From Leo XIV's Encyclical to Plural Technological Democracy: On the AI Governance Triangle

Catholic social teaching, the tech right, accelerationism and pluralism argue about AI governance from premises that do not meet. Comparison therefore needs instruments that presuppose no agreement about value. One is a set of coordinates: three vertices—super-technology, anti-horizontal competition, anti-technological domination—record what a position commits itself to, holding its reasons in suspense. The other comes from Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas, which enumerates those who design, finance, regulate and use a technology. Abstracted into structural positions—the "elements of technology"—that enumeration yields a framework of non-domination in which the dominator's position is a variable. Intent need not be inferred. What matters is which positions converge, and which escape any check. So diagnosed, the encyclical, Peter Thiel, and cyberlibertarianism together with defensive accelerationism each hold one side of the triangle. Glen Weyl's pluralism goes furthest toward holding all three at once—but only by redefining super-technology and dropping "actually existing AI" as a premise. The three sides provoke one another, and the good each pursues proves hard to disentangle from the Babel the encyclical condemns.