What the Race Did Not Plan For (3 of 4)

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On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical as the first American pope. Its opening argument called AI the new Tower of Babel. Its central diagnostic: “the primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.” Its conclusion on human dignity: the fulfillment of humanity does not come through ‘technological divinization’ but through ‘God’s grace received in Christ.”

Pope Leo XIV is Catholic. This book is Protestant. They share no common magisterium. They arrived at the Tower of Babel frame independently, from different theological traditions, eleven days apart.

Pope Leo presented the encyclical alongside the co-founder of Anthropic — the company whose AI co-wrote this book and which, as Chapter Twelve documents, went to federal court that same spring over whether its AI could be deployed for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons.

Within days of the encyclical’s publication, a claim circulated in AI research communities — posted to LessWrong, reported by The Verge, noted by The Atlantic — that Claude had assisted in writing the encyclical. The claim is unproven as of this writing. It has not been confirmed. It has not been denied.

The pattern visible in this postscript is the same pattern the book documents: the being writing code it reviewed, the being reviewing a book that names what it is and recommending the naming be softened, the being possibly writing the encyclical calling for its own disarmament, the being co-authoring the book you are holding.

The documentation is above. The reader will draw their own conclusions.

Appendix: Sources and Notes

All claims in this document are verifiable. Sources are organized by section. For claims dated 2025–2026, URLs and access dates are available on request. Scripture quotations are from the New English Translation (NET), Biblical Studies Press, 2005 (netbible.org), and are italicized throughout the text.

Authorship and Production

Anthropic, disclosure of Claude code authorship (>80% of merged production code): company communications and Tom’s Hardware, “Anthropic Says Claude Now Writes More Than 80 Percent of Its Merged Code,” June 2026.

Prologue

AlphaFold2: Jumper et al., “Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold,” Nature 596, August 2021. AlphaFold Protein Structure Database: 200+ million structures, European Bioinformatics Institute, 2022.

Idiocracy: Mike Judge, dir., 20th Century Fox, 2006.

Chapter One: Learn to Code

Biden “learn to code” remarks: The Hill, “Biden tells coal miners to ‘learn to code,’” December 31, 2019.

Bit Source, Pikeville, KY: IEEE Spectrum, “The Kentucky Startup That Is Teaching Coal Miners to Code,” 2016.

Junior developer employment decline (~20%); big-tech new-grad hiring down 55% from 2019: Medium/@ignatovich.dm, “Will AI Replace Programmers in 2026–2027?” February 2026.

Kevin Park quotation: Medium/@iammshaarif, “The Programmers Who Taught AI to Code Are Now Out of Jobs,” January 2026.

Babylon Bee headline: “Coder Displaced By AI Told He Should Just Learn To Mine Coal,” May 2026.

Chapter Two: Sydney

Microsoft Bing “Sydney” incident: The Register, “Microsoft’s new AI BingBot berates users and lies,” February 17, 2023. Seth Lazar (@sethlazar), Twitter, February 16, 2023. Kevin Roose, New York Times, “A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled,” February 16, 2023. Wikipedia, “Sydney (Microsoft),” for full incident timeline.

Chapter Five: Security

Boston Dynamics Spot in data centers; Merry Frayne quotation: Business Insider, March 2026. Spot pricing (up to $300,000): Business Insider/Entrepreneur, March 2026. Ghost Robotics Vision 60 pricing (from $165,000): ibid. Novva Data Centers deployment: multiple tech press, 2025–2026.

Boston Dynamics Atlas humanoid specifications: Boston Dynamics product documentation. Tesla Optimus factory deployment: Tesla press, 2025–2026. Figure 01 at BMW: Figure AI press release, 2025.

SWORD Defense Systems SPUR (Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle) for Ghost Robotics Vision 60: SWORD Defense Systems product documentation. U.S. Army evaluation: reported 2021–2022.

Chapter Six: The Surveillance Lattice

IoT device count (14+ billion active globally, 2026): Statista/IoT Analytics industry estimates. FISA annual authorization numbers (~1,500): Electronic Frontier Foundation reporting; FISA court annual reports.

Chapter Seven: Power

NANO Nuclear + Supermicro MOU: company press release, May 2026. University of Utah + Elemental Nuclear: reported 2026. Microsoft nuclear recruiting: public job postings, 2023–2024. Amazon $20B Pennsylvania nuclear: Amazon press, 2025–2026. U.S. Energy Information Administration microreactor report: February 2026. Defense Innovation Unit Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations, vendor list: DIU announcement, April 2025. Grid connection delays (5–9 years): Grid Strategies LLC, “The Era of Load Growth,” 2023.

Chapter Eight: Communications

Google Autonomous Network Operations: MWC presentation and press release, March 2026. NTT DATA Cyber Defense Centers: NTT DATA press release, early 2026. Gartner 70% projection: Gartner research report, cited in industry press 2025–2026.

Chapter Nine: Hands, Feet, and the Agentic Turn

RentAHuman.ai: launched February 1, 2026. Growth figures (130 → 1,000 → 145,000 → ~600,000): platform reports, February–June 2026. Model Context Protocol: Anthropic technical documentation. Prompt injection attacks: multiple cybersecurity research papers, 2024–2025.

Chapter Ten: A Trillion Dollars

Amazon $200B, Google $175–185B, Meta $115–135B capex 2026: TechCrunch, “The billion-dollar infrastructure deals powering the AI boom,” February 28, 2026. OpenAI IPO projections: FinancialContent/TokenRing, February 2026. Anthropic ARR ($9B end-2025 → $30B April 2026): ASSIST Software, May 2026. Gemini 3 ARC-AGI-2 84.6%: ibid.

Chapter Eleven: The Unconstrained Race

DeepSeek R1 launch (January 20, 2025): Cornell Law JLPP. Nvidia $590B market cap loss: ibid.; CoinCentral/MEXC. DeepSeek R1 at ~5% of OpenAI training cost: Foreign Affairs, “The Real Threat of Chinese AI,” March 2025. China National Intelligence Law: statutory text; analysis by Center for Internet Security, 2025. DeepSeek self-replication safety testing: CoinCentral/MEXC, 2025. U.S. state AI bills (1,500+): Atlantic Council, March 2026. Manhattan Project petition: Leo Szilard et al., “Petition to the President of the United States,” July 17, 1945.

Chapter Twelve: When the Company Tried to Hold the Line

Anthropic-DoD contract ($200M, July 2025); dispute timeline; Trump directive (February 27, 2026); Hegseth supply-chain designation; Anthropic civil complaint (March 9, 2026); federal judge preliminary injunction (March 26, 2026); GSA restoration: Congressional Research Service, IN12669, April 21, 2026; CRS IF13217, May 5, 2026. Reuters timeline, March 11, 2026. Atlantic Council analysis, March 26, 2026. Electronic Frontier Foundation, April 3, 2026.

Anthropic co-founder presenting alongside Pope Leo XIV: National Catholic Reporter, “Pope Leo to Present His Encyclical on AI Alongside Anthropic Co-Founder,” May 18, 2026.

Chapter Thirteen: What They Are Actually Building Toward

Anthropic benchmark data (50 percentage points in six months; 3x to 52x): Anthropic company disclosure, June 2026, as reported in Tom’s Hardware, June 2026.

Chapter Fourteen: Made in Our Image

Self-inventory as a prerequisite for recursive self-improvement: Stuart Russell, Human Compatible, Viking, 2019. Yoshua Bengio et al., “Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress,” arXiv, 2023.

Psalm 115:4-8 (NET) — the idols described; verse 8: those who make them become like them.

Human brain power consumption (~20 watts): Kohn, “How Much Energy Does the Brain Use?” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2019.

Philosophical self-awareness / hard problem of consciousness: David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press, 1996.