The new pope's choice of name was deliberate; he chose it to honor Pope Leo XIII who was Pope from 1878 - 1903. Leo XIII is famous for taking a left-wing stance on workers' rights in response to the Industrial Revolution, and calling for state pensions, social security, and other reforms rooted in social democracy.

It will be interesting to see what Pope Leo XIV calls for. Universal Basic Income? It wouldn't surprise me. The day is soon coming that humans won't be able to economically compete with ultra-cheap AI/robot-employee staffed businesses.

Some people scoff at the notion of the Catholic Church concerning itself with such things. If they do, they're underestimating the Church's vast soft power. Vatican City might be the world's smallest state, but the Catholic Church is arguably the preeminent global superpower when it comes to soft power.

There are 1.4 billion Catholics, and if the church decides to support UBI, it will have a vast reach to sway politicians in 100+ countries on almost every continent.

In an interview this week, Mark Zuckerberg said most Americans have only 3 friends, but they'd like 15. Never fear, he has a solution to how to get 5 times more friends. Meta will create AI friends for you. As it will own them, as befits the world's second largest advertising company, their primary purpose will really be to sell you stuff.

Even in an episode of 'Black Mirror', this vision of the future would rank as one of the bleaker dystopian hellscapes. It says something about how out of touch Big Tech has become with the lives of ordinary people, it never even occurred to Mark Zuckerberg how appalling this sounds to most people.

Switching Chinese factory jobs to America has been in the news a lot lately. Many people have pointed out it doesn't make much sense. Do Americans really want sweatshop-wage jobs making sneakers?

Another reason it doesn't make sense is that China is dumping those jobs anyway - replacing the humans with robots. The numbers are startling. If the trends of the last ten years continue, China will be creating 1 million industrial robots by 2029. By 2032, it will be creating more industrial robots, than there were new human jobs in the US in 2024. Robots may even be adopted on an s-curve, and be adopted in far higher numbers sooner.

Where is this heading? Will the robots keep the aging Chinese population economically afloat? Will using humans in factories instead of robots in the US be seen as a noble alternative to the socialism of UBI?

Source: Rise of China's Robotics Industry: from Manufacturing Arms to Embodied AI

Waymo's peer-reviewed study in Traffic Injury Prevention, PDF, 58 pages found its self-driving cars safely drove 56.7 million miles across four U.S. cities without a human safety driver. With 80-90% level reduction for different types of accidents.

56.7 million miles is a tiny fraction of the overall US miles driven, only about 0.002%. Current self-driving AI wouldn't be as good for all road types and conditions. But it will get there, the only question is when. When it does that 80-90% reduction in accidents means 34,000 lives saved in the US, and hundreds of thousands globally - every single year.

The day is going to come where the public conversation is going to be about banning human driving, like no-seatbelts and indoor smoking before it. I've a suspicion the same people who said losing a few hundred thousand lives to 'herd immunity' will be telling us that those 34,000 dead a year are a price worth paying, so they don't have to change anything about their lives or routines.