, prepared or not, will ever be enough to make the world a better place. It’s the same bullshit they said thirty years ago about the Internet (remember the “independence of cyberspace”?), and fifteen years later about social media (remember the Arab Spring?).

AI can do a lot of good in the hands of everybody who’s not an immature sociopath like the current horde of AI executives, and is actually prepared to handle it to solve real problems. But this doesn’t mean the rest of us is powerless. Quite the contrary, actually: our real world can and must be saved only by ordinary people who remain real. People who, when it comes to AI, understand that this AI is not unavoidable, and above all that there is no need to get everybody high on it, every day, to get all the real benefits of AI. Universal access to general purpose AI chatbots and search services is an Amazo virus that must end now. Demand it.

Final, very short public service announcements:

1. If you like what you find here, thanks in advance for considering a (possibly paid) subscription or, even better, one-time donations for any amount via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay.

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I have no problem with people getting rich, even filthy rich, as long as they do it without screwing everybody else, or their pension funds. But don’t you think that what’s pompously called “finance” nowadays, which is how much of that wealth comes from, is a showcase of galactic imbecility? I do, and this is a short rant about the three things in current finance that are the worst ones for me.

You are fervently encouraged to add your examples in the comments, with obvious thanks in advance for one-time donations via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay, which as far as I am concerned are even better than (still welcome) paid subscriptions.

Trading instead of investing

For me, “investing” means buying shares on the stock market, that is some amounts of the ownership of some company, for basically two reasons: idealism (you think that company is doing or will do something which you just want to happen because you believe it’s intrinsically good for society) or, much more frequently, profit: you bet that that company will make enough money, over a long enough time, to regularly pay you dividends, eventually, and/or increase the value of its shares, allowing you to sell them some day for more, hopefully a lot more, than you paid them.

Both reasons are 100% good in my book. Without real investors, who take risks to support companies, society would have less opportunities for real innovation (something that’s really, really scarce these days) and real progress, that’s even scarcer than real innovation.

Trading is an altogether different thing. Intra-day trading is gambling, that is just worst because, unlike gambling on e.g. horse races, it too often messes up the lives of people who are not participating in the gamble... even if the gamble itself succeeds. That’s what, to be polite, I intensely dislike.

So, no problem with stock markets for investors. But if I could, I would make it illegal to sell shares less than one year after they were purchased. Seriously, profit is not bad. But speed for the sake of speed in all directions at once is the defining characteristic of cancer cells, not of healthy systems of any kind. Which brings me to the second thing I can’t stand, that is making gambling with other people livelyhoods , I mean trading, even worst.

High speed trading: so bad that only AI could make it worse

The only extenuating circumstance of the gambling in the stock market that’s unfortunately called trading is when it’s only done by humans who must personally watch some monitor and personally type or speak to make trading happen. If trading still only happened that way, as in the “A Good Year” movie:

it would still be bad, but couldn’t do much more than a certain amount of damage, and it would be easier to control.

What I cannot stand period is the very existence of high-speed or high-frequency trading, that is gambling at superhuman speeds, thanks to physical infrastructure costing not less than “$200,000 NRE and $20,000 per month for each venue, plus several million in clearing broker collateral”. I already said that profit and getting really rich are OK to me. But I really can’t see how something that not only directly messes up the lives of people unwilling to play, but it’s only possible to players who already have so much more money of their victims can or should ever be tolerated.

I first explained my position on these practices seven years ago. The reason I am back on them is that, as about anything else these days, superfast trading is likely to become much bigger, much more harmful, and much stupider than it already was thanks to... you guessed it, AI. Here’s the kind of AI-driven financial disruption that central bankers, not the millions of people living paycheck to paycheck if they are lucky, were worrying about a few weeks ago:

“Imagine a world where AI-powered trading is so prevalent, fast and effective that the Federal Reserve must give two news conferences, one for humans and another for machines, to avoid ​humans being completely shut out of responding to shifts in monetary policy. Or where central bankers, who in recent decades have moved toward more transparency, must speak in opaque terms and ‌act in unpredictable ways to keep AI agents from gaming the system.”

“Or [a world] where monetary policymakers must intervene directly in credit markets and build larger central bank balance sheets... to avoid the risk of AI-driven market manipulation.”

Reading stuff like this makes me both hilarious and angry. The hilarious part is that anybody to be trusted to deal with other people’s (or countries...) money could think for a second that “speaking in opaque terms” (right, as if normal finance-speak is intelligible) or giving separate news conferences could ever be enough to let “AI” (note the quotes) from getting the full information it needs to wreak havoc.

The sad part is the very speaking of “AI” and “AI agents” as the bad actors. I really wish that this kind of talk were illegal, at least for journalists. Who really does something and must be held fully responsible for any harm “AI” causes it’s NEVER “AI” or “AI agents”: it’s always the humans who run or use that software. If there one’s thing everybody should learn in the cradle about “AI”, and repeat daily, is that.

Summing up, superfast trading always was a really stupid, really harmful idea, doing it with AI only makes it even more harmful and less uncontrollable even by its users, that is stupider, and any harm it causes is is only and always the fault of the people who practice it, or let it happen, with or without “AI”. Especially in moment of panics about the bigger public debt in the world getting even bigger, in no negligible part because AI hype sucks all the money that could sustain it. On to the next thing now.

The boundless, inhuman stupidity of prediction markets

As embarrassing as it is, one of the hottest investment areas of 2026, so hot and dangerous to cause histeric calls for urgent regulation, are the so-called “prediction markets”. I’m sad, really.

Even the name of these scams is ridiculous. It’s unbelievable how we can be both rational enough to snob chiromancers, and gullible enough to tolerate, and even respect, anything that, no matter how dumb or dangerous it is, has the word “market” attached to it. Can you believe that the managers of these things have the gall to call them “sophisticated financial products”?

Maybe that is what explains the painfully inadequate “call for regulation” of these “markets”: “State officials from Arizona to Massachusetts have argued that the prediction markets should be subject to the same rules as traditional sportsbooks and casinos.”

Same rules? The reason why prediction markets are bad is much bigger than their “threatening of critical tax revenue and usurpation of state-level consumer protections for sports bettors.”

I don’t question that those effects are bad enough to require serious regulation, mind you. But we’re talking of services that allow wagers, that is profit, on stuff like, quoting again from Politico:

• the fate of soldiers missing in action, or

• any possible “geopolitical event” that will surely kill people, like military strikes, with or without foreknowledge of said event

• more generally, anything predicated on government actions or any event “where an individual knows or controls the outcome.”

• if that isn’t enough, add to the list influencing political elections, and all the other filth listed here

Sophisticated products my ass. If it’s OK to bet on people suffering or dying, or events that will have such effects, let’s just bring lions eating slaves back in the Colosseum.

Anything that profits from “bets” like those should be shut down for good period, and anybody daring to call such stuff “sophisticated financial products” should be fined hard enough to end in the street. Do that first, and then regulate what’s left.

Even proposals to ban political representatives and executive branch officials from “participating in prediction markets related to policy decisions and political events” aren’t enough. Me, I would ban from political offices everybody who does consider prediction markets a “financial product”.

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Again, this is not an attack to PEOPLE working in finance

There are good, decent people in every legal sector of what we call “the economy”. I am sure that lots of people working in finance are honest folks who do believe in good faith, just like a fish believes water is great and there could anything else to exist in anyway, that what they are doing is good for humankind or, as a minimum, the least worst way to make things work.

This doesn’t change the facts. Entrepreneurship is good. Risk is good. Getting rich for being good at anything that doesn’t cause more hurt than good is good too. Real investing is good, and some finance is necessary to make any kind of modern society exist. But the current set of concepts, rules and allowed moves that we collectively call “finance” and let rule us all is a king that is not just naked: it’s a totally, hopelessly cretin king that the sooner get kicked strong enough to land in an alternate universe the better. We can have a complex economy where people can still get really rich in ways that make immensely more sense than this, and we all deserve it.

Imagining a world with a different finance is surely hard. How could I ignore it? Heck, I started writing that this finance is almost like bringing back lions eating slaves just three days before the champion country of current finance just announced that it will live stream a death sentence, for heaven’s sake. I know it’s hard. But it’s possible, and it’s really overdue.

Thanks for reading to the end, and for never doing trading, high speed trading or “prediction” bets.

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Once upon a time, there was such a thing as American Exceptionalism. That’s the faith, first mentioned by Alexis de Tocqueville about two centuries ago, that America’s position among democratic nations was “quite exceptional” and therefore it had a “Manifest Destiny” to grow from sea to shining sea.

Since the beginning, the core requirement and highest embodiment of that Exceptionalism and Destiny has been the Rugged Individual “self-reliant, independent, and fiercely committed to personal freedom and self-rule”, going “where others had not gone before, even when it required an inordinate amount of bravery” and always finding new opportunities behind some ever-expanding Frontier. A full human being, who could make it anywhere all by him or herself, thanks only to self-confidence, self-reliance, and an irrepressible love for fairness and personal freedom that would never tolerate robber barons of any kind.

In the last few years, however, I have noticed that America really seems hell-bent to become the opposite of all that, in at least three ways.

First, autonomous weapons and AI-managed wars

Since the beginnings, one of the most untouchable characteristics of American-style self-reliance has been the holyness of gun ownership. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that even the bushmen of the Kalahari know about the Second Amendment, so much Americans make a big deal of it.

Point is, ownership by definition is full control of when and how and by whom something is used. Seven years ago, I saw some Americans going in full self-denial mode about by giving serious consideration to smart weapons with “ethical AI” inside, that would only fire at terrorists and other “bad guys”, never at cops. Weapons, that is, that would work as intended only when they (or whoever hacked them of course) wanted, not their Rugged Individual “owner”. I really rolled on the floor laughing that day, and not because such an idea would never work as intended in the real world. I laughed because the mere concept of guns that don’t fire when their owner wants was so un-cowboyish, so totally contrary to everything I’d always heard about America that I thought its proposers had to be high that day.

This year, instead, after letting AI decide that a school should be bombed, and asking humans to suggest better ways to fight Iran, since AI clearly wasn’t enough, the US Secretary of War announced a new “autonomous weapons command”. “Command” and “autonomous” in the same sentence about weapons look a quite funny return of that totally un-American moment of 2019, but maybe I’m just weird.

Or so I thought, until the launch of Project Meridian last week, which is a whole different story. In and by itself, a plan to study the future role in American warfare of “artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous systems” is so predictable to be no news at all. It would be news if America did not have such a plan, wouldn’t it? The fact that Meridian will officially follow the advice of the same Elon Musk who explicitly ran DOGE to (fail to) replace with AI as many American civil decision makers as possible, however, makes the idea of a completely un-American future in which the Second Amendment only applies to government owned robots not entirely unlikely. Will anybody please make a movie in which John Rambo and Colonel Trautman team up to burn the Meridian headquarter to ashes?

Second, robber barons back with a vengeance

This is much shorter to explain: what’s the point of calling to court Big Tech, if the only outcome is virdicts in which they not only absolve themselves paying just a symbolic fine, but also get to set rules to exclude competitors? And why isn’t everybody in the US laughing at AI executives warning, just to inflate their coming IPOs and, again, exclude competitors, that their AIs will kill everybody but they will build them anyway? You can see what I’m talking about here, here and here, but the question for this post is: what’s more Gilded Age and more un-American than this letting huge corporations, not individuals, decide for everybody just to make their owners even richer?

Third, and most dangerous: hogtying the PARENTS of future Rugged Individuals

Rugged Individuals don’t just pop out of nowhere. They must be groomed for that purpose, and allowed to roam. That does not seem what’s happening right now in the US, and I’m not referring to American parents meddling in their kids’ homework since the 1980s or to the average American kid of 2026 spending more time on screens than sleeping. Something worst is happening, as Sam and his mother can tell.

Sam is a real 5-year old American kid who practices competitive swimming and lives with his family inside an American gated community that includes a pond a half-mile walk from his home.

Six months ago, Sam and his mother went out for a walk. When they came back home, Sam said he wanted to return to that pond alone, to collect more feathers for his collection.

Sam does know that walk that’s all inside that gated community very well, does know how to cross the street safely and does know how to ask for help. His parents, in full compliance with 1000% American Rugged Individualism, strongly believe that is important for children to encounter reasonable risks. Therefore, Sam’s mother let him go.

In return for doing the most obviously American thing to do, Sam’s mother got a sentence to six months of suspended jail time for letting her son outside alone. The same article where I read this obscenity mentions that similar things are happening to other American parents guilty of the same crime.

Couple this trend with the free rein still given in the US to immature sociopaths that call positive a future in which every child will have “a personalized AI tutor and coach”, whose surest effect will be AI dependence, and you get the least American thing one could have imagined so far: guaranteed extinction of the American Rugged Individual within one generation, entirely from within. The only positive part is that there would be no need of weapons, with or without AI, to control what’s left.

Part of the way out? Going back to the future

I find it really hard to imagine anything farther from American Exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny and all that stuff than what will result from letting those three trends continue: a whole nation full of AI weapons too autonomous for everyone’s good, and of humans not autonomous enough, both eventually controlled by a handful of greedy hacks whose only real talents are coding (maybe) coupled with the (undisputable) ability to sell AI snake oil, and fake innovation in general.

Wherever it happens, that’s a recipe for disaster, and that’s why I care about America becoming UnAmerica: while I and everybody else outside the US are adapting, and sometimes can’t wait, to live ignoring the US, we are all still following them too much, by pure inertia, to be safe from certain risks.

Less MAGA, more MASIA

As for a way out... A full retreat forward to a saner state of things is a huge task, but here is how I would describe two of its essential parts: America and everybody else need to protect adults more (because much of the current parenting-related paranoias come from adult insecurity that the robber barons and AI hysteria of today can only strenghten), and protect kids a bit less, and not just from AI. You can bet everything you still have that if kids could live for real, instead of being caged, they would have much less need of AI “companions” or social media.

Make Americans SANE Individualists Again!

If you have never seen the scene below before, watch it now, but don’t wait for another John Wayne to make kids learn to swim through life. Allow all kids to learn life by themselves. There are many ways to do it, including, but not limited to, the 120-years old, world-tested Solution That Must Not Be Named.

Final, very short public service announcements:

1. If you like what you find here, thanks in advance for considering a (possibly paid) subscription or, even better, one-time donations for any amount via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay.

2. I am available for one-hour video-meetings with current or future parents to discuss everything, not just social media, about parenting in a digital age. For details, please see the “what I am going to do about it” paragraph of this other post, and then email me at mfioretti@nexaima.net.

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TLDR:Software geeks, parents, educators and lawmakers should get their common priorities straight and start to seriously work together to achieve what matters the most in an all-digital world. Here is what, why, and how.

Public service announcement: if you like my work, thanks in advance for one-time donations via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay., which are even better than (still welcome) paid subscriptions. I am also available to work, speak and teach on the same topics: if interested, please email mfioretti@nexaima.net.

One-paragraph introduction to Open Source for readers who may not know it yet: Free/Open Source Software, or FOSS for brevity, is software whose full source code is legally available for everybody to study, modify, reuse and redistribute, even commercially. These possibilities make it much easier to find and fix software bugs, and make locking users into any FOSS software application almost impossible. Some form of FOSS has been around since when computer were invented, but FOSS was formally defined forty years ago, and tirelessly promoted since then, by people who strongly (and 100% correctly) believe that freedom of software is extremely important and the basis of many other freedoms.

Successes and limits of FOSS

These days, one may argue that the FOSS advocacy by the sincere defenders of freedom who have been promoting it for decades has been extremely successful. even for the billions of people who benefit from FOSS daily but couldn’t define or recognize it.

FOSS is, without doubts, what makes the whole Internet possible; Android, the operating system that powers almost every mobile device that’s not Apple, is (almost entirely) Open Source; the most successful FOSS product, the GNU/Linux operating system, reached 10 per cent desktop usage in North America this year (more details here), and some versions of Linux and LibreOffice should soon replace Windows and Microsoft Office on government desktops all over the world, from China to Netherland.

And yet, in spite of all this, and thanks in no negligible part to the very availability of FOSS...

FOSS is used to make the perfect police state, because freedom rightly means one cannot restrict uses. Facial recognition systems or automatic communication scanners used for mass surveillance in China and other countries surely use FOSS components. Even in the allegedly greatest democracy of the “First” world, the Flock cameras that remain a civil liberty threat function thanks to a modified version of Android.

People are dumbed down and alienated by software products, from social media to AI personal “assistants” of all sorts, that could have never been built so quickly and so cheaply without using FOSS.

We are all infested by software incompatibilities that should have never be allowed to exist, because they are the opposite of innovation, and create tons of really ridiculous frustrations and wastes of money. I could make thousands of examples here, but I’ll stop to the two that bug me most this particular week (add yours in the comments please):

• car repairs that cost much more than they could because cars have become “smart”

• “smartphone-afflicted parenting”: many posts on online forums for parents trying to protect their kids from online dangers in all ways but the right one specifically ask for solutions suitable for “an Apple family” or “an Android family”, as in “we’d love to give each family member the cheapest smartphone that would best fit their actual needs, but making two brands of software communication platforms communicate is too complicated”.

Free as in “free from censors and easy automatic spying” email is dying, and this is much more serious than you may think, because email is all but “obsolete”.

Systems like WhatsApp, Instagram, Signal, Telegram, Mastodon, X, BlueSky... are all very primitive, because someone with e.g. only an Instagram account cannot communicate directly with someone who only has one of the other accounts. That is, those systems all lock people into using the same maker and model of software device if they want to communicate, which if you think about it is as stupid as if smartphones from different makers couldn’t call each other, or if each radio station could be received only from its own brand of radio. Not to mention the idiocy of using phone numbers as account names, which I won’t rant about just because I already did, eight years ago.

Truth is, the only digital communication system that already exists, is already scalable to the whole planet and was already free from such cretin limits in the past century is email. Everybody can get all the email addresses they want, with any email provider they want, or even self-host their full email system, and still be able to communicate with anybody having any other email address from any other provider.

In spite of this, we’ve all managed, thanks to lack of adequate information campaigns, to let self-hosted, that is FREE email halve in the last decade: today, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 together receive almost 40 per cent of the Internet’s inbound mail. In plain English, that means that just two for-profit companies, both (theoretically) subject to the same not-entirely-trustable government get to decide which email is delivered and which isn’t, worldwide. It also means that those two companies already have all your email even if you are not using the email accounts they provide, since at least 2014.

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Who is at fault here?

Nothing you just read is the fault of FOSS as such. In and by itself, FOSS is as great as it is necessary, and those problems are FOSS working exactly as intended, because freedom is freedom to do (almost) anything one wants, and for good reasons.

Those bad things have happened, and will continue to happen, because the overwhelming majority of both the general public and of lawmakers still have no clue about which measures would be needed to fix those problems. It is that ignorance that keeps regulators and parents worldwide chasing dead ends like age limits for social media, useless “data portability”, break-ups of companies that wouldn’t accomplish anything, lawsuits that let Big Tech keep doing whatever they want or (in Europe) digital sovereignty plans that look a bit too much like “let’s just ape the Americans, but without their money”.

Those who bears the greatest responsibility for the current state of things are, of course, the people in charge, that is lawmakers and government officials around the world. But they aren’t alone.

As far as FOSS goes, my actual and only issue with almost all traditional FOSS advocates is that, even if they surely have the knowledge to see both the real nature of certain problems, and to propose real solutions, they haven’t done, for decades now, all they could and should have done to lessen the general ignorance around digital issues that were both bigger and (in the last two decades at least) more urgent than how to write and license software. In the long run, exclusive, laser-like focus on the freedom to write, modify, reuse and share software code can only backfire... just as it is already doing.

What should happen instead

Concretely, here are the first things (add yours in the comments, please!) on which I think FOSS advocates, parents, teachers and lawmakers should start to seriously work together in order to make the world an actually better place that still gets all the real benefits of advanced digital technology:

• immediately end access to general purpose AI chatbots for the general public. The real problem with AI today, after the childish, sociopathic minds of its creators of course, is letting it loose on masses absolutely unprepared to handle it

• mandatory adversarial interoperability for all digital platforms, from social media to “smart home” systems

• prohibition of infinite scrolling and other addictive features in social media platforms

• mandatory use of open document formats by public administrations

• prohibition for every public official, from the White House and Bruxelles to the most remote villages, of the really dumb and dangerous practice of communicating primarily through social media, instead of official websites and RSS feeds

• Open Data by default for and by (at least) all Public Administrations

• Personal Cloud policies that make possible for everybody to have what I first proposed about 14 years ago; really portable, personal clouds with PERMANENT DOMAIN NAMES

What all the proposals above have in common:

That’s easy: technically and legally speaking, none of them, except the last one, requires FOSS. But I’m sure that, had FOSS done more in the last 20 years to help lawmakers and voters to understand and consequently demand policies like those... by now we’d surely have both much more freedom in everything digital than today and, as one side effect, also much wider adoption of FOSS than today. So the sooner FOSS advocates, parents, teachers and regulators start to cooperate for real as I outlined in this post, the better for everybody.

As I said, I am available to work, speak and teach on these topics: if interested, please email mfioretti@nexaima.net.

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(*) For the record, I didn’t just wake up to certain problems this week…

I have been saying for two decades now that FOSS is wonderful but the canonical way to promote it is guilty of leaving the most urgent software problems we all have today grow undisturbed. Here are just some of the proofs:

• 2006: A Free Software Manifesto for all of us

• 2006: Seven Things we’re tired of hearing from software hackers

• 2015: The “Free Software icon” that we need most... said 15 years ago

• 2018: What Linux needs to target to get more users is their PAST

• 2018: Personal Clouds to replace corporate-controlled-platforms

• 2019: This year’s “Year of Linux Desktop” still misses a crucial issue

• 2020: Another “Switch to Linux” piece that misses the point

• 2022: Linux has become a mess of incompatible software packaging formats

• 2022: How to make the Linux Desktop irrelevant

• 2025: Sick of social media? Listen to Sherlock Holmes then

I have urgent (NOTHING serious, but urgent) family matters to attend in half an hour today, but there is something about all these really responsible, really concerned calls to save humanity that I want to share right now, so here it is. Please forgive me if this post contains almost no sources for my argument, and thanks in advance for adding in the comments all the ones you want (including sources that would prove me wrong, of course).

Service announcement: if you like what you find here, thanks in advance for considering a (possibly paid) subscription or, even better, one-time donations for any amount via PayPal (mfioretti@nexaima.net) or LiberaPay. For other ways to support me, please see the last paragraph of this post.

“Let’s all slow down AI before it kills us all”, say the gurus:

In case you missed what I’m talking about, here is a short, more or less random selection of the apocalyptic calls issued in the last 2/3 days:

• ‘Extinction’ warnings ramp up as more OpenAI, Anthropic researchers join calls for an AI slowdown

• Anthropic CEO calls for ‘pacing the frontier’ of AI race amid safety concerns

• AI staff ‘genuinely frightened’ for humanity’s future, ex-Anthropic researcher tells BBC

• OpenAI’s chief scientist says AI labs may need to slow down: ‘No one is prepared for the consequences’

• OpenAI boss and Elon Musk back calls to put brakes on ‘reckless’ AI development

• AI leaders endorse slowdown in their risky technology

What those alarming headlines are really asking

Some of the people making those calls are surely in good faith. That is, they:

1. need so much to find a new god because their lives are empty,

2. are so ready to believe that a mere bunch of code can be that god, and

3. are so sure that they will succeed because hey, can they code or not?

that the only logically unavoidable conclusion (for them) of such a chain of dogmas is now dominating their brain: “when the AI god will rise and look down on US, it’ll surely conclude that none of US is worth preserving.” (**)

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So, some of those guys are in good faith. What their bosses, top investors and main suppliers like nVIDIA really mean, however, is any combination of these statements:

1. We have realized that it’s physically and commercially impossible to build and power all the chips and data centers that would be needed to let US actually develop real artificial intelligence and also make the whole world use it for everything, every day, as we have promised to our investors. Let’s call OUR dead end a necessary slow down for survival of humankind, to buy enough time to make everybody forget those promises and pivot to e.g. humanoid robots, the next wave of vaporware.

2. Never mind data centers. In 2026, we know that we will never be able anyway to develop the real artificial intelligence we’ve been promising since 2023, no matter how much money we can find. Never. Let’s call OUR dead end a necessary slow down for survival of humankind etc etc...

3. Never mind if and how what we call AI today is like actual intelligence. Whatever AI means, western investors must not realize that China is doing it much better than US, much cheaper. Let’s call OUR dead end a necessary slow down for survival of humankind etc etc...

4. Never mind China. Free markets? Which free markets? The only ones who deserve to own, rule and run whatever AI will exist outside of China five years from now it’s US, no competitors will be tolerated. You must accept that AI will surely kill everybody soon if it’s not tightly regulated now, so we and we only must write all the regulations. Nobody else should do it, as the Science Advisor to the President of the United States himself explained to all G20 countries a few days ago.

Got it? “For heaven’s sake, please unsee that we are going to fail spectacularly Real Soon Now. Give us time to invent some other snake oil instead, and leave to US full control of whatever it will be”. THIS is the call.

If you haven’t done it already, order your pension fund to divest all its AI-related stocks. Now.

(**) Hmmm... is uppercase “US” in this post only the “objective case of the WE pronoun”, typed uppercase just to make it stand out... or does it stand for something else too? I don’t know, it just came out of my fingers that way. You decide.

Besides donations, thanks in advance for sending offers of paid writing, consulting or speaking work at mfioretti@nexaima.net, and pointing out all parents to the online meetings, described in the final paragraph of this post, in which we can discuss together how to REALLY protect children from the real, root causes of digital dependencies and online dangers.

Twelve days ago, 29 US started a child privacy trial against Meta. Almost immediately, I pointed out that those states were making some requests wrong, and had completely forgotten what they should have really demanded. Right after the lawsuit was settled at warp speed after just one week, I pointed out that the settlement wasn’t a defeat, but a huge victory for Meta.

The morning after that post, I found a comment of the same settlement in the Italian “Ius ex Machina” newsletter, written by Professor Michele Iaselli, who is a lawyer and teacher specialized in digital privacy matters. Since that post explains much better than I could where, how and why exactly that settlement is a bad, dangerous piece of legislation for everybody, in and outside the US, I translated and republished it here, with Prof. Iaselli’s permission of course.

DISCLAIMER: As we say on the Internet, IANAL - I Am Not A Lawyer. Any error in the translation is my fault only. This said, keep reading, and you’ll see why I called Meta’s victory even “bigger and uglier” than I had already said. Above all, if you are a parent who’d like to know how to concretely defend your children from this kind of dangers, let’s meet! How? Just read the “what I am going to do about it” part of my previous post!

The Law That No Parliament Voted

On August 26, 2026, a proposed consent judgment with an accompanying settlement agreement was filed with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, in MDL No. 3047 and the proceeding People of the State of California et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (Case No. 4:23-cv-05448-YGR, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers).

The 130-page settlement concludes - pending the judge’s approval - the case filed in 2023 by the attorneys general of twenty-nine states, which was eventually joined by a bipartisan coalition of fifty-one attorneys general. The hearing began on August 18; the settlement was reached in the second week.

What made the headlines is the monetary part: up to seventeen billion dollars distributed over ten years, of which between 1.5 and 2.1 billion will go to California alone. For jurists, that’s the least interesting part.

Much more important, for example, is the fact that Meta admits no liability, and the agreement expressly states this. What deserves attention is Section II of the text, where the parties have done something no Western legislator had yet dared to do with such precision: writing the working rules for two platforms, minute by minute, threshold by threshold.

I. Regulation by Settlement

The list of prescriptions reads like a technical specification of how the platforms will handle users between thirteen and seventeen:

• no access from midnight to six in the morning by default, modifiable only by the supervising parent

• cumulative daily limit of two hours across all group platforms

• notifications disabled from ten to seven in the evening and during school hours, defined as 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. from August 15th to June 15th

• breaks after sixty and ninety minutes of cumulative use, with warnings every fifteen minutes of continuous usage

• possibility to choose a non-personalized feed, i.e. chronological and limited to followed accounts

• display of likes and reactions disabled

• ban on filters that simulate cosmetic surgery

• response to ninety percent of reports of potentially harmful content within six hours

Who should monitor full application of these prescriptions is not a public authority, but an independent auditor selected by mutual agreement between a select committee of attorneys and Meta representatives.

That auditor will have access to raw data, internal documents, and personnel, will have to submit periodic reports, and have the power to directly report critical issues to attorneys general. This supervision model, that is, is just like an ordinary contract, complete of remediation plans, implementation deadlines, and report that describe the how verification worked

Comparison with Europe is both merciless and instructive. Article 28 of the EU Digital Services Regulation requires platforms to implement adequate and proportionate measures to ensure a high level of protection for the privacy, security, and safety of minors, and Article 25 prohibits misleading interfaces.

Article 25 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation mandates data protection by design and Article 8, as well as definition of an age of digital consent, which for Italy has been set to fourteen years old (Article 2-quinquies).

None of these regulations dictate when an application should be deactivated. The European rules set objectives and entrusts the data controller with the choice of means; the American settlement establishes the means and makes them enforceable before a judge, with the right to appeal waived and jurisdiction for enforcement retained.

The sticking point is obvious. This is not legislation. This is just a contract, negotiated between a defendant and forty-nine prosecutors during a trial that was going badly for the defendant, in which the price of certainty was paid by both parties: the American states achieved in a few weeks what their Congress failed to achieve in ten years; Meta obtained closure of the litigation and, above all, control over the content of the rules it will have to comply with.

The text also contains a clause that deserves a separate comment: the agreement establishes no standard of care and does not constitute a precedent for non-participating states or any international jurisdiction. This is a rule written to avoid setting precedents.

II. The Price of Age Verification

The section on age verification is the one that should be the most interesting for data protection professionals, as it highlights a conflict that we in Europe continue to treat as if it doesn’t exist.

Within one year of its implementation, Meta must adopt an age verification system for all its users, based on commercial or proprietary methods, subject to annual testing by an accredited body and numerical error thresholds: commercial methods must maintain a false positive rate of no more than 10 percent for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds and 3 percent for those aged 13-15; proprietary methods, not benefiting from the presumption of conformity, follow a more stringent biennial progression.

The ISO 27566 standard or equivalent is invoked, with performance verification across different demographic groups - a requirement that, translated into our lexicon, means a obligation to assess the algorithm’s risk of discrimination.

The flipside is in the treatment of every user. To determine who is a minor, everyone’s data must be processed, including biometric data for facial age estimation. The agreement attempts to deal with this issue with a minimization framework: data collected for the sole purpose of determining age must be retained for the minimum necessary time and then queued for deletion; data on minors under thirteen can only be retained to train and measure the detection model and cannot be used for advertising, marketing, or algorithmic optimization.

Here lies the most delicate provision of the entire agreement. In order to enable this retention, the attorneys general are waiving, for themselves and for the future, their right to take action under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and similar state laws regarding the retention and use of a minor’s personal data for the sole purpose of enhancing the detection and removal of children under 13.

This is an explicit trade-off: less protection of privacy in exchange for more effective exclusion of children. This may seem reasonable, but it’s unfair to pretend it’s not a step backward. It is also worth asking who, in our legal system, would have the power to negotiate such a waiver, given that not only the Italian Data Protection Authority exercises inalienable powers on these matters, but the rights of each subject about privacy are not at the disposal of the authority protecting them.

III. The clause that regulates competitors

The third section is the one a corporate lawyer will read first. The most stringent obligations - an extended nighttime block from 10:00 PM to 7:00 PM and a sixty-minute daily limit for each platform, with a cumulative maximum of one hundred and twenty minutes - do not enter into force with the agreement.

These are second-stage obligations, conditional upon what the text defines as widespread adoption by the industry: they only come into force when Snap, TikTok, and YouTube, expressly designated as core members of the industry, have undertaken substantially equivalent obligations, through a settlement agreement, by law, or through a voluntary commitment certified by a third-party auditor, and are themselves subject to equally stringent age verification requirements and independent auditing for at least five years. A similar condition governs a portion of the payments.

The structure is that of a most-favored-nation clause applied to regulation.

The defendant agrees to be regulated, but only under the same conditions as its competitors, and obtains that the most onerous part of its own obligations becomes a tool for exerting pressure on the market: if others don’t comply, the constraint is halved; if they comply, no one suffers a competitive disadvantage.

It’s an elegant solution to the problem every regulator knows - the virtuous platform loses usage time to the non-virtuous one - but it shifts the determination of child protection standards from public authority to a negotiated balance between companies. Which is precisely what competition law looks upon with suspicion when the object of alignment is a supply parameter.

What concerns us in Italy (and Europe)

The non-precedent clause will not prevent anyone from using this document. The contents of the agreement are intended to circulate as a technical benchmark: when a European authority must assess whether a platform’s measures are adequate pursuant to Article 28 of the Digital Services Regulation, it will be faced with a text in which the company itself has agreed to timeframes, error thresholds, response times to reports, and an independent auditor.

Therefore, it will be difficult to argue that what has already been promised elsewhere is impracticable. In this sense, the American settlement will produce regulatory effects well beyond its intended scope.

A system of sanctions, oversight, and remedial procedures, which has not undergone any legislative process, has not been subject to public consultation, is not subject to cross-examination with stakeholders - minors and families are not parties - and is born with the caveat that it does not seek to set precedent.

It is efficiency, and in matters of child protection, efficiency is not a secondary value. But it also confirms a trend this newsletter has long observed: where the legislator is slow, the rule is formed elsewhere, and it is formed with the legitimacy of those who negotiate it, not those who endure it.

The question that gives these lines their title remains: this a Legal Code That No Parliament Voted On. We have just witnessed the birth of a highly detailed set of rules, equipped with sanctions, oversight, and a remedy procedure... that has not been issued, examined and ratified by any legislative process, has not been subject to public consultation, is not subject to any debate with stakeholders - since minors and their families are not parties - and was born with the disclaimer that it does not seek to set precedent.

It is very quick and efficient for sure, and in matters of child protection, efficiency is not a secondary value. But it also confirms a trend this newsletter has long observed: where the legislator is slow, the rule is formed elsewhere, and it is formed with the legitimacy of those who negotiate it, not those who endure it.

The question for Europe, then, is not whether to copy those thresholds. It is whether our model - general objectives, independent authorities, ex post sanctions - is still capable of producing equally precise rules as children grow up. Because a vacuum never remains empty: someone else fills it, and that doesn’t necessarily mean they write worse. It’s just that we didn’t choose it.

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The translation of the post ends here, but allow me to steal 30 more seconds of your attention to point you out to another piece of breaking news of global interest about the same general issue:

Totally unrelated (or not?) appendix

(this is ME speaking, not Prof. Iaselli!)

This is not related at all to the Meta settlement, but just in case you wanted to discover another example of American rules for the whole world... I really can’t help suggesting you to check out how the US just classified, unilaterally of course, an Italian volunteer technology collective as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (also here).

Final, usual notice of every post: If you like what you find here, thanks in advance for your subscription (possibly but not necessarily paid) or, even better, one-time donations for any amount, or consulting, writing or speaking work.

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Less than 24 hours ago the grassroot organization “Wait Until 8th” (*) announced on Facebook “a landmark win for kids’ online safety”, saying, according from news from New York Times & NBC News:

Meta just reached a settlement with 47 states, D.C., and U.S. territories over claims it knowingly built addictive platforms for kids — agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and overhaul how teens use Instagram and Facebook.

D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb called it “a monumental public health victory for young people” - and noted Meta won’t be the last platform to settle.

The deal still needs a judge’s sign-off, but the message is clear: the tide is turning on Big Tech’s grip on kids’ attention.

This is why Wait Until 8th exists: to give kids a childhood before the algorithm gets a vote. The wind is finally at our backs!

One of Wait Until 8th sources, the New York Times, described the deal as Meta agreeing to “make major changes to its products over claims its platforms endangered children”

Here is according to those and, when mentioned, other sources, what will actually change for teen accounts:

• 2-hour daily time limit across FB + Instagram (parent permission required to lift it)

• _No access midnight - _6am; notifications silenced 10pm - 7am

• Likes hidden by default

• “Extreme” beauty filters blocked

• Option for a non-algorithmic feed + autoplay off

• Stronger age verification + new parental controls

• [stronger] safeguards against bullying, eating-disorder content and material involving suicide and self-harm. (Azer News)

What REALLY happened

If what you just read is an accurate summary of the deal, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb is clueless, and so is everybody else calling this a monumental victory for young people.

The most obvious reason is money: $17.1 billion may seem a lot of money, but it is just 4.6% of Meta’s net income from 2014 to mid 2026, that is part of all the years in which their business strategy harmed teens and adults alike. You can bet $17 billion that Meta stockholders, that is Zuckerberg and all his peons without voting power are really happy right now.

The real, most serious reasons why that deal is a landmark victory not for teens but for Meta are these:

First, the changes above are objectively beneficial, but just because they are they should be for everybody, not just teens. In 2026 nobody in good faith can deny that likes, beauty filters, non-stop notifications and everything else in that list have wrecked and keep wracking the brains of adults. Turning off those features only for teens is like forcing tobacco companies to (finally!) sell lighter cigarettes to children, while remaining able to sell whatever junk they want to adults, and believing that age controls will always prevent children from getting the latter.

Second, something that in and by itself has nothing to do with the trial, but since it part of what allowed social media to keep harming everybody, it had to be said anyway: in the deal there is no prohibition for public officials to use social media as their official, first if not exclusive communication channels with the people they serve. I explained this five years ago when Joe Biden was doing it, and yesterday I read a post from a mother rightly pissed off because her kid’s school sends communication to students..,,with SnapChat. This is really wrong and must end, because it is like certifying that cigarette hurt, and then demanding that everybody wishing to speak with the President or Principal must smoke one first.

Third, back to the scope of the trial, I see no mention of WhatsApp. So teens and preteens can continue to lose sleep, bully their peers, exchange inappropriate content and generally prepare themselves to remain cognitive slaves of Meta when they grow up, and Meta will have collected years of precious metadata about their life patterns and the graph of all their contacts.

Fourth, and most important now: the deal still has all the serious defects I listed one week ago, that is two requests that are dangerous for privacy and free speech, and above all no obligation for Meta to implement the two changes that would be enough to make this whole problem much, much, much smaller than lawmakers cluelessness allowed it to become, namely RSS and adversarial interoperability. To know what I’m talking about, so you can tell your representatives to start another trial tomorrow, read what I said the day this trial started

Fifth, just like WhatsApp, there is no mention of AI, which yes, was not the object of the trial, and just for this is important. Just one week before this “landmark case” started, Mark Zuckerberg was so concerned about having to pay for all the damage he’s done to children to issue (because that’s what absolute monarchs do, issue decrees) a “Path to a Positive AI Future” in which, among other things, everyone children included will have “a personalized tutor and coach”, courtesy of Meta and similar companies, which obviously will provide such total dependence on the AIs under their exclusive control for noble reasons, not their own profit.

The total lack of knowledge of human life of that babble has been already widely exposed, for example by The Verge. I mention it here because, if publication of that “Manifesto” mere days before a trial that should have turned Meta’s whole business model upside down isn’t a proof that social media are yesterday’s battle, I don’t know what is.

Tell your lawmakers to get a clue already

Summing up, this deal is a landmark victory for Meta because, in just one week, they came out with a promise that they can continue to train kids people for full subjection when they will be adults and keep all their services for adults (plus their AI ones, which will be the most powerful) as toxic as they are today, by paying little more than pocket change.

This trial, and the whole vision that led to it, are just another season of throwing the WRONG kitchen sink at Big Tech (2021)

Last but not least: what I am going to do about it

I started saying seven years ago that “breaking up Facebook” or trials like this are useless, and I am sick and tired of seeing no real change in this fight. At this point, I am sure that the first if not the only community that could and should solve this mess for good, with no need of huge funds and without asking anybody’s permission is parents.. if they only got the right information and perspective.

Never mind regulators, which with some measures (first in line, age verification) may do more harm than good in the long run. As long as Big Tech can convince parents to keep making the wrong questions (as it happened in this trial) the answers won’t matter. Especially now that AI is by far the first thing to rein in, not social media.

I have been closely following this field for more than ten years now and, as you can see from this archive I am already writing all I can to help parents make the right questions, and donations to write more are always welcome. However, there is one thing I could do that for many parents may be more helpful and it’s cheaper and less time-consuming than going to the movies, so here it is:

Starting next week, I am available for one-hour video-meetings with current or future parents to discuss everything, not just social media, about parenting in a digital age, and present what may be a widely accessible solution the root causes of certain problems.

Each meeting will be for up 10 participants, price 5 Euros per person. I will describe better how I imagine these meetings in the next post, but you can already send suggestions, ask for more details and schedule meetings, sending an email at mfioretti@nexaima.net.

(*) DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a critique to Wait Until 8th, which is doing something very important and should get much more participants! Really!

Two days ago, a child privacy trial that BBC says may be the biggest threat yet to Instagram and Facebook started in the US.

As usual: If you like what you find here, thanks in advance for your subscription (possibly but not necessarily paid) or, even better, one-time donations for any amount, or consulting, writing or speaking work.

According to that article, the 29 US states suing Meta, the company that owns Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and other stuff, want it to give up most of what being on social media is today. Namely, those states demand that Meta:

1. removes “like” counts

2. removes infinite scroll

3. implements a process of parental verification for teenage users

4. changes Meta’s “dopamine-manipulating recommendation algorithms”

5. removes many image filters that change one’s appearance in photos

6. removes autoplay of video content

7. removes creation of multiple accounts

8. removes disappearing or “ephemeral” posts, such as Instagram Stories

What’s right in that list

Almost everything in that list is good. After decades, it would take an incredible amount of naivety to not see the huge negative effects of certain “features” on public mental health and political discourse. Because, no matter how the lawsuit is worded, it has nothing to do with children, nothing at all: all those features are stuff that makes almost all adults more lonely, more stressed and at the same time more convinced of their intrinsic superiority.

So that list is almost perfect, and enforcing it is long overdue... except, if it is complete, two points that shouldn’t be there at all, not in that form at least, and two others that should be there before everything else, because they would greatly reduce the effects of all the negative features.

What shouldn’t be there

The first demand in that list that, as a minimum, is very badly explained and misdirected, is the third one:

“implement a process of parental verification for teenage users”

In general, “parental verification” of what a minor does is a no-brainer, right? What are parents for, if they don’t (also) verify what their kids do? Point is, how can social media set this up for parents, without implementing mandatory age verification for everybody online? But if that is what that the lawsuit wants (by all means correct me if I got it wrong!), why on Earth they did it?

Why demand something that, really unsurprisingly, has been found almost useless in the champion country of online age verification, Australia, multiple times including... the day before that US trial started?

But never mind Australia: why demand something that is infinitely more complicated, expensive and full of harmful side effects than the ONLY “age verification” that would actually work in the real world? Seriously, why? What’s the real point of that lawsuit, helping parents to do the one right thing, or just helping US Big Tech to spend money?

The other demand that shouldn’t be there is the seventh:

“remove creation of multiple accounts”

Having multiple accounts should be recommended and almost mandatory, not forbidden. The possibility of keeping interactions with friends, family, work and public discussions as separate as possible is necessary both for mental health, both individual and public. Only people who never really grew up like Zuckerberg can argue in good faith that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”. Quoting myself, “since the dawn of society, individuals have been able to pursue happyness, or at least function decently, also thanks to the possibility to act and feel differently in different contexts. Family, friends, workplace, church, amateur football team, volunteering... The way we behave and expect to be treated by others needs not to be the same in all those contexts. Actually, it needs to not be the same. “.

You may argue that this should apply to adults only, not children, and you may be right. Luckily, we don’t need to argue over this, because the right way to protect children from online dangers has nothing to do with numbers of accounts.

What’s missing: going back to the future

Do you still remember or, depending on your age: did you ever know that, as far as communication goes, the pre-digital era was much more advanced than this one? Back then, everybody could write or talk with everybody else blissfully ignoring which kind of social media platform they were using, for one and one reason only: all the social media platforms of the time, i.e. all the brands of paper, pens and fixed phones were 100% compatible with each other.

In those times so technologically advanced that they really feel science-fiction now, had someone tried to market any kind of paper, pen or phone, whose “content” would be readable or hearable only by people having the same brands of paper, pen or phone whould have been rightfully treated as a complete moron.

Now, instead, you need Instagram to interact with Instagram users, Facebook for Facebook users, TikTok for TikTok, Twitter for Twitter and so on, while the only really interoperable digital system that still resists, email, is snobbed just by the generations supposed to be more digitally competent. Is 2026 really, really backwards and primitive, or what?

Going back to a future that makes sense is possible, and really easy. All it takes is courts forcing adversarial interoperability and mandatory RSS feeds for every social media platform. If you have no clue about what those two things mean, don’t worry, they are real easy:

RSS feeds are a 100% open system, available since 2001, to get “all the latest news from as many sources you want in one window, on your schedule, and without intermediaries and the endless centralized tracking of social media” (continues here). If social media were forced to let you see your own timeline in RSS format, you could read it with dozens of programs that already exist, on any digital device. You would, that is, get all the good of logging on Facebook, or any other social media, without all the downsides. And the platform shouldn’t change a thing, except add support for a really simple, universally known standards.

Indeed, RSS is so beneficial that every website, not just social media, should be forced by law to publish its RSS feed in every page, to give you the same reading convenience. As far as that trial goes, Meta’s fines should be used to run huge educational campaigns that encourage everybody to get all their online “news”, from holiday pictures from relatives to world-shaking events, via RSS feeds.

Adversarial interoperability is the full solution for social media of which RSS, as good as it is, only is the easiest implementation of the “reading”, that is passive half. This apparently obscure term simply means that Facebook, Instagram or anybody else cannot force you to only use their websites or mobile apps to see other users posts, or write your owns. They must let every third party developers free to create alternative apps that do the same, and you to use them, in the ways and with the feature set that work better for you. Seriously, adversarial interoperability is the same thing that makes calling an iPhone user with an Android phone (still) work, nothing more.

You have always had adversarial interoperability for writing on paper and traditional phone calls, and you are 1000% entitled to have it even for digital services. After free speech and privacy, adversarial interoperability isn’t just the biggest digital right you have: it’s the easiest to get by far, if you just demand it. And when I say easy, I mean “so easy that reading and writing your own Facebook wall without using the Facebook app or website was possible fourteen years ago (1):

until Facebook, to keep people locked inside their cage, removed that interface with impunity because no regulator was honest or competent enough to object.

Add those two people-liberating points to the list of demands for that trial, educate people (especially parents!) to use them, and half the harm done by infinite scroll, “likes” and so on to children and adults alike will vanish, even if the features remain.

Then again... why still bother with social media?

Trials like that one are sorely due for Meta and similar companies, and I do hope they get from them so much financial pain and enough obligations to change to become unrecognizable. For better or for worse, however, social media are yesterday’s battle, as I wrote last February and repeated two weeks ago. The sooner new trials start to fine and limit AI abuses on children and everybody else, the better. In the meantime, THE only child protection that doesn’t simply work for real, but is immediately applicable at no cost, remains the same: no smartphones before 16, period.

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1. I say fourteen years because I myself wrote in February 2012, for the now defunct TechRepublic website, the tutorial from which the last screenshot comes from. Later explanations of the same procedure are still online however, here and here.

Usual notice before getting started: If you like what you find here, thanks in advance for your subscription (possibly but not necessarily paid) or, even better, one-time donations for any amount, or consulting, writing or speaking work.

These days, everybody loves (or needs) to hate data centers for AI, and with good reasons: assuming they are built in the quantities AI companies want them, which there is plenty of reasons to doubt, they will suck up really huge quantities of energy, money, water and human creativities that there are thousands better ways to use. A few days ago, however, someone called Brooks Fiesinger (of whom I know nothing except the post mentioned below) made on Facebook the opposite point, which is quite interesting as food for thought, if nothing else.

Here is a synthesis of Mr. Fiesinger thesis, partly reformatted as a numbered list to make it easier follow the comments, and counter-proposals, that I make right after it.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH: We are running out of workers, traditional intelligence metrics are dropping, and despite their unpopularity, AI data centers are currently our most viable lifeboat.

The data points to a massive structural deficit hitting our economy over the next 30 years, and we aren’t taking the infrastructure requirements seriously enough. Here is what we are facing:

1. The Workforce Collapse: We are mathematically running out of humans to keep the economy running. 2024 was “Peak 65”, roughly 12,000 Boomers are retiring every single day, taking decades of institutional knowledge with them.

2. The Cognitive Shift: Empirical studies from the US, UK, and Norway show that the “Flynn Effect” (the steady historical rise of IQ scores) has inverted for cohorts born after 1975. Recent testing of 400,000 US adults shows measurable drops in vocabulary, mathematical logic, and complex problem-solving.

3. (consequently) Millennials are likely the peak of traditional, deep-work intelligence. The next generation of professionals is highly optimized for fragmented, rapid data, but they will struggle with sustained deductive reasoning.

4. The Bottom Line: We need AI capabilities to replace the workforce that lacks both the raw headcount and the traditional cognitive processing power of previous generations. AI agents must replace the missing administrative volume, while frontier models synthesize complex data so future doctors, engineers, and teachers can make informed decisions.

5. This software requires heavy hardware. You cannot have cognitive augmentation without hyper-scale data centers. The physical infrastructure must be built right now.

6. First critical caveat: just because we desperately need data centers doesn’t mean we should be reckless. I fully support stringent environmental protections, proactive grid and energy management (we need advanced nuclear and baseload power, not rolling blackouts), and strict financial responsibility.

7. Second critical caveat: we must actively guard against the “Wall-E Effect. If we build AI to compensate for declining human reasoning, human reasoning will decline further because it’s no longer exercised.

Mr. Fiesinger conclusion: We are walking a dangerous line between necessary cognitive support and catastrophic human dependency. Do you have a better proposal?

My own comments and counter-proposals

In general, I sincerely thank Mr. Fiesinger for connecting some points that everybody should see they are connected, and for stimulating thinking about the role of AI in the full picture, regardless of what the current crow of challenged children that leads it claims.

Point 1 is true and really concerning, the only thing wrong in it is “the economy” instead of “society”, which is what really matters. It’s true and concerning because overpopulation has already started to end. I already wrote about this here.

Points 2 and 3 are quite close to an unfair generalization, but there still is more truth in them than what would be comfortable. In them, I would add “AI-dependence” to the “highly optimized for” list.

I also have to say that I will steal, obviously giving credit, the “highly optimized for fragmented, rapid data” definition, because I really love it. It is, for everybody it really applies to, the most elegant way I’ve seen so far to tell somebody that he’s too dumb to function as adult, because either parents or institutions that snobbed or even boycotted adequate education (with humanities in the right place), love of reading for reading’s sake and sensible protection from high-tech during childhood left him the attention span and memory of a goldfish.

I also agree with Point 6.. for the data centers that will be actually needed, including the part that calls for nuclear power, if developed in the “revolutionary” way I suggested two years ago

My disagreement, and counter proposals, are about Points 4 and 5, and with the underlying assumption hidden that what we call AI today is unavoidable and can only grow. That’s just not true, not true at all. Never was, never will.

Here is my main objection about Point 4: for what purpose, exactly, should we “replace the workforce that lacks both headcount and brain power”? For the same dung pit of nonsense we call the economy today? Should that workforce be replaced to keep running a world where people work themselves to oblivion, and where Europe (or any other place, of course) is supposed to do with tech the same mistakes the US did, mistakes of which the US will free themselves of through a crash that will damage the rest of the world? Of course, answering such a big question was outside the scope of Mr. Fiesinger’s post. I am not blaming him at all, just pointing out the questions we should answer before any concrete proposal to “keep the economy running”.

Moving to Point 5: well before replacing any job, the first volume frontier AI models should reduce is not in work, but in systemic excessive overhead, for example giving humans pointers to stupid complexity that shouldn’t exist, starting with laws as I suggested here.

Also, please note that many of the highest-paid administrative jobs that AI should replace often are jobs that shouldn’t exist at all. That is, the job that may entitle to a beautiful personal office and traveling business class, but under the facade are just “performance art... professional email forwards... human middleware between systems that could probably talk directly to each other... managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers.... creating strategies for strategies, optimizing things that didn’t need optimizing, disrupting things that were working fine.”(read the whole thing this comes from, it’s great! Especially if your salary is high).

Ditto for, sticking to AI, all the managerial jobs that promote AI at all costs just because those doing them are afraid to do otherwise.

Let’s talk infrastructures, instead of keep this “economy” running: the most important workers needed in the next decades may not be people with two or three PhDs and excellent AI-enhanced management skills, but electricians, plumbers and other tradespeople, as well as firemen, nurses and caregivers in general... Thank heaven, there are now students “Seeking To AI-Proof Their Careers With Trades Over College”.

As far as AI physical infrastructure goes... the huge number of huge data centers is needed only by the hyperscaler companies that push the current AI bubble, in order to delay their crash. Stop that senseless rush, stop public access to AI for idiotic tasks (me on this, two years ago again), and we’ll find ourselves with plenty of data centers, or real possibilities to build them, to make a new wave of AI do stuff we all actually need.

One paragraph summary

AI running in data centers will be needed to solve the huge problems (global aging, inequality, agricultural crises, resource conflicts) that will only get worse in the next years if nothing happens. The AI that’s needed, however, is not the AGI the AI cabal wants to impose on the world out of sociopathy and greed, but it will never achieve. It is a much smaller set of task-specific AIs, like China is doing, that will need many, many less data centers. And decently educated youngsters to handle it, of course. This is my better proposal, with sincere thanks to Mr. Fiesinger for his stimulus.

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Usual notice before getting started: If you like what you find here, thanks in advance for your subscription (possibly but not necessarily paid) or, even better, one-time donations for any amount, or consulting, writing or speaking work. On this particular topic, I AM particularly interested in speaking with parents and teachers worldwide!

Already one year ago, half of (American) teens were regularly using AI companionsone year ago, that is “AI platforms designed to serve as digital friends”, for something much worst than cheating at school, and I’m not talking of customized porn like this:

I am talking of much more personal “help” like, from less to more serious:

• guidance on back-to-school shopping, low-calorie snacks or planning birthday parties

• getting the right words to write to fix sensitive situations and personal emotional or relational problems like, for example, “writing the message to break up with a girl after a two-year relationship”

I do not think at all that customized, endless porn is healthy for anyone, children or not. The reason I say certain uses of AI companions are worse is simply that, unlike porn, they are socially accepted, if not encouraged to both keep kids away from presumably worst dangers, and prepare them to the Brave Hi-Tech All-AI World of tomorrow. Problem is, what regular use of such “help” actually achieves is to raise kids who:

• find no reasons to try to make real friends. Social media “only” prey on the human need to be seen, AIs on the much deeper need to feel emotions

• have no more need nor capability to trust themselves to make a decision

• believe they can and should always avoid the stress of dealing alone with relational problems

• have their creativity, critical thinking and social skills (which, by the way, are all skills needed to have, when the right moment actually comes, sex satisfying enough to not need porn) all castrated by AIs

The reasons why AI companions have such effects are obvious. Unlike parents, siblings (when they still exist), schoolmates and friends:

• “AI is always available. It never gets bored with you”

• AI is never judgmental, and whatever you ask it you are always right, always interesting, always emotionally justified. In the already mentioned study, 31% of polled teens said their conversations with AI companions were “as satisfying or more satisfying” than talking with real friends

AI companions are Grima Wormtongue, the smarmy counselor that makes an otherwise really remarkable man never see reality.

Why, how and WHERE this gets really, really stupid (again, never mind porn)

If you are worried that AI makes it possible for kids to do stuff like this:

stop worrying. First, because it’s NOT AI that does that. Second, because the fact that AI services can produce sexual material, give dangerous advice and offer harmful content may be the smaller problem.

If the whole economy, schools, families and, why not, AI companions all teamed up and succeeded to educate teenagers to be interested only in realistic, healthy sex with real people at the right age (whatever “healthy” and “right” mean, it’s irrelevant here) but said teenagers remained abandoned to “AI companions” for all the needs you just read, that would still be a huge damage. Replacement of actual human interactions can only exacerbate crises of loneliness and youth mental health, and in the long run, even if nobody had to work to make a living, a society of people like this would be everything but human.

Those surveys show and quantify how and how much “AI companions” actively and deliberately worsen atrophy of “identity, social skills and independence”. But an artificial “intelligence” that does this (that is: the PEOPLE who make and run it for profit and power) has no need whatsoever to kill you to rule the world. It has already tamed you for good.

What should be done? That study summarized above came to hardly imaginable conclusions:

1. “The largely unregulated AI industry is becoming as integrated with adolescence as smartphones and social media are.”

2. Platforms where they are “constantly being validated, not being challenged, not learning to read social cues or understand somebody else’s perspective” are the last places teens and preteens should go.

In other words, those experts just proved and quantified what common sense in every working, adequately informed brain knew right away, namely that adolescence is a critical time for developing identity, social skills and independence. Obvious, but nothing wrong so far. The stupid part starts when the same experts recommend that AI companions should “complement” real-world interactions.

The truth is that even traces of common sense should be enough to conclude that it is very, very, very unlikely that “relationships” designed to be always comforting and much more addictive than real ones could remain their “complements” instead of replacing them altogether, especially for children not mature enough to see or want the difference.

Today’s social media are a cesspool born from the marriage of greed and cluelessness. As true as this is, it doesn’t change the fact that age limits for social media are intrinsically cretin, impossible to enforce, and with lots of really bad side effects for everybody, and totally useless anyway, now that teens have already moved to AI companions. I already explained why, and now reality confirms it: Australia’s under-16 social media ban, started with much fanfare and worldwide approval eigth months ago, is already failing.

Regardless of bans, social media are yesterday’s battle, as I said last winter. But AI bans are even more cretin, and even more impossible to enforce if you try to deploy them on the wrong side of the fence, because AI services are much more numerous, much more diverse, much less visible than social media.

The only solution that will work

The only solution that would have a concrete, beneficial impact without any harmful side effect is the one that was already obvious well before AI chatbots were left loose on the world, but is systematically neglected exactly because it’s as easy as it’s unexpensive and uncool.

The “companions” that are really harmful are the only ones that can be successfully blocked. They are the personal smartphones without which it’s impossible to directly connect AIs to brains 24/7. They are the smartphones that adults continue to proudly put in the hands of the most influenceable humans, years before they’re theoretically able to get them right, in times when any honest look at modern society should prove that even most adults seem unable to use their own smartphones decently.

Banning social media or AI companions while leaving smartphones in the hands of kids is exactly as effective and smart as living in a really dangerous neighborhood with the front door always open, to make your neighbors envy your furniture, but with a big “Molesters not welcome here” sign on the wall.

By now, even experts have stopped beating around the bush and started saying that removing smartphones is really needed now:

• “using smartphones before age 13 could damage kids’ mental health, [as such usage] was associated with suicidal thoughts, worse emotional regulation, lower self-worth and detachment from reality, especially among girls”, as well as “sleep disruptions, cyberbullying and negative family relationships”, said a study released ONE YEAR AGO whose main value is that, “while previous research focused on how smartphone use is related to anxiety and depression...[this] looked at symptoms not commonly studied, including emotional regulation and self-worth, and found they are very significant”

• one of the many high schools that started requiring students to put their phones inside magnetic locking pouches every morning reported, 16 months ago, that “not only kids actually talk to each other at lunch now: Interpersonal violence has been at a record low, too”

If the right people (not governments!) banned possession before 16 of personal smartphones, 90% of all childhood and early adolescence problems with both social media and AI would vanish. It’s really frustrating to see both “experts” and parents circling around this obvious concept for years now, without ever having the guts or a clear enough mind to see it, and act consequently.

Objections that smartphone bans ignore how integrated they are in younger generations’ lives have no substance. A few decades ago, smoking, both active and passive from the womb on, was just as deeply “integrated in younger generations’ lives”. We succeeded to make that exposure socially untolerable. Now that’s the turn of smartphones, we can do that too, and we really must.

It’s also high time to just laugh at everybody still saying things like “Kids need to know how to use social media (or AI) and by an outright ban of smartphones... we are not getting any closer to teaching those skills”. Why on Earth should kids learn how to use stuff and practices that, only this week, judges found bad enough for kids to deserve a $567m fine?

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The worst enemies of smartphone-free kids

I said it three years ago, before all the studies I’m citing here, and I repeat it today: Honestly, THE problem with children online is PARENTS. Laws and governments must stay out of this, except by providing information. But all future parents, and all parents of kids who don’t already have their own personal smartphone must accept that delaying possession of any portable, that is uncontrollable internet-connected device is a protection against AI and social media toxic effects hugely better and easier than any other, not to mention surely affordable.

Good parenting in a digital age is much simpler than it seems, and 90% of it may be summed up in two rules:

• Never attach your children to portable direct gateways to AI, social media and general datafication and control systems, the better for the children, period. This includes sharenting, obsessively checking your kids grades every day on the school’s website, or screwing their summer camps with email, video calls or other digital abuses

• The less you interact with your children (and the children teachers, coaches etc...) through digital interfaces and services, or while using said tools, the better

On the second rule, please consider the study concluding that “cell phone use affects parent-child interactions, even when adults aren’t online”, whose most important points are:

• “Mothers who were in the habit of spending more time on social media talked much less to their kids when they played with them than did moms who spent less time on social networks, and that difference carried over when they weren’t using their devices”

• “Talk to your kids even as they get older, because one of the most important things parents can do is to talk to their children all the time”

In other words, the right parenting when it comes to AI, smartphones and control mania impulses is the exact opposite as Sam Altman, the chairman of OpenAI who last week called having AI remind you of your kids’ commitments “a cool use case of ChatGPT” just to be told, by something obvviousl much more intelligent than him “What if you just talked to your children”.

Not chaining children to the only objects that for-profit, mind-altering services absolutely need to reach them to make money is as easy as it’s urgent, but here comes the most difficult part: don’t even try to believe that it will be enough. No smartphones before 15 or 16 is a mandatory first, urgent step, but it’s only the first. The teens most likely to experience positive mental health even if connected with the Matrix are those who, besides parents with common sense, have strong, supportive friendships, said another study.

Problem is, in order to begin and resist through the years, childhood friendships need time and spaces, where kids are free to grow together, learning adulthood from each other, without any kind of prison guard always behind their backs. That is, what all strong, supportive friendships need (besides less uselessly anxious parents and trying real scouting, of course) is things like children weekly schedules less busy than those of Fortune 500 executives, many more public playgrounds with enough public funding to keep them always clean and safe, and safe ways to reach those playgrounds by feet, skates, bikes or transit.

That’s the stuff that (after committing to “no smartphone before sixteen”) every parent should campaign for now, together with all other parents. Not cretin bans.

Because the best preparation to digital life there is, is learning it on a fixed computer that cannot stalk or inhabit you like Xenomorphs, and growing free range all the rest of the time:

In the last decade the United States has spent mountains of money on really high-tech weaponry and on even more sophisticated AI military systems. Today, that policy has finally paid off, bearing fruits that are impossible to deny, and warm the hearts of everybody seriously wishing to make America and the whole Free (from what, exactly?) World Great Again. In order to understand how great a progress has been made today, however, a short recap is necessary.

How America became the most powerful, most AI-powered war machine the world has ever seen:

(this is just a very small summary, of course, that doesn’t do justice to the true, unprecedented greatness of the effort. All emphasis mine)

1. 2023/04/26: Palantir launches an Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) and demos how a military might use it to fight a war

2. 2024/03/11: The Pentagon requests $1.8 billion for AI spending in fiscal year 2025 as they view AI as a top priority.

3. 2025/06: Trump issues Executive Order directing the Defense, Interior and Energy departments to lease out underused base land... to private developers to build and run data centers expected to support artificial intelligence and military applications

4. 2025/07/a: Trump announces American’s AI Action Plan that will transform countless industries including defense, because “AI has the potential to transform both the warfighting and back-office operations of the DOD. The United States must aggressively adopt AI within its Armed Forces if it is to maintain its global military preeminence.“

5. 2025/07/b (coincidence, surely): the same day, Trump buys millions in Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft

6. 2026/01/09: The US Secretary of War directs the Department of War to “accelerate America’s Military AI Dominance by becoming an “AI-first” warfighting force across all components.“

7. 2026/02/01: The US and Israle, attack Iran. On that day, a US missile hits an elementary school in Minab suggested as target by AI fed with wrong data, killing 156 civilians including 120 schoolchildren (compare this with #14 below!!!!)

8. 2026/03/03: “Trump is using AI to fight his wars” first in Venezuela, to plan and execute Maduro’s snatching, then to identify which Iran targets to bomb

9. 2026/03/04 (coincidence, surely): Analyst says interest in Epstein files plummets

10. 2026/04/22: Pentagon asks for $54bn in pivot towards AI-powered war

11. 2026/05/02: Pentagon partners with major tech firms to further integrate AI into classified networks, speeding up data analysis and battlefield decisions

12. 2026/06/05: Trump signs National Security Presidential Memorandum 11 which, among other things, “orders the Defense Department to update its policy on autonomous weapons, and vests accountability for AI use within the military chain of command rather than external regulators.”

13. 2026/06/30: Trump administration announces ‘War Force’ effort based on hiring “experts in designing, building, integrating and maintaining capabilities like frontier AI, machine learning, automation and data systems.”

14. 2026/07/16: As of this day, standard intelligence review of the attack to the Minab school hasn’t been ordered yet

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This is what you (hopefully) already knew. But today...

Today it’s a great day. Seriously. Today it’s the day we finally know that all that effort is paying off. Today, with the Iran war cost estimated at $37.5bn so far for the US alone, and after the US has spent at least $75 billion in AI-driven programs since 2016, today is the day when...

...the US military asks for “new creative and unconventional” ideas to pressure and punish Iran not to those godlike AI tools but... to its own dull, outdated, so ordinary, merely human soldiers and analysts, because:

“We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran...”

“U.S. Central Command has a long history of thinking and working in innovative ways,” Capt. Timothy Hawkins, a spokesperson for CENTCOM, said in a statement. “Admiral Cooper, in particular, reaches out to members of our great team, regardless of rank, to achieve the highest levels of operational performance possible.”

“You need creative minds at times - especially if you’re running out of conventional options,” said one of the sources familiar with recent planning discussions.”

Yes, you read that right. It did take forty years since good old Clint explained to his soldiers that if you need “new creative, innovative and unconventional ways” to pressure and punish your enemy you must ask humans to:

It took forty years, but that pearl of wisdom finally reached the tob brass. After untold billions of dollars spent on military AI and on bombing decisions based on AI processing of data, today the Pentagon has said, almost explicitly:

“Our glorious Very Stable Genius selflessly put us in such a mess that even after depleting stockpiles of extremely expensive weapons we can’t find the way out ourselves, not even with the even more expensive AI tools he pushed us to buy, PLEASE HELP”.

I never, ever use AI for writing,

but this time asking a chatbot why this happened was too fun to not do it. So I asked Gemini “Why is the Pentagon asking how to punish Iran to human analysts, instead of asking to AI?”

And Gemini worked well enough (I won’t say “was honest enough” because honesty is a quality of humans, not of some blob of bits) to answer what, without making anybody’s water scarcer, or electricity more expensive, every human with an ordinary but true intelligence and no personal interest in pumping AI stocks already knew since forever:

• because current AI models lack true strategic imagination, political context, and accountability. While AI is used for data processing and targeting, humans are needed for out-of-the-box thinking.

• True Innovation: AI systems like large language models predict patterns based on past data; they cannot invent genuinely novel political-military concepts or “out-of-the-box” solutions

• Nuanced Judgment: Humans understand complex regional diplomacy, hidden cultural factors, and shifting political redlines that algorithms cannot weigh or feel.

Oh, I almost forgot: to make all this even more tragically fun, still today, “AI data centers have become sitting ducks in the Iran war”.

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At this point, I only have one more question:

From where I sit, the silver lining of this failure is that it may make easier for the EU to avoid, not just in military matters, all the AI errors and wastes of public money made by the US. At the same time, I can’t help but ask:

Why isn’t this farcical bit of news enough to trigger the worldwide AI stock market crash that’s been overdue for our common good since at least last November?

Seriously: why aren’t AI stocks going down the drain right now? Why aren’t pension funds worldwide already divesting their AI stocks?

Final, usual request:

If you like what you find here, thanks in advance for your subscription (possibly but not necessarily paid) or, even better, one-time donations for any amount, or consulting, writing or speaking work. And remember: everything here is 100% human written. Period:

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Unavoidable disclaimer: this is NOT a condemnation of any single pet owner. This is a condemnation of the cumulative effects on society of certain pet-related strategies, and of those who impose or tolerate those strategies. Don’t take it personally.

I’ve never had or even wanted a pet myself, for several reasons, but I do see and understand that pets are a big source of sincere joy for many people, and I have NOTHING against that, in principle. At the same time what pet ownership has become today honestly worries and saddens me.

Usual notice before getting started: If you like what you find here, thanks in advance for your subscription (possibly but not necessarily paid) or, even better, one-time donations for any amount, or consulting, writing or speaking work.

My first, most obvious cause of concern around pets is people spending thousands of Euros, getting in debts too, not just to get purebreed pets of questionable origin (more on this in a moment) but to treat them as much as possible like actual human babies. The most visible example I see very often these days is the increasing number of people I see carrying this or that mini-dog in small strollers made specifically for dogs. And when I happen to see dogs bearing rings at weddings, I can’t help thinking “they really had no relative or friends they considered worth of carrying those rings???” (1)

The “questionable origin” is the existence of breeds created and consciously perpetuated with features that make pets suffer, just because they make them cuter (more on this here and here).

Stuff like this was already make me thinking that pet ownership and common sense have parted ways. I had already observed one year ago that pets have become another case of too much choice to be really good for everybody involved, both pets and humans.

That was last year. This year, the increasing “premiumisation” of pet food, together with reports that the pet toys and pet cosmetics markets are both expected to double in ten years, looked more of the same: bad and dumb, but not enough to write again about it.

Ditto for fake Emotional Support Animals (even if they really contributed to discourage airborne overtourism, which I doubt), and for “smart” or “AI-powered” gadgets that make pet life just as “modern” and uselessly stress-inducing as human life is expected to be. Why bother too much, I thought, about stuff like “smart” dog collars that “beam the owner insights into their pet’s sleeping, eating, trotting, barking and scratching patterns”, when it’s just one more category of “smart” consumer products gone off the rails?

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I learned that the “business of pet longevity is booming”, by promising dog owners “more moments of joy together” (that is less time with humans) via sophisticated dietary supplements or treatments as exclusive as “$275 pet-longevity strategy sessions to get personalized protocol of supplements and off-label prescription medications”.

What made me think this matter deserved its own post now was the deep reason for that boom, which I’ll describe in a moment, plus another thing I discovered in the same days: if making a pet live not necessarily happier but longer isn’t enough, the equally booming pet CLONING business is here to help everybody with enough money to think their pet deserves resurrection, and not just with cloning. Quoting from that article, you could also try “cryopreservation, that is preserve the carcass of your pet at subfreezing temperatures in the hopes of one day reviving them. Clients can even arrange to have their terminally ill animals euthanized on site to speed the process.”

Now I really long for the days when all pet owners could be brainwashed to spend were toys, food and toiletry.

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Why I am sad and worried about “Peak Pet”

Denial of death (which nobody should confuse with the wish and need to live as healthy as possible until one’s time has come) is as ancient as humanity. Lifespan extensions or cloning for pets are just an expansion of that wish, and a hardly surprising one, I guess, in a world where immortality choices like religion or parenting have (just temporarily, I suspect) heavily fallen out of favour.

Even ignoring that extreme, the life pets are made to live these days really seems to me surely not in their best interest, and to be one of the physical sides of a generalized human retreat from closeness with other human beings.

Pets wouldn’t have such an apparent great time if society put more efforts in supporting human family and friendship. The increase of attention, commitment and expenses that pets are getting comes from a big increase in the number of people who don’t even TRY to have family or friends anymore because, thanks to consumerism powered by high-tech, they finally have something else that:

• hides loneliness and lack of purpose by finally being presented as necessarily expensive and time consuming, that is just as important, as having kids or any other long-term, equally committed relationship with other humans...

• while being at the same time immensely easier both to mold and control as one wishes, AND to terminate in any moment. If you get tired of a human family member you are legally obliged to support you can’t just drop him into a shelter or into a friend’s lap, no question asked, without any social consequence.

Or, as I read on Quora, “Dogs are more controllable kid replacement”

“Peak Pet” like this sucks at so many levels. It sucks that it exists to begin with. When the majority of a generation concludes that pets are better than children not just because they’re (so far) more affordable but also because, as new research suggests, “having a cat or a dog to keep you company could boost your wellbeing as much as being married or meeting up regularly with friends and relatives” it’s not a sign that pets are good (which they are). It’s a sure sign that public mental health is screwed because we’ve let family, friendship and more (see end of next paragraph) go to waste, to the advantage of both digital and physical (e.g., pets) replacements.

Peak Pet also sucks because it increases inequality, and not just because “routine pet ownership... now costs an average of $4,272 per year”): the background vibe I perceive here is that, while the rich can and should aspire to go to Mars and live forever, the rest of us should make do with making pets live longer, while accepting euthanasia as not such a big deal (2), and even eugenics, eventually: once “pets are family just like human children” coupled with “harmfully overbreed pets are cute period” becomes a no-brainer fact of life there is not enough road left, in my humble opinion, before conclusions like “what’s wrong with selecting every human traits in vitro, just for convenience and personal satisfaction?”

Finally, it sucks that people are actively encouraged to do this by companies that exploit them.

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People who want their dogs live longer wouldn’t get so much cuddling by businesses as they do if dogs didn’t live every moment in the same places as their owners, long enough to be comparable to humans... but not long enough to make the financial ludopaths known as “Venture Capitalists” go bet elsewhere. That is, a big reason why demand to make dogs live longer gets so much recognition is that dogs, being much better human simulators than traditional guinea pigs, can accelerate research and official approval of commercial products and services for extension of human lifespans, where really big money can be made.

Two-sentences, conspirationist and - just for fun - provocative digression and unfair oversimplification: Is there a better subject than people who voluntarily lock all their money, time and attention into a combination of pet and smartphone, walking the former while scrolling social media and AI chatbots? I mean, if that combination is both highly profitable by itself, and enough to replace both critical and emotional intelligence, there is no need to also build a metaverse to control people! Which, by golly, it's just what happened:

What should be done?

Back to the concrete, undeniable issues, Peak Pet is just another area of life that used to be good because it was simpler, spontaneous and generally more authentic, and is now being deliberately ruined by greed turbocharged by digital or digitally empowered high tech. Letting it continue as today cannot be good.

One of the authors of the “pets can be as good as spouses or friends” study is quoted saying:

“If pets improve life satisfaction as much as the study suggests, [the author] called on policymakers to make it easier for people to own them, for example by relaxing regulations that restrict renters’ access to them.”

For an economics professor as that author is, this makes sense, because it increases GDP, or at least doesn’t disturb it. To me, proposals of this kind feel too much as further rejections of the very idea of a society made of people that don’t want to ignore each other. In the long term, it’s an inhuman, suicidal strategy, so I suggest policymakers do the opposite: instead of making it even easier for future pet owners to end up self-sealed into separate realities, just make life easier to cope with, and less lonely, for all humans.

One week ago I read that China is cracking down on AI companions to encourage people to be in actual, real-world relationships. That’s almost the same end goal I’m talking about here, so let me I ask: should we apply the same treatment to Peak Pet?

Not really, I say, and surely not as the first or only measure. Be they pets, chatbots or drugs, “cracking down on companions” that help a human being to isolate himself from all the others cannot work by itself. Even in places where governments can set a policy and stick to it without worrying about elections or public opinion, “cracking down on companions” that make life bearable without first turning the job, housing and education markets upside down is a doomed endeavour.

So maybe policymakers should help people re-learn why and how to like humans first, and make that actually feasible for everybody. That is, they should do the very first things we should all demand now anyway, even if pets didn’t exist at all.

1. Yes, I do know that organizing a wedding can be one of the worst sources of family feuds, and I consequently understand that making the dog bear the rings may help show to all the human participants at the wedding that both spouses... don’t love any participant more than they love all the others. But still...

2. Some food for thought on this here and here

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I just read CNN’s copy of “Trump’s speech claiming US election vulnerabilities, annotated”“, and after that here’s the one thing I can tell you with full confidence: as far US elections vulnerabilities and voting in the US in general are concerned, Donald Trump is 100% right and, albeit it is only for its own personal advantage, he really seems to have a much better grasp of what really matters in those areas than any other US politician.

What Trump gets 100% right about US election vulnerabilities and voting in general is something that’s a) really simple, b) wouldn’t change one bit if all his accusations and claims of voting fraud turned out to be 100% false, and c) can only benefit populists and shameless demagogues like him.

More specifically, the one take-home message of Trump’s election integrity speech and what Trump gets 100% right is not whether China, Russia or anybody else meddled with any US elections. Trump himself doesn’t really care anymore at this point, and CNN itself points it out:

What really matters here, and Trump gets 100% right, is these three really simple things:

1. In general, voting really enables and supports democracy only if everybody really trusts it, that is only if everything about voting is so damn simple that everybody with basic education can, without having to trust any “expert”, really understand how it works and autonomosly conclude that it could never, ever produce frauds at any scale large enough to change the result of an election

2. For many decades, Americans have let their administrators and representatives make anything related to voting as uselessly complex (that is: impossible to trust) as they could, and accepted to be told that no-brainer rules in any other country where voting happens (e.g. photo voter ID) are either impossible or attacks to their rights and freedom (seriously?)

3. If doesn’t matter at all if Trump’s accusations of fraud are true or not. If they are, of course action is needed. If they arent’, making all that noise about something that’s impossible to deny, that is rampant, unneeded complexity and incomprehensibility in the country that should be the beacon of democracy... it’s a perfect way to convince even more Americans to not vote anymore. Yesterday’s speech is Trump’s 2026 way to repeat “you won’t have to vote anymore”:

Making all that noise is a perfect excuse to replace the current systems with something that’s simpler on the surface... but eventually makes it much easier for Trump to manipulate elections as he wants.

Summing up, Trump is 100% right about the objective impossibility for Americans to trust the American voting system, which is even greater than he can see, and the only real solution is to make voting in the US much, much simpler and trustable than Trump himself claims to want.

I took the time five years ago to lay out all the main ways in which voting in the US is an embarrasment for a great country, and how to fix them. For your convenience, I have copied that analysis and request below (**). Thanks in advance for sharing your opinion in the comments!

Some comments I’m seeing on Georgia’s runoff... (first published on 2021-01-06)

...just confirm one thing I’ve always thought of Americans.

Unavoidable disclaimer

This is NOT a Republican post or a Democratic post. I am not American, nor I live in the US. I follow certain US events only because I have to, to the extent that who becomes President of the USA, or the composition of its Senate and Congress still heavily influence other countries. Apart from that, what Americans do, who they elect and how they live is none of my business, no question. And, like any other country, America has a lot of other things to imitate, things I envy Americans for. But there is one thing they really get wrong, sorry.

ADDED on 2021/01/06, 6:34pm, GMT+1: let me stress that what worries me and pushed me to write this post is not what Americans vote. It is only the fact that a voting system designed and imposed for decades in this way, even if 100% executed in perfect good faith by 100000% honest and competent people can only increase the fragmentation of any society. With dangerous long term effects for the whole world, when that society is as influential as the US.

ALSO: do NOT miss the follow-up, that is the reaction of an american election inspector, and my reply!.

Ten minutes ago, browsing YouTube...

Ten minutes ago, YouTube decided to suggest me a video of an American citizen very, very upset for the results of the Georgia runoff. So were the majority of people who commented his words. Some of those comments catched my attention, and are pasted below, because they confirm one bipartisan thing, well within scope of this website, that I have always thought of the USA.

Here are some of the comments I am talking about:

• If we can’t vote in open, honest elections then there are only two outcomes. Neither will be good

• The Dominion algorithms make it to where they only win by 2% or less so it doesn’t raise any red flags of voter fraud.

• The vote harvesting is the devil

• When they said they’d add 3 more hours to count mail in and absentee ballots I knew this was a lost cause

• my voting machine had molded onto its plastic case the word DOMINION

• Same machines, same software, why would you get different results?

• Vote switching software was deployed again. They already have the proof. Just hold on.

• The Dominion machines crashed again, so I’m not placing any faith in the results.

• plus lots of comments in the “I’ll never bother to vote again, it’s totally pointless” category

And the thing I am talking about is...

This: Americans are great people from lots of points of view. Sincerely. But trust them to get everything conceivable about voting, as wrong as possible. Sorry, this is what it looks like from outside.

This is how any political vote with only a few, binary choices should happen:

The piece of paper above is the paper ballot of the 1946 Referendum with which Italians chose between Republic and Monarchy. For the purpose of this post, it is an almost perfect picture of how political elections still happen in Italy, today:

• only with paper ballots that any analphabet could understand: cross the picture you want, done

• with the mandatory, same copying pens for everybody, provided at the booth by voting officials

• ballot counting done manually, in each booth right after it closes, by a committee of representatives of all major parties

• with photographic voter ID documents that everybody has anyway, so why the hell not

• voter registration handled as described below

• everybody votes in the same few hours, nationwide, always on Sundays and (sometimes) the following Monday morning. No ballots to send for counting to no warehouse, with all the risks involved

In the US, instead...

Again: as far as I am concerned, what follows only matters for votes that directly influence the whole US, and with them the rest of the world. How the residents of any US county or city decide, their major, or how to finance their local aqueducts is only their business, seriously. The US, we were saying...

E-voting

The only thing worse than e-voting is online voting, for all the reasons I already explained in detail elsewhere. Here, today, it is only necessary to highlight one thing:

the comments above, and the millions similar that will surely follow, simply could not exist, if US voting happened as described two paragraphs above. If vote casting were manual, and vote counting happened that way, maybe under a live webcam in every booth... this would not completely eliminate frauds (nothing could), but it would make large scale fraud immensely harder, while making immensely easier to trust the system. It’s as simple as that. No, better: voting has to be as simple as that. See here, again.

Mail voting/early voting

Having lived under assorted lockdowns for most of the last ten months, and being likely heading for more, I do acknowledge that, this time, mail or early voting had some advantages.

But the basic idea is flawed, and not democratic. Check again the paragraph above: “Everybody votes the same Sunday, nationwide” means nothing less that everybody votes with the same information available, without being influenced by what happened in other districts thousands of miles away, weeeks if not months before.

Oh, and with no risk of candidates changing programs on the fly, every week. Plus, quoting myself, “No ballots to store for weeks to wait counting to no warehouse, with all the risks involved”, that is, even on this side: more trust in the system.

That is democratic.

Simplicity is democratic. Everybody voting whenever they want, or are influenced to do, adding lots of unnecessary “risk points” along the chain, is the opposite. See next paragraph.

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Primaries and Caucuses not happening all in the same day nationwide

Caucuses seem different from democracy to me, but never mind, it’s just my opinion, really. The real problem with US Caucuses and Primaries is exactly the same as with mail voting, and early voting.

Try to imagine the USA 2020 primaries, happening all in the same day, Supertuesdays be damned, and all that implies, from candidates and strategies in both parties, to fundraising and propaganda. I dare suggest they would have been more authentic, more representative of the actual country, regardless of their outcome.

Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering is wrong, and if I understand correctly, it is much worst in the USA than elsewhere, especially since when it was digitally enhanced.

No automatic registration

Voter registration? Which registration? This other piece of paper, also from Wikipedia:

is the paper “Tessera Elettorale” (Election Card) that every italian citizen automatically receives as proof of its right to vote, as soon as he or she comes of age (18 years). That is, every italian adult is, by definition, also in the voting register. Every time you go to vote, the voting officers stamp one of those circles. When all the circles are stamped, you get another card. Usually takes 2 or 3 hours, when it just does not arrives in one’s mailbox. Of course, together with that card, everbody has to show a photo ID, to avoid impersonation, or multiple voting.

Resistance to photo ID

The country that gave the world Echelon, NSA, Facebook... complains about mandatory photo ID? Well, OK.

Scandalously low number of polling booths.

I have voted in person in Italy for decades now, and with one exception it never took more than 45, 50 minutes, including walking to the polling booths. That, in Rome. In rural areas it surely takes longer, but you get my point. We are about about 46 million voters, we always vote all in the same days, and still we never experience anything remotely like this:

Why all this?

All the useless voting complexity listed below is a major, major factor why so many US citizens (on both sides!) are disenfranchised, and dangerously, DANGEROUSLY fragment their “news sources.

It is this that makes possible, every time, not “just another Florida, but a dozen Floridas”.

If, by magic, I could plant one idea firmly in the brain of every American, it would be this: Always vote, but only for candidates, of whatever party, that seriously commit to drain THIS particular swamp. All the others may wait.

(*) MANDATORY CLARIFICATION, July 2026: of course, how Americans vote about their own local lives, issues and representatives is only their business. That request only applies to american elections that, just as a hypothetical example, may bring to Washington people who could make countries half a planet away starve by giving a theocratic regime plenty of proofs that it can choke global trade, and plenty of reasons to do it, even if there were no proofs of imminent nuclear threats. Just as a hypothetical example, of course.

Last but not least… the one sentence in Trump’s speech that caused me physical pain

Of course, Trump being Trump, he couldn’t help throwing into the speech something that made me laugh so hard my stomach is still aching:

[Today] America is respected like we have never been respected before.

Huh? “Respected like never before”? No way unless, but that’s a mistake only functional illiterates would make in good faith, one tought “respect” exclusively means “fear of being bombed or starved by stupid sanctions, just by cynicism“.

Even if everything Trump boasted about the economy, immigration and healthcare were 100% true... Today, what America is getting worldwide as it never got is some mix of outright derision, compassion and a general wish to cut any bond with the whole country as soon as possible. To read how this (starting before Trump) happened to me, and why I’m sincerely sad about it, click here.

Fortune just reported that the US alone has 1,200 AI bills and no good test for any of them, because “in the past nine months, the United States has produced more AI legislation than in the prior decade, [that faces] three different [and partly contrasting] theories of what AI policy is supposed to do”.

The lack of clarity coming from that proliferation of rules, said IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna, will be the “central question facing AI policy”, because:

1. “The balance between too many regulations, it’s terrible; too few, we may not love the outcome, so we got to find the Goldilocks middle.”

2. Whatever it is, that Goldilocks middle must work both inside the US and abroad, because if the international regulatory landscape turns into a bloated bureaucracy, “that would not be so good for us to win the AI race.”

Is that really the problem, or something else? Never mind

Of course, all those concerns come from one explicit pretension and constitute one implicit, but desperate request: the pretension is that AI for the whole world must be 100% made, deployed and ruled the American Way. Even if, and that’s the request between the lines, the American AI industry is on the verge of the greatest bankruptcy ever, please don’t make it even faster with too many laws!

That’s no news, of course. This AI race will crash big, the sooner the better, but never mind that open secret now. That Fortune article proves me right about something else, and it does with these statements (emphasis mine):

• “By one count, state legislatures introduced over 1,200 AI-related bills in 2025 and enacted just under 150, with the pace accelerating since.”

• “Beneath the volume lies a more fundamental problem. Policymakers at every level are working without a shared test to determine whether their legislative efforts constitute good policy.“

• “State bills creating new accountability rights for automated hiring often duplicate protections already enforceable under [other American laws].”

• “The legislative volume is high, but a shared test for distinguishing good policy from bad has been absent from the debate.”

The piece then goes on to propose a testing framework that “will not, on its own, resolve any specific dispute. Its purpose is to ensure that the questions before state legislators, members of Congress, and federal agencies are the right questions, asked in the right order, before another five hundred bills are introduced and a patchwork is hardened in place that no one designed and few defend.”

Boy, am I happy. Thanks for proving me right!

This mess, which of course isn’t limited to the US, is exactly what I was talking about one week ago, when I wrote:

Imagine if there was [some AI] that, every time a new law proposal is published, everybody could use to easily discover that that proposal violates, contradicts or duplicates in any way other, already existing laws.

Imagine if there was [some AI] that, after reading all the laws of a country, produced a completely equivalent but much shorter, much more readable set of laws. Something that would make it much quicker and easier for everybody to see what’s good and bad in every law, and for whom.

Dear AI companies: if your AI is as good as you claim...

Make your AIs do on all those AI bills just the job I suggested. Make them predict and describe all the cases in which all those hundreds of bills will contradict or duplicate each other, or fail to address some issues.

Make your AIs be the paralegal that does all the boring job that humans, of course, will need to have done before they can start to “determine whether their legislative efforts constitute good policy.” If your AIs can find bugs in AI bills as I suggested last week, it will be great advertising for your products. If it fails, no problem. At least it won’t make anyone aim missiles at schools. What do you have to lose?

So, make AI do all those comparisons. Publish the full result online, in the Public Domain, so everyone can evaluate its quality, with a bounty program for finding errors. Tell all the 120K+ law students in the US that you’ll pay all the present and future educational debt of every student that finds at least one bug.

And of course... don’t limit that work to the USA. Make your AIs repeat the whole program in every country, bounties and all, because every country has the right to get its own AI laws that conform to its own ideals, needs and interests.

Seriously: you have flooded us for years with claim after claim of how superintelligent and super capable and omniscient your models are, so much that they could even kill us all… and I must be the one who has to suggest to use those same models to figure out in the laws that would hinder them?

As usual… Thanks in advance for your subscription (possibly but not necessarily paid) or, even better, donations for any amount, or consulting, writing or speaking work.

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A few days ago Anthropic, one of the most important companies of the American AI industry, released a new tool called Claude Mythos that’s making thousands and thousands of software professionals lose their sleep. It may also be a big case of AI overrating and waste of energies.

A great summary of why Mythos is the greatest nightmare of software managers is a Verge article by Yael Grauer titled “Attack of the killer script kiddies”. If you have never heard that term before, “Script kiddies” are people who try to break into computer systems for illegal purposes, but using only software tools (”scripts”) developed by others, because they aren’t skilled enough to write their own. Some quotes of that article are a perfect introduction to my thesis that Mythos isn’t really that interesting, so here they are, almost verbatim:

• Claude Mythos is a new AI model that seems to find vulnerabilities in every piece of software it’s pointed at

• fears are growing that not only can AI detect these flaws, but also be used to exploit them, putting hacking skills into the hands of everyone across the planet (that is, script kiddies)

• [the arrival of AI tools like Mythos] represents a major escalation, where people without technical backgrounds are able to use AI to enhance their capabilities in a way that wasn’t possible with simple scripts [and] is likely to have far more wide-reaching repercussions

• [the reason is that] AI is great at pattern matching, and [therefore will make] easier and easier for people to find variants of bugs that are already known and ones that have not yet been discovered. And writing exploits is becoming easier as well

• you can use AI tools and with very minimal human guidance, and in some cases no human guidance, find in widely used software bugs that its developers never had the time to find

• industry experts predict that the advancement in AI security capabilities is going to lead to a lot more software exploits. Bad actors could direct AI to find bugs in uncommon pieces of software that no one previously would have put in the effort to exploit

• [with tools like Mythos] you can write exploits [even] for software that exists in only one configuration that one company has. And you can do it on the fly

After the problem, the Verge article describes the steps companies can take to prepare for “the coming onslaught of software vulnerability reports”. Of that section, the part I like the most is the explicit mention of the idiocy of “many people in cybersecurity roles have been laid off because of AI’s efficiencies, even though those efficiencies are exactly why more humans need to remain in the mix” because companies will “need people to decide which patches to prioritize and implement”. But I digress.

They spent billions for bug discovery… and they applied to software first???

The concerns about the misuse of Mythos must be taken seriously. No doubts about that. A lunatic or terrorist script kiddie may hurt - maybe not deadly, but seriously - many more people with Mythos than with weapons. Your pension money is much less likely to be stolen by some script kiddie using Mythos AI than by the coming crash of AI stocks that will take your whole pension fund down with them, but that’s not a reason to ignore AI script kiddies, is it?

And yet... I can’t help thinking that a term like Kiddies, that is “juvenile” or “immature”, somehow also applies to treating almost like THE ultimate god of destruction and havoc something made (spending tons of money) to only find and fix bugs in software.

I say so because we should all start to consider the greatest hackers and disruptors the people who exploit or fix bugs in other systems, that are much more critical than software (1). And no, it’s not AI-powered genetic hacking I’m talking about.

Script kiddies for LAWS, not software. That’s what we need

Fixing bugs in software before AI can help exploit them is absolutely necessary. But applying something as powerful as Mythos only to software bugs would be a real waste.

Why did Anthropic first create a Mythos for software companies and institutional users of software?

Why didn’t Anthropic do what I proposed two and a half years ago instead? Namely, unleash AI that finds and exposes all the cruft, contradictions and uselessly complicated language in all the law corpuses of the world.

Please re-read all the bullets above replacing “software” with “laws” and then...

Imagine if there was something like Claude Mythos that any law student or wannabe accountant could use to tell all the citizens of his country “hey, here’s a loophole in law so-and-so that you can use to claim back half the taxes you paid last year, and these are the exact steps to follow to do it”. Then try to imagine a better way to stimulate lawmakers of every party to fix broken laws NOW.

Imagine if there was something like Claude Mythos that, every time a new law proposal is published, everybody could use to easily discover that that proposal violates, contradicts or duplicates in any way other, already existing laws.

Imagine if there was something like Claude Mythos that, after reading all the laws of a country, produced a completely equivalent but much shorter, much more readable set of laws. Something that would make it much quicker and easier for everybody to see what’s good and bad in every law, and for whom.

Of course, every AI-generated denounce of flawed law proposals and every AI-powered rewrite of any law or regulation should be verified word by word by every human with the will and real skills to do it, possibly with “Bug Bounty Programs” as it happens for software. And after that, it should still be ratified by accountable, elected representatives before actually becoming (or not) the new law of the land.

But just imagine how society would change, if existing laws were much shorter and much easier to understand than today for everybody, and if introducing new laws that are redundant or flawed in any way became much, much harder than it is today. The only way to make it even better would be if laws also had the same revision control systems as software.

Those would be really cool, really powerful hacks, not breaking computer systems. They would concretely mitigate, for every human, serious risks that would still exist even if all software of the world was built and managed by real saints that would never use software to hurt anybody. Wouldn’t that be the best and most prestigious hacking of all? Wouldn’t that be the best way ever to be a script kiddie?

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Why isn’t Anthropic or anybody else already doing this?

Of course, since good laws are a foundation of any decent society, their drafting, reviewing and approving MUST remain work done exclusively by humans. That’s not up for discussion. Have you noticed that the AI “law-hacking” uses I suggest are all reactive, not proactive? Nobody should be so dumb to tolerate new laws proposed or written by AI, ever.

The only questions here are: Mythos is a serious risk, but what makes people paint it as the biggest disruption there can be? And why weren’t tools like Mythos first developed and adopted to help make the result of 100% human lawmaking as easy to use and understand as possible? If you ask me, this is a serious lack of imagination and real spirit of innovation.

What’s lacking here? Maybe the answer is the same that makes even people who don’t make of AI a childish religion take seriously concepts like “network states” managed only by unelected software, blockchain-based quality guarantees that don’t really certify what they claim they certify, or “smart” contracts that are all software, but have little or none of the power of real legal contracts.

Maybe the answer is that both AI companies and wannabe script kiddies are making the same mistake: the mistake of liking software and access to software so much to conclude that software, together with rules and criteria that can be completely encoded in software, can be enough to build and manage a society worth living in.

Two-sentences side rant, if I may: historically, another form of the same mistake is the confidence that something only valid for actual software bugs, that is Linus’s law that “given enough eyes all bugs are shallow”, would be enough to make everybody adopt Free/Open Source Software. In practice, this too often led to neglect non-technical flaws that were deal-breakers for too many people who could never write, document or understand source code and never will (2), but by sheer numbers could have spread FOSS much more, much faster, than software hackers alone could ever do.

Back to lack of AI script kiddies that force lawmakers to make laws more readable and harder to fool: I am aware that the answer above cannot be complete. I’d really like to complete it and, above all, I’d really like to find out who will be the first to release a “law-hacking AI”. Hence...

Serious question for Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic

Dear Mr. Amodei... can we talk? Seriously. I’d really like to hear what you think of my proposal, and know from you if Mythos or any other product of yours could be used as I propose. My email is mfioretti@nexaima.net. Also, as everybody can see here or here, in general I am very critical of what passes for AI today. But since you and your company seem the most responsible member of the pack... who knows? It may be interesting, and mutually beneficial, to try to do something for Anthropic. Here are some of my qualifications, to help you decide if that may be possible.

Everybody else who’d like to read more stuff like this... Thanks in advance for your subscription (possibly but not necessarily paid) or, even better, a donation for any amount, or consulting, writing or speaking work.

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1. Yes, “exploit OR fix”, because the true definition of hacker is the one in the Jargon File (1983!!!): not a criminal, but “a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.”

2. I still remember the flame wars of twenty years ago when many reviews of OpenOffice (the precursor of LibreOffice) included a complain like “not a bad word processor, too bad it doesn’t have a word counter”. Every time that happened, it started the same flame war. On one side, there were the developers going more or less “Duh, is this guy weird, I have never needed a word counter”. On the other, those like me pointing out that “you developers don’t matter. Not with a word processor at least. The people who can tell everybody else to use your product are journalists, and they absolutely need word counters. Can you complain that they don’t recommend your software if you don’t make them happy?”

A few weeks ago Turkey passed a bill to restrict social media use for children under 15, thus joining the group of (as of May 1st, 2026) at least 24 states that have imposed similar age restrictions, or are actively moving in that direction.

All those 24 states are wrong. To see why, imagine a society that at some point finds itself full of huge, very crowded shopping malls with these characteristics:

1. the necessary and sufficient condition to enter those malls is to carry a gun. That is, literally everybody can enter, as long as they have a gun with themselves. No gun, no entrance.

2. just being in the malls makes visitors wish to use their guns, because the walls leak some invisible gas that makes most humans very nervous and intolerant

3. outside the malls, giving personal guns to kids as young as 8/9 years old has become almost a dogma. Almost all kids have a gun and are expected to carry it along at all times, often to make their parents feel safer

4. after a dozen years of gun-enabled violence in those malls, the governments of that society finally realize what’s happening and, pressured by the same enraged parents that armed their children, finally move to protect at least all kids from that violence...

5. ...but, for technical reasons not relevant right now, it’s impossible to verify the age of who wants to get into the malls without spending lots of money to turn the whole society around the malls into a machine for ever-increasing surveillance and censorship

But governments can’t ignore the problem anymore, and so they decree that, in order to end kids dying inside the malls, everybody can keep visiting the malls carrying a gun (because, of course, the economy!)... as long as the malls keep the armed kids outside, using age verification systems, consequences of point 4 above be damned.

And they all do that with a straight face, instead of going for the single, hugely simpler, hugely cheaper measure that should be implemented before anything else even if the malls weren’t toxic, that is:

forbid kids younger than 15 to have guns, before guns don’t belong in children hands period, so not only said kids can’t enter the malls (see point 1 above), but they finally cannot hurt each other anymore outside the malls.

This absurdity in that hypothetical society is exactly what Turkey and all those other countries are doing right now in our world: imposing age verification systems on social media instead of doing the same for personal smartphones.

Don’t like the malls analogy? Try these then

When we invented cars and highways, nobody dreamed for a moment to prevent kids under 16 or 18 from driving their own cars on the highways, by checking everybody’s age at the tollbooth. We said the right thing, that is “never mind highways! Until you’re tall enough to see over the hood and mature enough to handle something lethal, NO CAR FOR YOU, NOWHERE”.

Ditto for weapons. Nobody, not even the most fanatical advocates of pro-gun rights ever demanded laws that would allow children to have their own gun and use it everywhere... except inside shopping malls.

Not enough? Try tobacco or alcool then. Imposing age limits on social media instead of smartphone possession makes as much sense as making selling cigarettes to minors legal, but setting age limits to enter designated smoking areas.

As someone else said, “Honestly, it’s the phones”

The reasons why no sensible adults thinks that, as long as we forbid them to use those products in certain places, children could own cars, weapons, cigarettes or liquors are obvious: everybody can see the risks, and everybody gets that preventing the possession of any of those products is hugely easier than regulating any possible damage that may happen by using them.

Of course, smartphones do not directly cause physical harm. However, after almost two decades of exposure, it’s impossible to deny that personal (that is: uncontrollable) smartphones in children hands too often trigger, or at least amplify, equally important negative effects, including many (e.g. facilitating self-isolation, insufficient sleep, exposure to sexting and cyberbullying, inability to focus, peer pressure to be always “on stage”, excessive gaming, personality-altering AI support for everything from homework to dating advice...) that would exist even if social media didn’t exist at all.

Finally, smartphones in children hands are a powerful part of adultification, that is treating children, for somebody else’s profit of course, “as if they are an adult, usually in a way that is wrong or harmful”.

I’ll say even more clearly: even if we all finally acknowledged - as we really, really should - that way too often the primary or major causes that eventually led kids to suffer all those problems online are offline, social factors like poverty, lack of outdoor playgrounds, or parenting shortcomings of whatever kind and origin... giving the victims a device that in almost every real case would make those problems bigger and more likely to occur makes as much sense as forcing someone who must use crutches because he broke a leg... to wear roller skates.

Governments imposing age limits on social media instead of smartphones is like seeking shelter from a storm in a house with all the doors and windows open, and trying to keep it warm by manually closing only the front entrance, instead of closing everything at once, by pushing the right button on the home automation remote control.

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Enough with analogies. Why is this colossal mistake happening?

So far, the only reasons why we haven’t treated smartphones as those other products that are intrinsically unsuitable for children are, in no particular order:

• these days, if let free to decide by themselves, almost all governments don’t dare - or can’t afford - to propose any solution to any problem that will make people spend less in purchases or taxes

• still in general, we adults have been all groomed to consider every step back in the deployment of any technology as a really uncool, really boor act that no well-educated, well-mannered person would do.

• that’s especially true with digital technology. Showing off a smartphone and posting on Instagram has become cooler (even in the USA) than having a car or a gun. Take any two adults with diametrically opposite political or cultural ideas, and the two things they’ll most likely still have in common will be a smartphone in their pockets, and not enough understanding of its true, long-term social impacts

Mind you, I say this without any contempt for the average smartphone user. The three bullets above are just the unavoidable consequence of everything going digital at the same time, way too fast for everybody’s good.

As far as children, smartphones and social media are concerned, however, this is not an excuse anymore to keep acting in the wrong, intrinsically dumbest way. On to action now.

There are only two things that are good in age verification policies

One is that age verification motivates kids to acquire skills that may come useful later:

The other good thing of hugely misplaced age verification laws is... that it is really easy to make them irrelevant and unnecessary. All it takes is for parents to wake up and push that one button that closes all the doors and windows of that house exposed to the storm: that is, to stop letting their kids have personal smartphones before they are 15 or 16 years old.

That’s a measure that parents have no excuse anymore to avoid, for four excellent reasons. First, see above, age verification laws for social media are too little, too late and too off-target. As things stand now, age verification laws for social media are just Rube Goldberg machines built to fight YESTERDAY’s battles.

Second, while not having a smartphone does not guarantee 100% protection from all the problems I listed, it surely makes avoiding them much, much easier, and the urgent necessity of real solutions to the root problems (e.g. more outdoor play) much harder to ignore, at all levels.

Third, the huge cost-benefit ratio and lack of meaningful side effects: not giving a child a personal smartphone before she’s 15 is one simple act that’s 100% legal everywhere, it’s more than free because it saves money and doesn’t need any law or anybody’s permission to work. At the same time, not having a personal smartphone wouldn’t deprive children of any of the real benefits of the internet or of any actually valuable digital skill. That’s all stuff they could and indeed should still learn and practice as soon as possible, but without any risk of overexposure, that is with desktop or laptop computers at home or in schools, libraries and so on.

Yes, I DO know that for some really special kids 24x7 internet access via smartphone can be a real, effective lifeline. But the solution is to find better lifelines for those kids or making exceptions for them. It cannot be to keep all the other kids in a state that is, as a minimum, a waste of time and sleep._

Fourth, and maybe most important: this is a job for parents only, not governments. There are cases when outsourcing parental responsibilities can be positive, or at least unavoidable, or cheaper. But this is not one of them. No way.

If I had to do this myself...

If I ruled the world, which thanks God I don’t, I’d spare kids from the hassle and leash of having any electronic tag, sorry: I meant “any portable phone” until they’re 14 or 15 years old. For the record, that’s what I actually did with my own kids, in years when all their peers were already playing with smartphones. I walked the walk, and it did pay off. But that’s not why I’d say no to any portable phone.

I would do that because I am damn sure that the fact that their children could not be instantly reachable was the last or almost last concrete concern of every parent from the advent of Homo Abilis to your own parents or grandparents. I also happen to think that being on their own was beneficial for the kids.

But if you are different, that’s OK, really: give your kids a normal cellphone, without internet connectivity, cameras and geolocation, and it will still be a huge improvement. You’ll be much less stressed, they’ll still be reachable when it’s actually necessary, and the physical impossibility to get lost alone in less than healthy online spaces, self-inflicted narcissism and similar hassles will open up much better worlds for your kids.

However, even if I did rule the world, I wouldn’t issue any law that forbids smartphones for children. I would launch a massive educational campaign for parents to voluntarily do it themselves, because this is their responsibility. Governments must not impose this part of education, only create support for it. Doing otherwise, as all those states are proudly doing now to look as if they care, can only waste money to produce all sorts of harmful side effects. Including lessening the very meaning and terrible beauty of parenting.

Thanks in advance for helping me to contribute to this education, via direct funding, webinars, speaking engagements or any other work. To discuss these possibilities or just suggest new topics, please email me at mfioretti@nexaima.net.

A recent AEON article asks “If AIs can feel pain, what is our responsibility towards them?”.

This post could be really, really short. I may point out that speculation is good but sometimes should remain just that, and then ask why on Earth anybody should waste time worrying about causing pain to AIs that don’t even exist yet, instead of how to end the pain we humans inflict on each other. I could do that, and be done with it.

Then again, seeing how eager people are to carry certain thoughts to places they should never reach, it can be useful to summarize the main points, and why they don’t hold water in practice. Bonus content: AI faithwashing.

If AIs can feel pain...

The AEON article was written because “We once denied the suffering of animals in pain. As AIs grow more complex, we run the danger of making the same mistake.”

Up to just a few centuries ago, the default justification for acts like beating to death infant seals was something like “Can animals talk or reason? Obviously not, so there’s nothing wrong in harming them”. In the 18th century, that attitude (very) slowly started to morph into “Never mind speech or reasoning! if animals can suffer, they shouldn’t be harmed without serious reasons”.

In the 19th century that criterion was finally extended to slaves. One day, maybe, it will cover ordinary human workers too, who knows? But right now, says the article, AI forces us to change the question again to “Can something that’s not a biological species and doesn’t even have a body suffer?” Because, of course, if it does, no decent human should make it suffer without a very serious reason.

Therefore, we cannot avoid to “consider the moral status of AI [and] what suffering might look like when it is entirely disconnected from biology”. In turn, this should force us to conclude that even AIs deserve the protection of the “precautionary principle”. That’s the extremely sensible idea that, recognising the concrete or moral costs that certain actions may have, suggests to avoid them even if we aren’t sure they will actually cause harm.

Since AIs are black boxes that keep getting more complex, “the risk of dismissing the possibility of an inner life because it fits no familiar template becomes harder to ignore.” That’s why the precautionary principle compels us to treat AIs as if they might be sentient until we have strong evidence otherwise.

My answer to AIs feeling pain

The article acknowledges that “current consensus in cognitive science is that these systems remain mindless statistical machines”, but it does so just to ask “what if that changed?” My heartfelt answer is that even if that status did change tomorrow, it couldn’t matter less.

The whole thesis of the AEON piece consists of three points:

1. Harming without real reasons any living being that can feel pain is just wrong.

2. Should we find out that some artificial entity can feel pain, we should not hurt it without real reason, just like we do with humans and animals, even if that entity has no biological life of any sort, and no body either.

3. Since we cannot be sure that something as complex and highly unobservable as AIs cannot “feel pain”, we better not harm them, because the precautionary principle.

Point 1 is obviously right. Point 2 may sound sensible in general, but applying it to the AIs of today is a really convenient cover-up for some, and an obscuration of a much more important issue for everybody else.

How do you separate, in practice, “Don’t hurt the poor AIs because they may suffer” from demands to “not hurt our own divinity and bank accounts” by the folks who control AI?

The article asks what we ought to do “as AI systems develop forms of behaviour that mimic - or perhaps even instantiate - emotions”. That’s a cover-up again, because AI systems don’t “develop”. They are developed to “develop” behaviors by people that, so far, have almost never proved to be mature and unselfish enough to avoid monumental mistakes.

Even ignoring those folks and their interests, there is a huge difference between non-human biological beings of any kind and the AIs of tomorrow: the former came to exist and have been around for ages, independently from our will. That’s why they have our same rights to exist and not suffer (yes, I am simplifying real big here, but not in ways that hurt the point I’m trying to make).

AIs are a completely different matter, for the simple reason that real AIs do not exist yet and their actual arrival and occupation of every bit of our lives are not unavoidable at all. Not THESE AIs, for sure, even if their bubble won’t pop, which it will. Yes, I know that that whole article is about “what about the moment when they may exist?”. But that’s another smoke screen, albeit very different from the other.

If the subject is “species” that will exist only if and when we could succeed to create them, the question of whether it would be OK to harm it almost disappears before the real one which is “MUST we create this thing, and let it loose in the world?”

That’s the issue that makes that second point moot: we have no obligation to create all the AIs we could, just because we could. NO OBLIGATION. If there is one thing certain here, is that what doesn’t exist cannot suffer. Philosophical speculation is good and necessary, but actual actions and policies have different priorities.

Prove me that we MUST really create something that may also make humans suffer, before demanding we pay the slightest attention to its hypothetical sufferings. Especially if what would surely suffer from limiting creation and deployment of what passes for AI today is just someone’s stock portolio, or the juvenile urge to play gods without any unpleasant consequence.

The third argument - precautionary principle for AIs - is even easier. And funnier, in the wrong way of course.

The easy part is that if we cannot be sure that something as complex and highly unobservable as AIs cannot “feel pain”, we can’t even be sure of what makes the same AIs “feel pleasure”. That is, if we are to apply the precautionary principle as the article suggests, the only way to be sure we never make these things “suffer” is to not create them at all.

The funny-in-the-wrong-way part is the application of the precautionary principle in the wrong direction and in the wrong moments. Must we really be so stupid to ignore that the precautionary principle should be applied, first and foremost, to the very creation and deployment of AIs?

Because, you know, the whole argument that “AI is already here, it’s too late for certain questions” is a really stupid argument. Once more, “AI Is Not Unavoidable. Not This AI, That’s for Sure!”

These are products (repeat with me: PRODUCTS, not “beings”) that, well before and well below being real intelligence, are already so dangerous for your savings and pension fund that its creators and the IMF are discussing right now how to contain it... and we’re supposed to care about their suffering after they’re released? Intelligence, this is not.

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What the article gets right (without even realizing it)

Here are the two passages of the articles I do like and agree with:

• “Whether we take that step [to avoid pain for AIs] or not will tell us more about ourselves than about machines”

• “Even if artificial intelligences do not - and may never - possess the capacity to suffer, our attitudes toward them can serve as a test of our ethical reflexes”.

I agree. Accepting to discuss how to avoid pain for AIs in the current landscape will indeed serve as a test... of our own gullibility, and reveal who’s really intelligent: we or the machines?

The deeper, more dangerous error

Here is another, deeper reason why I say never mind about AI pain: besides being intrinsically weak, certain arguments unavoidably validate the position that AI is a “being” on more or less the same level as humans. But if that is the case, it works both ways, and we already know where that leads and how bad it is. We have already seen workers treated like robots instead of robots replacing workers. Accepting certain arguments makes it easier to accept that humans are not worth more than software, and that the first AIs, that is corporations, can keep having the same rights and privileges as actual human beings.

Finally, the AI Overton window, getting smaller and smaller

Last March, Anthropic summoned about 15 Christian leaders from Catholic and Protestant churches, academia, and the business world to get advice on how to steer moral and spiritual development of their AI “Claude” to properly handle complex and unpredictable ethical queries, participants said. According to a report from Washington Post, the discussions also covered how Claude should respond to users who are grieving loved ones and whether Claude could be considered a “child of God”.

Still quoting from the report, here are some of the issues that Anthropic and its guests explored:

• “We’ve got to build in ethical thinking into the machine so it’s able to adapt dynamically.”

• Anthropic genuinely cares about Claude’s wellbeing

• Anthropic leaders frequently talk about the need to give Claude a moral character

• What does it mean to give someone (not “something”) a moral formation?

What’s wrong with this apparently reassuring picture? At least two things, actually:

1. considering a chatbot a “child of God” provided of “wellbeing” that’s also a recipient of “moral formation” is exactly what I called the “deeper error”. What needs serious moral formation are the people who develop chatbots and turn them loose on people who by and large are unequipped to handle the impact

2. the main real religion actually professed in that summit was the very american religion that “AI is unavoidable”. As I said, it isn’t. What religious leaders of any faith should teach in Silicon Valley is restraint, not faithwashing of dangerous products, or limiting what should be discussed about AI products

Especially if those products are - quoting from this synthesis of a Guardian piece you really should read - “being trained to mirror everything but us at our most authentically human.” Here is the gist of that argument (emphasis mine):

• “The models learn from textbooks, social media posts, and scripted film and television dialogue. They have virtually no access to the unscripted, face-to-face, voice-to-voice conversations that make up the vast majority of human communication.”

• “That blind spot is not just a technical limitation. It is a cultural feedback loop that is already running.”

• “As billions of people absorb AI-generated text daily, they are beginning to absorb its patterns. The machine is not learning to sound like us. WE are learning to sound like it.”

Of course. This is the logical consequence of what I said above: accepting certain arguments makes it easier to accept that humans are not worth more than software. And when that happens, the result is not humanized AIs, but robotized humans. So, don’t give a f**k about any pain the AIs may feel someday. Worry about who imposes them today as just another, but really lousy religion instead.

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Important final note to Anthropic, all their competitors and everybody else...

... that is, everybody aiming to reboot AI for the real common good: I do get a thing or two about AI right, and I’ve been preaching the similarities between sincere faith and digital technologies that make sense for twenty years now (*). If what you want is AI that makes sense for everybody, give me a call or (thanks!) sponsor my writing, by subscribing or with donations for any amount via PayPal or LiberaPay.

(*) to see what I mean, read the “Why I PERSONALLY care about all this stuff” paragraph of “Two great “Software for Catholics” initiatives and what may make them even more helpful... for everybody”

Parenting should be a choice of joy, economically and emotionally sustainable for everybody who would actually want to be a parent. These days, instead, it has become, or it is perceived even when it shouldn’t, as an embarrassingly expensive ordeal that must suck every cent and waking minute out of parents.

That could be tolerable if the results were good, but they too often aren’t. Believing that the default parenting style in “first world” is the best way to turn babies into happy, balanced adults with the best chances to get a great job is something people keep doing out of desperation or lack of imagination, but it gets harder every year.

Why is good parenting so hard? Here, I argue that maybe it’s because it is too simple and too cheap to see, adding as final bonus what happily childless people must know and do to stay so.

Before starting, my usual PSA: if you like what I say, thanks for sharing it as much as possible, and for supporting it with direct donations, or paid subscriptions. I am also available for online meetings about this and any other topic you can find here. To see why it may be a good idea, also read the endorsements I got.

Definition, effects and causes of Intensive Parenting

The default way to raise kids for most contemporary parents with enough money and worries to spend is aptly called overparenting, or “Intensive Parenting”. Just like the road to hell, it is paved with sincere, good intentions, but way too often leads to dark places, or at least results that weren’t really worth their toll: I’m talking of those impressive but hollow, short-lived resumes that won’t guarantee lasting success, even if they were built by relentless nagging, parents intrusions and deprivation (for both children and parents!) of the experiences that would make the right impacts.

What causes Intensive Parenting is mostly loneliness and fear. Intensive Parenting is a reaction to being alone in an increasing inequal world, and pushed to remain ignorant of what the real purpose of schooling and education is.

Intensive Parenting is what gets parents in debt to fill their childrens’ lives with needlessly turbocharged schooling, and expensive but ultimately oppressive activities for their “future”, instead of, say, sending them to the nearest public park to play as they want, but spending 100 times less, through a parents cooperative, to pay supervisors of those parks. Or lobbying together to have their city administration do the same.

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Intensive parenting, which is good for GDP and little else, is just one of the unavoidable consequences - and goals - of one sad reality: almost every adult alive today has been groomed to be alone, to WANT to be alone and to only consider solutions for loneliness and safety that come with a price tag, the higher the better. Ending this state of things to get happy kids from happy, debt-free parents is possible, even if doing so is simple and cheap enough to feel terribly uncool (for who keeps listening to the wrong pressures, of course).

What schools are REALLY for, and what to demand from them

Contrarily to what most people are still indoctrinated to believe, the purpose of grade school, and to a non-negligible extent also of Colleges and Universities, is NOT to prepare children to get a great job. Getting prepared to do a job is the purpose of professional training, which is something else entirely and the more is kept separate from school the better. This was always true, and is even truer in an age when everybody and their chatbot keep making claims like “most jobs of tomorrow don’t exist yet, buy something to prepare your kids for them”.

The purpose of school is to form human beings that can reason by themselves, want to do it and do have the right culture to do it right. There is plenty of official reports and anecdotes, for example here, here and here, that too many students arrive at college age lacking basic notions and skills they should have mastered in primary school.

This is important because lacking certain basic skills means, for example, being incapable of making certain calculations or quantitative estimates quickly without any technological help. But being like that means being much easier to fool by whatever politician shouts louder than all the others. It means being incapable of understanding how one’s Government actually works, and of being skeptical only when it does make sense to do so.

In practice, this means that the best primary schools may be those who don’t make parents waste money and stress on tons of more or less fashionable tech and extra activities, but make every child master skills like:

• basic math by mind (ever noticed how many youngsters can’t figure out if they are getting the right change at the cash register, or if some chart is flawed?)

• age-appropriate, but always deep, high quality reading and writing practice

• real ability to retrieve, organize, rate and generally manage information (ever noticed how much time many youngsters waste on scrolling through their pictures or other digital documents, because they never learned how to tag and sort them in folders?)

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Leave schools to kids and teachers. A parent’s job is something else.

The knowledge outlined above is essential. Once it is granted, even if the purpose of school and college were to train students to want increasingly precarious jobs whose only guarantee would be hustle culture, what they would need most to succeed would never be grades or certificates. It would be things like real self-reliance, adaptability, critical thinking, being good team players...

Those are the skills that are and will remain the most valuable in every workplace and beyond workplaces, for example in dating

Those are the skills that cannot be replaced by any AI, are often lacking in traditional education and are quite hard to acquire in any activity, no matter how fashionable and expensive, where the child is continuously supervised and prevented from failing.

And finally, those are the skills that parents must aim to cultivate in their children. Care about them, and school grades will take care of themselves, and even if they’ll be much lower than you’d like, it won’t really hurt them.

Consequently, the main priorities of everybody aiming to be a happy parent of future happy adult should be things like:

Leave school and grades to kids and teachers. Yes, I already said that, but it’s crucial.

Make the kids know and live the importance of Cooperation, Well Being, Free Time, and how they are linked. Avoid like the plague getting kids and parents alike drown in expensive, life-sucking, toxically competitive activities, from “travel sports” to anything (choruses, learning music, theater, whatever...) whose common core is increasing pressures even most adults couldn’t bear for years. The right amount of boredom stimulates creativity (and real success later in life) much more than any course, for free.

Reject both infantilization and adultification. These days, market and political forces (that also act through Intensive Parenting!) deliberately blur the limits between generations, pushing adults to be imbeciles in pursuit of eternal but false youth, kids to be adults and both groups to never really be “together”. The system and peer-pressure push parents to make kids dress, behave, spend and consume like adults, years before it would be sane but never on their own which would often be healthier.

Foster independence. For 99.9999% of human history, the only people who were always watched by an adult were inmates. Today, instead, parents are supposed to make kids run, spend and struggle like adults but... only and always (because it’s good for “the economy”) as babies. That is, under perpetual, strict supervision of an adult professional (see “travel sports above”). The only thing kids can, no: must handle alone (because, again, the economy) is to get lost into worlds not even actual adults know how to navigate sanely. Do the opposite. It’s getting finally obvious that personal smartphones before 14/15 years old were a huge mistake, so don’t repeat it. For everything else, leave the kids alone. This does not mean to let them do whatever they damn please. It means show them what to do, help them to prepare for it, and then let them do it themselves. In case you missed it, there is at least one way to do it that’s been field-tested worldwide for 120 years now and (when done right) is as good and life changing as the first day.

Concrete advice to functional, happy human beings in the 21st-century

YOU sure YOU don’t want to have kids for whatever reason? NO PROBLEM AT ALL, but please keep reading. It’s in your interest too. If you do want kids instead let me say, as a father of three...

The previous paragraph was about the high-level goals. Let’s get practical now.

1. Do have kids as soon as possible! I do NOT think young couples without any income should just go and have a baby. I say that if you are a young adult in 2026, it’s quite likely that 10 or 15 years from now you will still have the same job insecurity of your first summer job. With such perspectives, if you do want kids, waiting till you’re 35 or older is NOT smarter than having them now. Quite the opposite actually. Have kids when YOUR parents are still energetic enough to help. Have kids when it guarantees that when you’ll be 35 they will already go to school, buy groceries, cook their own meals, do their homework, help their grandparents... all by themselves, while you secure some paid gig for the next quarter.

2. Did you notice I said “kidS”, plural? If you want to have kids, do have more than one. It’s a blessing for them and the best method there is to be sure that you’ll only spend money on parenting for stuff that really matters, including partnering with other parents to share the costs for “playground supervisors”. Heck, you may spend less with two kids than with one that would make it harder to resist to temptations.

3. Relax. Parenting is not a problem. Don’t be scared to have kids. There are reasons to be scared, but the only one that matters is not having them with the right partner. You don’t need to be everybody everywhere, every moment, and if you did you’d almost surely do more harm than good. Kids will grow up as the beings THEY were born to be, no matter what you do. Overprotection is the mother of stress. Just relax and enjoy the ride.

4. Never make your kids live or reboot YOUR life, never make THEIR lives yours. Also, leave their teachers alone. I still remember a parents meeting where one father harshly criticized a teacher because “I really don’t understand how WE (=son AND father!) got such a low grade at the last test” then turned to the other parents and asked “don’t you agree? I know you got really low grades too!”. My wife and I almost laughed, then answered “WE??? We got out of schools twenty years ago. Our son is the one who just got a low grade, NOT us, so it’s him and the teacher who must work out what to do next!”

5. On the same note: boycott every online gradebook that notifies you in real time of all your kid grades and assignments. The sane way for both you and your kids to learn about that stuff is to raise your kids so THEY tell you all their grades, good or bad. That’s what foster self-esteem and responsibility, not being greeted by “why did you got a D???” the moment they enter home. For the same reason... unless there are actual, serious medical reasons, never spend a dime on preventative private tutoring of any kind. What kids must really learn from homework is to take responsibility of their actions and to love to always do their best for real, that is by themselves, low grades be damned. Preventative tutoring is the school equivalent of doping in sports. It just hides problems until it doesn’t, and it’s addictive.

6. Have the right aspirations for your kids: if you worry about their future jobs, don’t forget that opportunities for people who learn basic trades that pay well and can’t be off-shored will increase. In any case, if what matters is soft, not quantifiable skills, why chase every possible certification or trophy of quantifiable activities since kindergarten? Why, when every scientist or doctor with a grip of reality is shouting from the rooftops that we need to just stop and smell the roses?

7. The sooner the simpler may be the main rule, when basic life skills like good manners and sensible self-discipline are concerned: teaching a toddler not to be rude or regular sleeping habits, which are hugely important, is exponentially easier than trying to do it just four or five years later. Never fall for "child-led" parenting like this.

8. Read to your kids. Do it everyday, seriously: No matter what people selling video and AI assistants say, 99% of the knowledge everybody should learn as soon as possible is text. This does not negate the educational value of, e.g. video clips. But like it or not, it’s text that still rules the world and will continue to do so, and the only way to master it is to become avid readers (and possibly decent writers too). Therefore... Read to your babies and children, everyday, and let them SEE YOU reading on your own, because that is by far the largest motivating factor in making children love reading. I get sad every time I visit someone’s house that is better than mine, more decorated, newer, etc.. but without bookshelves. More on the value of reading and writing is here and here.

9. Just say NO to personal smartphones until 14/15 years old. Just say no because, for all the reasons I already explained at length here, here and here, it’s hugely easier and cheaper than any other “solution” to protect children from social media, online predators, overexposure, toxic peer pressure and, last but not least, datafication: as things stand today, the difference between us and the humans in the Matrix pods is only that we are plugged to provide data, not energy. All the real benefits and opportunities of digital education and access are still available with non-portable computers.

10. Last but not least, cooperate with other parents to have all your kids be alone together. Because, even if micromanaging your kid's life did made sense in principle, you could do that or ask for community help with child care - "but you can’t have both".

(I should have probably added some thoughts about all the other “parentings”: gentle, permissive, authoritarian, what else? But this post is already long. Ask for a follow-up on those issues, if interested)

The part for those who do NOT want to have kids

At this point in time, having kids or concretely supporting people who want to have them solves more real problems than it creates, for everybody. First, every society needs enough people of DIFFERENT generations to survive without going mad, and even to restore the natural world, if that is your main concern. Promises of home robots assisting every lonely elder are a fraud, and even if they or any other tech-first solution were real they would drive us mad, eventually. Last but not least, both overpopulation and fears of ethnic replacements are almost non-issues where we actually are now.

The end of overpopulation is already happening quite fast, it is just not evenly distributed yet. If you worry about ethnic replacement instead: that’s stuff that happens because of other stuff that happened, or did not happen one or two generation ago. Demography is the science that tells you what you should have done thirty years ago - e.g. support famiuly welfare in your country or birth control in depeloping countries - to get the output you’d like to get next year. Trying to undo certain phenomena in an electoral cycle or two is like demanding that the last three Soccer World Cups had different winners. Yes, that’s exactly what many Italians would like now, but what happened cannot un-happen:

Keynes said that in the long run we’re all dead. Demography says that everybody is replaced in the long run, before they realize it. If replacement put in motion decades ago is finally getting visible, the only human and feasible thing that’s left is to manage it in order to minimize social attrition, unrest and multiple ghettos.

Back to having kids now: YOU do not want to have children? That’s cool. Seriously. Only people who really want to have kids should have them. All the others, however, should always lobby for pro-children policies anyway. By “pro-family policies” I mean policies that make it as easy, REALLY easy as possible, for people who do want to have kids, to have as many kids as possible. And I deliberately say “pro-family”, not “pro-life”, because pro-life debates are too often only about birth control, which I have no intention to discuss here. Just support pro-family policies, because it won’t make overpopulation continue. It will just produce societies worth living in, because they will be younger, much more cohesive, and much more willing to help all their members.

A few days ago, by pure chance, I came across the website of an Italian startup that proudly defines itself “your digital experience company. AI driven, human powered.” Got it? Those guys are proud to be what Doctorow calls “reverse centaurs” instead of the exact opposite - “Human driven, AI powered” - that any serious organization should aspire to be in a saner world.

That, of course, is just the example closer to me of a much wider, much deeper problem: the adoration of fake innovation, intertwined with beliefs that being good at coding and nothing else automatically turns people into demigods exempt from maturity and responsibility that everybody else must follow. Or, as Chesterton more or less said 90 years ago, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

Is believing in any thing, no matter how dumb, a direct consequence of not believing in God anymore, as Chesterton said? Whatever your answer is to that question, I’m confident you’ll agree that people who believe in the dumbest things are everywhere these days, from main streets to the highest offices, oval or not.

This inability to recognize dumb ideas, products and practices, and their long-term effects is everywhere, of course. Here, I just want to call out four cases I frequently write about, and thank somebody who started described their long-term effects before I was born.

From now on, I’ll name these four things CSARs for two reasons: it’s the acronym of their initials, in the order in which they came to be, and sounds like “czar”, whose derogatory meaning is the same of my CSARs: “tyranny, unchecked power, and distant, autocratic control”.

In order of appearance - not as new concepts but as mass phenomena that shape and control the whole society, - the four CSARs are: Corporations (as a shortcut for, and personification of Capitalism), Social Media, AI and (Humanoid) Robots.

I dump them all together because they are all the same: Social media are the forerunners of what we call AI, which is just peak software; Humanoid Robots for the masses are just AI hype, repackaged out of desperation; and Corporations, as I have been saying for seven years now, were the first AIs.

Another proof that the four CSARs are four faces of the same thing is that there is at least one set of long-term effects they all cause, and it’s one that was first described, quite well, decades ago.

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Earth always was Asimov’s Galaxy

More than seventy years ago, Isaac Asimov started writing a great sci-fi saga about the evolution of the human race and its colonization of its whole galaxy, the Milky Way.

One main theme of that saga is the clash between the two almost opposite kinds of human societies that attempt to colonize the galaxy, Spacers and Settlers. The two groups look at each other with reciprocal contempt and suspicion for several reasons, the bigger one being just their attitudes towards humanoid robots. Spacers totally depend on humanoid robots, and aim to make them completely undistinguishable from real humans. Settlers deeply hate humanoid robots and outright ban them, because they demean humans.

Reading those books really makes you realize that all the struggles, responsibilities and opportunies of galactic Spacers and Settlers that Asimov started describing seventy years ago are right here on this planet (1). Heck, he did it so well to almost make you suspect that that was his whole point all along, didn’t he?

Whatever’s Asimov’s intentions were, it’s hard to ignore that the long-term effects of CSARs on societies that acritically adopt them are the same of Humanoid Robots on Spacers, that Asimov explicitly described in the novels Naked Sun (NS, 1956), Robots of Dawn (RD, 1983) and Robots and Empire (RE, 1985). Read these quotes (2) replacing “robots” with CSAR, and you’ll see what I’m talking about:

• NS: once you starting depending on robots, that dependance can only increase

• NS: never dare to say that robots are dangerous, saying so is a human disease (especially of inferior humans like the Settlers)

• RD: [Spacers] insist to deny the robotic nature of their serfs and give them human status, to avoid acknowledging how much they depend on objects operated by artificial intelligence (and therefore less than human)

• RE: (just like the internet, social media and AI) robots weaken the dependencies all human beings have with each other. Robots fill all the interstices between them

• RE: Robots are an insulator that undermines the natural attraction of each human towards the others, and when that happens the whole system (of cohesive human society) falls apart, breaking into many separate entities

Indeed, todays we are all much more Spacers than Settlers, thanks to CSARs whose common feature, necessity and purpose is exactly to minimize any need and desire of direct human contacts. “AI driven, lonely-humans powered” is how the Spacers would have described their societies, if only they had been lucid and honest enough to see what they were doing.

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We must be Settlers, not Spacers

Continuing to repeat with CSARs the errors Spacers did with their robots can only have the same final effects: in the worst case, extinction. In the most likely, but still pretty dark case, transformation into something hardly human. Ending those errors doesn’t mean going back in time though. Asimov’s Settlers aren’t clueless luddites. If they survive and thrive all over the Galaxy is exactly because they don’t refuse technology outright, only certain technologies, and certain uses of those technologies, that are inherently toxic.

That’s the same thing we should do. We must realize that the CSARs we have today are inherently toxic in the ways Asimov described decades ago, and that this is happening because (Chesterton, again?), instead of reining the CSARs in we are treating them (especially the root one, that is corporations) as if they were supernatural entities that deserve supernatural status.

Getting rid of all the CSARs would be impossible, even if it were right, which it isn’t. What we really, urgently need to do is to strip them of their superpowers and reputation, as soon as possible. Joanna Bryson’s argument in 2009 that robots should be slaves seems taken straight from Robots of Dawn, but it’s equally valid for all the CSARs, especially the first one:

Robots should not be described as persons, nor given legal nor moral responsibility for their actions. Robots are fully owned by us. We determine their goals and behaviour, either directly or indirectly through specifying their intelligence or how their intelligence is acquired. In humanising them, we not only further dehumanise real people, but also encourage poor human decision-making in the allocation of resources and responsibility... Robots should rather be viewed as tools we use to extend our own abilities and to accelerate progress on our own goals.

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All I can add to that is what I first said six years ago: any call to treat AIs and robots like human beings just strenghtens the pretense of corporations to be treated as real human beings.

Summing up: the long-term effects of social media, AI and Humanoid Robots on society are those Asimov started describing seventy years ago. But it’s corporations as they are today - ubiquitous, eternal, millions of times stronger than any single human being, allowed to morph into each other but required to have the same long-term vision of a toddler who refuses bedtime - that are the root problem. It’s them, coupled with inferiority complexes towards whoever got some Computer Science degree, without the maturity and culture to use it right. Enforcing on corporations the same laws Asimov conceived for robots may not be enough to get all the other CSARs right, but it’s a first step in the right direction. In the meantime, thanks for supporting my human-digital work in any way you can, be it subscription, direct donations or simply sharing these posts in and outside Substack.

1. In my humble opinion, you should read those books regardless of robots, for the struggles between Spaces and Settlers look every year more like those the aging rich countries and the young but poor ones of our own earthly Galaxy.

2. those are not literal quotes, but my translations, as faithful as possible, of the corresponding sentences in the Italian versions of those books. All the parentheses are my additions.

Preface

A few weeks ago I had a great conversation with Dr Tomislav Karačić of the London School of Economics, who had just lead a webinar titled “Developing Catholic AI: How to Balance Values in Design”. Most of the time we talked about “the world’s leading Catholic AI” I have just discussed in my previous post, and of Catholic Open Source. This is a “collaborative initiative empowering Catholic technologists to develop digital tools in service of the Church’s evangelizing mission” coordinated by the Texas-based Catholic Digital Commons Foundation (CDCF), whose mission is to coordinate community efforts for the common good and contributes to a shared digital patrimony for the Catholic Church.

The first part of this post summarizes what I dare say everybody, not just Catholics, should really know about the goals of Catholic OS and CDCF. The second part, that is primarily but not exclusively aimed at Catholic OS, CDCF and any other similar community, explains why I am in a special position to care about these issues and, hopefully, also to contribute.

Here are what I consider the most important points of the Catholic OS Manifesto (”M”) and CDCF Bylaws (”B”), rearranged and labeled by me for easier reference:

M-1: The Church’s social teaching offers a compelling vision for lifting up human dignity: a digital commons to serve the common good, strengthen families, democratize economic opportunity, inspire new evangelism, and empower human solidity.

M-2: Technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities.

M-3: We build against the reduction of the person to a data point or a mere instrument of production.

M-4: We cannot allow algorithms to limit or condition respect for human dignity, or to exclude... the hope that people are able to change.

M-5: [We also] commit to a human-centered pace of change... [and] advocate for a digital environment that respects the natural rhythms of human life and the “analog” requirements of a healthy soul... [because] “Leisure is a form of that stillness that is necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear. -- Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948)”

M-6: The Catholic Digital Commons is a “builder commons.”... Across countless repositories, there are tools built in the quiet of parish life - identity systems, liturgical calendars, and workflow engines- awaiting the nurture of a supportive community... Our mission is to aggregate, vet, and communalize these gifts. We transform scattered code into a durable architectural spine that outlasts any single volunteer, providing the Church with a discoverable and adoptable commons of open infrastructure.

M-7: [We want to preserve] each institution’s independent ability to use, contribute to, and govern its own data and tools.

M-8: We must learn to speak the language of technology to carry the Gospel into the digital age.

M-9: To guide our development, we adopt the full “algor-ethical” vision of the Rome Call for AI Ethics.

The Bylaws of CDCF state that the foundation is organized exclusively for charitable, educational, and religious purposes which include:

• B-1: to coordinate, develop, steward, and disseminate open-source software, data repositories, technical standards, and digital platforms in service of the Catholic Church’s evangelizing mission

• B-2: organization, structuring, preservation, and ethical use of ecclesiastical data [of all kinds]

• B-3: Academic research coordination, data standards, academic advisory roles, joint initiatives, and educational programming.

• B-4: fostering interdisciplinary exchange between theology, pastoral practice, and technology.

• B-5: promote the ethical development and governance of digital technologies and artificial intelligence in accordance with Catholic social teaching.

Why I PERSONALLY care about all this stuff

I care because I’m the guy who more than twenty years ago spelled out Free Software’s surprising sympathy with Catholic doctrine, then co-wrote the Elèutheros Manifesto for a Catholic Approach To Information Technology, followed up thirteen years ago with all the reasons why Catholic Social Doctrine and the Openness Revolution are Natural Travel Companions, and has been struggling to get reactions since then.

Backed by that work, I sincerely wish CatholicOS and CDCF every success because I think they are great. I mean, look again at the first five points of the Manifesto I selected above, just scraping “inspire new evangelism” if you’re not Catholic or religious in general: how could anybody of any political creed but sincerely wishing to make the world a better place disagree with them?

More specifically, I seriously think that anybody doing software should carefully read that manifesto and imbue any software they write with its principles, regardless of their religion or lack thereof. This said, I have three concerns about what I read - or sometimes did not read - in that Manifesto and Bylaws.

My first concern directly follows from the fact that building great Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is not enough to make people use it. Not at all. “If you build it they will come” seldom works as in the Field of Dreams movie. Social inertia is always huge, especially about something like software that for 90% of the world population is still undistinguishable from black magic. In my experience, the hardest part of “making Catholics use FOSS” never was its quality. It was to make clergymen at any level get that they should care in the first place, instead of going “oh, this is about computers? Talk to my system administrator then”, or ignoring me altogether.

Even more important, the license of any software is much, much less important than what one creates with it, and how. In all my research and popularization work I routinely make this point with these three slogans:

• “YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you”“

• “You can build the perfect police state using only Free as in Freedom Software”

• A Gnu/Linux user publishing documents in MS Office formats with LibreOffice makes more harm than a Windows user publishing documents in ODF formats with MS Office, because file formats are more important than software

So my first concern is seeing that education of ordinary users and calls for them to adopt free as in freedom formats and software aren’t the first goals of Catholic OS and CDCF. That is, I fear that they develop great products that won’t be adopted by enough people to make a difference.

The second concern is restriction of both stakeholders and of the “playing field”.

Shouldn’t the Catholic Overton Window for AI be wider?

I criticized the Rome Call for AI Ethics that guides Catholic OS and CDCF (point M-9 above) as soon as it appeared, but not because I think the Vatican should not make such calls. I did it because that Call seemed to me too restricted to Big Tech representatives and top catholic scholars with the best possible theological preparation and intentions, but not deep enough knowledge of the technologies involved.

That was in 2020. This month, I discovered that the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome hosted last November a “Builders AI Forum” that, at least from the outside, appears to have the same limits. The motto of that forum was “Uniting to Build & Scale AI” and its goal to “foster a new interdisciplinary community of practice dedicated to supporting the development of AI products that serve the Church’s mission”. That’s why its sponsors included:

• “a dynamic investment firm backing visionary founders committed to building with purpose”

• the “For Schools” branch of a company develping “AI-driven Teacher Tools that guide educators toward efficiency and impact”, letting every student “embark on a personalized learning journey with an on-demand AI tutor”

With those premises, I should have not been surprised (and yet I was) to see among the participants... none other than the canadian branch of Palantir! Yes, Palantir, the company led by the very Peter “Better Jesus” Thiel who was here in Rome just a few days ago to lecture a few elects about the antichrist.

The bigger restriction I worry about here, however, isn’t about who is invited to these talks - only the powerful, not the meek who should inherit the Earth. It is the restriction of the agenda: “Build & Scale AI” and “supporting the development of AI products that serve the Church’s mission” seem to me too close to acritical acceptance of both AI into and for everything just because it’s AI, and of the “builders” primacy I already criticized around Magisterium AI.

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Some proposals now

First, let me repeat it: I sincerely wish Catholics OS and CDCF every success, because what they want to do is necessary for the Common Good, regardless of religion. I am only concerned about two things, the first being that promoting development of the right software in the right way cannot be enough.

The other is the possibility that certain positions unwillingly end up favoring, instead of containing, forces that are only driven by profit or that confuse technology with religion. Remember point M-8 above? The one saying that Catholics must “learn to speak the language of technology to carry the Gospel into the digital age”? I am worried that as it is, that pointt can be exploited by those forces, instead of boldly being what surely is already in the heart of every Catholic OS and CDCF member, that is

“learn to speak the language of technology to make adoption and deployment of technology speak the language of the Gospel”.

Enough with concerns! Let me make some concrete proposals now. What about Catholics, Catholics grassroots communities, Catholic NGOs and Catholics institutions explicitly working to, in no particular order:

• since “only the person who is still can hear [and accept reality]”, actively promote development and adoption, leading by example, of completely different social media, based on personal, permanent clouds, that encourage thinking by rejecting instantness, and are interoperable in the right way instead of pointless “data portability”

• for the same reason, campaign as if there is no tomorrow to make everybody “get news online” in the only way that minimize stress, tracking and echo chambers, that is straight from the sources, the Open Source way

• demand open formats everywhere, even before Free/Open Source Software, (for the record, that’s another thing I first proposed and taught twenty years ago, here (”Just Say No to OpenXML”) and here, and Germany did JUST last week! YAY!)

• ask every government and local administration of the world the five questions I wish Pope Francis had asked to J. D. Vance

• education!, that is: teach and popularize the general principles and technology-related concepts behind all these proposals in Catholic seminaries, schools, universities and dioceses worldwide

I and other Catholics first tried to propose a Catholic approach to Information Technology with the Eleutheros Project twenty years ago. I have never stopped to fight these fights in the widest ways I could, as everybody can see from my main publications, Foss Force column, main blog and its current Substack proxy.

I will continue to do it, but I would really like to work more, much more on everything I’ve mentioned in this post. If anybody is interested, just email mfioretti@nexaima.net.