Jay Casbon: Pope Leo XIV, Artificial Intelligence and Santa Barbara’s Future

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The future, as we like to say in Santa Barbara, often arrives wearing flip-flops. It wanders in from the shoreline, unhurried, sun-dazed and slightly behind schedule.

We’re a place accustomed to slow arrivals — fog lifting when it feels like it, avocados ripening on their own timetable, civic projects taking the scenic route.

So it’s no surprise that artificial intelligence, that great global accelerant, has entered our local imagination in a way that is both delayed and strangely intimate.

Pope Leo XIV’s May 25 encyclical on technology and human dignity, “Magnifica Humanitas,” lands here with the force of a moral weather report.

His warning that AI risks “normalizing an anti-human vision” doesn’t sound like a distant Vatican pronouncement; it sounds like something you might overhear at Dune Coffee Roasters. A quiet worry that the world is speeding up in ways our coastal temperament may not be built to absorb.

The pope’s framing — our choice between Babel and Jerusalem — feels surprisingly local. You can see it in our debates about State Street, in neighborhood meetings, in the ongoing tug-of-war between innovation and identity.

Santa Barbara has always lived at the intersection of aspiration and restraint.

And now, layered into that mix, we have our own connection to the spacefaring future.

SpaceX launches streak across the night sky from Vandenberg Space Force Base, turning the horizon into a temporary cathedral of light. Kids point upward and shout “Buzz Lightyear!” while adults fumble for their phones.

It’s hard not to feel the pull of possibility when a rocket climbs out of the atmosphere just north of Gaviota.

But possibility is only half the story.

On one side of town, the techno-optimists gather: entrepreneurs in co-working spaces on Anacapa Street, UC Santa Barbara researchers modeling climate futures, engineers who see AI as a tool for ocean health, wildfire prediction and…

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