I spent last week in Italy. It was meant to be a summer holiday, and instead I spent most of it working in the sun, though to be fair, a good thawing out was badly needed. But in a small miracle, I also managed to read a book. A book. A physical book, held in two hands. For everyone who insists that listening isn’t the same as reading, I challenge you to acquire two kids, a dog, and a startup and then find the time to get all the way through one. I won’t relitigate it here. I’m a voracious reader and always have been, mostly non-fiction, mostly to get some perspective, to ground myself in my own beliefs, to build a framework for navigating a life.
The book I chose was Michael Pollan’s A World Appears, billed as a science book but really a philosophical one, a long inquiry into consciousness. And it turned out to be a philosophical week all round, because while I was reading it, the Pope published Magnifica Humanitas: forty-odd thousand words on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. I did not get the honour of reading all of it. I got the cliff notes. But the two of them, read side by side in the same Italian week, told me something I haven’t been able to shake.
The world is in a genuinely weird time.
Here is the strange thing about these two books. They appear to disagree, and underneath they’re making the same plea.
Pollan spends three hundred pages establishing, with great care and honesty, that we have almost no idea what consciousness actually is. We don’t know how it arises, who has it, or whether the self (the thing you most take for granted, the you reading this) is anything more than a convincing story the brain tells itself. He visits neuroscientists who suspect the self is an illusion, and plant biologists hunting for the first flicker of awareness in a leaf.
The Pope is doing the opposite, or seems to be. Magnifica Humanitas is an argument that the human person is magnificent and must be defended, that our dignity does not depend on our abilities, our wealth, or our position, but simply on the fact that we exist. Where Pollan dissolves human specialness, the Pope plants a flag in it.
And yet they want the same thing. Both are insisting, in their different dialects, that we situate ourselves inside a moral framework. Pollan, because if we don’t understand consciousness we should be humble about what we trample. The Pope, because if we forget what a person is, we will start treating people, and ourselves, as products. Two men, one a self-described psychedelic confessor and the other the Bishop of Rome, arriving at the same warning from opposite ends of the room.
Which is unfortunate timing. Because it’s hard to look around right now and find much evidence that we, as a group, have any moral foundation left to stand on at all.
For a few hundred years we organised our moral life around the human being and now Silicon Valley would like to sell us the exit. They call it post-human, meaning a world optimised beyond us. A world where intelligence is decoupled from the inconvenient body that carries it, where the slow, distractible, mortal animal is a legacy system to be upgraded out of existence. I have tried, honestly, to imagine wanting to live there. I can’t think of anywhere I would less like to raise my children.
And here is the trap, the thing that connects Pollan’s humility to the Pope’s alarm. The post-human argument runs on a theory of worth, even if it never says so out loud. It says you matter in proportion to what you can do: your intelligence, your output, your capability. It’s an attractive theory right up until the moment something arrives that can do all of it better than you. If your worth is your capability, a superior machine doesn’t just compete with you. It outranks you. We have, without quite noticing, adopted a philosophy of human value designed to make us obsolete.
Dignity that does not depend on ability is the only kind no faster, smarter system can erode, precisely because it refuses to be a competition. It’s the firewall. And it’s the one thing Pollan’s book, for all its beauty, can never supply, because science can only ever tell you what a thing can do. It can never tell you why bare existence should command your respect.
What I think is actually happening, underneath the AI debate and the climate debate and all the rest of it, is the quiet dissolution of moral frameworks themselves. Not their replacement with worse ones, but their replacement with none. With maxing. The instinct to maximise: growth, engagement, intelligence, returns, capability, speed. Maximisation has become the closest thing we have to a shared value, and it has the seductive quality of seeming not to be a value at all. More is just more.
And we should be honest about what the “more” actually is. Strip away the euphemisms and the maximand is almost always profit. Somewhere in the last half-century we performed a quiet and astonishing inversion: we began to treat profit as a proxy for virtue, as though the fact that a thing makes money were evidence that it is good. The market became our moral instrument. If it sells, it must be wanted; if it’s wanted, it must be valuable; if it’s valuable, who are you to stand in its way? We have outsourced our conscience to a price signal.
Look at what that required us to believe. Greed is something every one of the traditions I’m about to invoke identified, without a single exception, as a weakness: a deadly sin in one vocabulary, a vice of excess in another, the very craving the Buddha placed at the root of all human suffering. And we have rebranded it as the engine of progress and, finally, as a goal worthy of organising an entire civilisation around. We took the appetite the wise spent millennia teaching us to discipline and made it the thing we optimise for. We looked at the lowest part of ourselves and called it the way forward.
This is not only wrong. It is short-sighted, and short-sighted in the most literal sense, because greed is the appetite that cannot see past its own next bite. A morality built on it is structurally incapable of accounting for anything downstream: the depleted soil, the warmed ocean, the hollowed institution, the bill that always, always comes due on someone who wasn’t at the table. We have chosen as our compass the one human impulse guaranteed to point away from the future. And the future is exactly where our children have to live.
The trouble is that maxing doesn’t argue against ethics. It routes around it. It treats a moral framework the way an engineer treats latency, as friction, as drag, as a constraint to be minimised on the way to the objective. The most honest version of this worldview, the accelerationist one, says it out loud: any slowing is the enemy. Build faster. Decide later. Ask forgiveness, if anyone’s still around to ask.
And here is the thing I want to put plainly, because almost nobody in the room building this future will say it: speed at all costs will have a cost. That is not a luddite complaint. I am not against optimisation as such. Optimisation gave us vaccines and pulled billions of people out of poverty, and I’d be a fool to pretend otherwise. But optimisation as the only value, severed from any account of what it is for, is a different animal entirely. The cost is real even when it doesn’t show up on the optimiser’s balance sheet. It just gets paid by someone else: a river, a forest, a laid-off worker, a generation of kids who can no longer sit still. The refusal to even acknowledge the cost is the tell. You can’t reason with someone who insists the thing is free.
Because here is what we are actually proposing to throw away. For the entire run of human history, in every culture we know of, people have lived inside some moral structure, some answer, however partial and often cruel, to the question of how we should live and what we owe one another. The content varied enormously and a great deal of it was wrong. But the fact of it was constant. To be human was to stand inside an inheritance of meaning. What is genuinely new in this moment is not a bad moral framework but rather it is the proposal to run without one.
And those frameworks, the ones we are now too impatient to consult, were not generated by a model in an afternoon. They were the slow, accreted, argued-over work of people who read and thought and sat with the hardest questions for entire lifetimes: Aristotle and Confucius, Aquinas and Maimonides, Kant and Mill, the anonymous authors of the texts that still hold up half the world’s idea of decency. They disagreed furiously about almost everything. But notice that on this one point they did not disagree at all: every last one of them named unbounded acquisitiveness a sickness of the soul. That is about as close to a unanimous verdict as ten thousand years of human thought has ever produced, and we have decided we know better. It is a particular kind of arrogance.
But I keep coming back to the environment, because that’s where this stops being abstract.
We did not destroy the planet by accident. We destroyed it on purpose, in pursuit of our own materialism and, more than that, our own disconnection: the deep conviction that the world is dead matter, raw resource, a thing without inwardness that exists to be used. That conviction has a name in the philosophy of consciousness. It’s the materialist view, the one that says mind is just chemistry, just matter and energy doing their blind mechanical thing. And I want to suggest an alternative.
It is very hard to argue that consciousness is merely chemical, and then look at what that belief licensed us to do.
Because the same disenchantment cuts both ways. If the mind is just matter, then matter is just stuff, and stuff is just there to be strip-mined, burned, and discarded. The story we told ourselves about our own minds is the same story we told ourselves about the river, the forest, the soil. Dead matter all the way down. The ecological catastrophe is not separate from the consciousness question. It is what the materialist answer looks like when you act on it for two hundred years.
And the strange thing is, the materialist answer doesn’t even hold up that well. Touch a mimosa and it folds its leaves away from your hand. Touch it again and it learns to ignore you. Pollan’s plant biologists are not cranks for finding this unsettling. I’m not claiming the mimosa feels what you feel. Nobody can claim that, which is rather the point. What I’m claiming is that our confidence it feels nothing is exactly the kind of confidence that has served us catastrophically before. We were sure infants felt no pain and operated on them without anaesthesia. We were sure the animals were automata. Every time, the certainty that something on the other side of us was empty inside turned out to be less about them and more about what we wanted to be free to do.
This is the technocratic paradigm Pope Francis named in Laudato Si’ a decade ago, and that Leo has now carried forward into the age of the machine: the belief that everything is a problem with a technical fix, and that nature and people alike are raw material to be optimised. Strip-mining the earth and strip-mining human attention are not two crises. They are one worldview, applied to two objects. The AI maximalist and the polluter are running the same operating system.
Which brings me, of all things, back to the book in my two hands.
The powerful men building this future are, many of them, openly contemptuous of the slow business of reading. Why read the book when the model can summarise it, why hold the thing for hours when you could absorb the gist in minutes? But deep reading was never about the gist. It is a sustained act of attention and interiority, the deliberate building of an inner life, the one human capacity the attention economy is engineered to dismantle. Pollan’s book ends with him in that cave, trying to be fully present. Reading is the secular version of the same practice. It is how you keep a self while the world tries to atomise your attention into something it can sell.
And it is, I’ve come to think, the same act that built every moral framework we are now in such a hurry to abandon. The people who gave us our ideas of decency did it by reading slowly and thinking for years. To read a book all the way through (two hands, no notifications, a whole week of a holiday I was supposed to spend resting) is not nostalgia. It is the small, stubborn refusal to be optimised. It is me trying, in the only way I know how, to be one more reader in that long line rather than the generation that finally stopped.
So here is the question I came home from Italy carrying.
What world do we want to live in, and what world are we leaving our children? I don’t have the moral framework fully built but I do know that it is something I want everyone to think deeply about. It is the conversation that is missing in massive rounds and stock options and profits at all costs. It is the discussion and debate that we should be having, to disagree and still find a way forward, to actually debate hard problems that are not engineering problems but social, philosophical and moral. And ultimately, those are the only problems that matter.