CHRIS ROPER: Algorithms come to Babel
Many years ago God didn’t like it when humanity united to build a skyscraper, so he used language to divide them. Today big tech does something similar
“Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of hell,” wrote Pope Francis in his Good Friday meditation on the Stations of the Cross which, though he couldn’t be there in person, was given at the Colosseum on April 18, a couple of days before he died.
I can’t decide if this is an amazingly appropriate metaphor for the techno-industrial complex that currently determines how the world works, or if it’s a sadly revealing insight into how the pope was taking God’s side against his fellow humans. Probably both, as is usual with these complicated matters...
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