The Bitter Cup: Notes About Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity (Reading Magnifica Humanitas)

November 2, 2026
|In #11 AI and the Brain (2026)
|By Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Gethsemane

Even if it is not reducible to Humanism, the Christian cultural sphere—in all the contradictory complexity of its history—is the space within which the ethical and ontological autonomy of human action could be conceived. I am not a believer, yet there is one moment when I feel so close to Jesus that I am almost compelled to call myself a Christian. That moment occurs in the Garden of Gethsemane. Just hours before his ordeal, Jesus turns to the Father and whispers: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me.”

Clearly, it would be possible, given the omnipotence of the Father. Yet Jesus, as though daunted by his own request, immediately adds: “Yet not my will, but yours be done.” Like a son sent to die for the Homeland, Christ bows his head before the Father’s will. Yet his human nature—in a moment of desertion from History—pleads for the cup to be taken from his lips. In that garden, Christ’s humanity prevails, if only for an instant, over his divinity. It is the moment of autonomy from historical necessity—or, in this case, from divine will. But Historical Necessity soon reasserts itself. The Father witnesses the martyrdom of the Son, so that upon that martyrdom the Church might be born: a Church dedicated to proclaiming the glory of the Father.

The Christian Church has always carried this dual origin within itself: it stands with the Father, yet also with the Son. The Church of Peter is dedicated to the glory of the Father, not to the weakness of the Son. Nevertheless, it is within Christianity that Humanism becomes possible, for Christianity contains these two irreconcilable elements: the Necessity of the Father and the Son’s aspiration toward autonomy. What is new today is that the Church has come to stand with those who plead, “Take this cup away from me.”

It is from this perspective that I have read Leo XIV’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (2026).1 Amid the dehumanization wrought by capitalist absolutism, the Church of Francis and Leo appears as one of the last bastions of humanity. In our time, Historical Necessity takes the form of Artificial Intelligence; and since Historical Necessity is inseparable from war, the technologies of automation remain subordinated to the logic of warfare. The resources required for the research and infrastructure that make AI possible come almost exclusively from military systems, while its most essential applications continue to be military.

In this context, I read the encyclical as one of the highest expressions of contemporary Humanism after the defeat of the materialist Humanism founded upon equality. Yet, much like the words whispered by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, I fear that Leo’s words too are destined to go unheard by the Intelligent Automaton—an entity beholden to the military systems of powers preparing for a terminal war. I fear that Prevost is overly optimistic when he describes humanity as magnificent. Humanity does not exist in the abstract. Homo sapiens evolve alongside shifting social relations and the technical forms that it both produces and is produced by. The Homo sapiens emerging from forty years of free-market competition and digital technological mutation is not especially magnificent. If contemporary humanitas is embodied by the Israeli people and by the majority of Western populations—to say nothing of the rest of the world—I would suggest that the more fitting description is horribilis, not magnificent.


What Will Be Left After the Bubble

In The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late (2026), Cory Doctorow argues that the promises surrounding artificial intelligence are deceptive because the development of this technology is ultimately economically and financially unsustainable:

Every AI company is losing money, and the bigger the AI company is, the more money it’s losing. The biggest AI companies are losing billions per quarter. . . . The financing for new models is coming from investors, and those investors are making a bet that the AI they are funding will be so good that employers can fire half their workers and replace them with AI, with the profits split between AI companies’ customers and the AI companies themselves.2

This bet will be lost, according to Doctorow, because the automata will never be able to replace human labor, even though they are capable of threatening workers and reducing their wages. Consequently, “the bubble will burst, as all bubbles do, always.”3 There is, however, little cause for celebration. In fact:

No matter how much you hate AI, this will not be a good day. Remember: seven giant AI companies account for 35 per cent of the US stock market. . . . We are talking about a crash that will put 2008 in the shade and meet or exceed the pandemic sell-off.4

To the economic damage that the bursting of the bubble could cause, one must add the harm that the infrastructure supporting this technology inflicts upon a physical environment already on the brink of collapse. As Kate Crawford observes:

The full AI supply chain encompasses capital, labor, and planetary resources, demanding vast quantities of each. The cloud is the backbone of the AI industry, and it is made of rock, lithium brine, and crude oil.5

The looming economic disaster, therefore, promises to be colossal, given that investments in this technology are set to reach $600 billion in 2026 alone, according to Goldman Sachs estimates. Since there is no visible economic return to justify these massive debt-financed investments, Doctorow’s prediction could be correct, even if (I must say) he fails to take into account the scale of military funding, which is already enormous and threatens to grow.

Yet, in my view, the economic consequences are not the central issue. However dramatic the effects of a financial collapse might be, Doctorow appears to overlook the tangible impact that mind-automation technologies are already exerting on both the military and cognitive fronts. Doctorow further writes:

Everyone who falls for the AI hype is dreaming of getting a human need fulfilled without having to extend moral consideration. That’s as true of the AI girlfriend weirdo as it is of the bosses hoping to use AI to replace half their workers and terrorize the remainder. . . . An AI girlfriend demands nothing of you, except those things you tell it to demand of you.6

Thus, AI may possess no human value; yet this does not mean it lacks economic value—or use value, to employ the Marxian concept denoting the concrete usefulness of the products of abstract labor.

Can a product possess use value while lacking human value? Yes, certainly. A product can be profitable even when it is destructive, as arms manufacturers know well. Indeed, one might argue that inhuman use value is often the most profitable kind, precisely because of its connection to life and death. What, then, is the use value of contemporary AI applications? What economic return justifies the enormous investments they require?

The answer is simple: in its current form, the primary use value of AI lies in war. It is military applications that provide the most immediate means of recouping the capital invested in the development of these technologies: smart drones, intelligent defense systems, automated warfare—in short, the smart destruction of civilization. If this is so, and if the principal use of artificial intelligence today is military, then we confront a troubling alternative. Either war expands, creating the conditions under which these enormous investments can be recovered, or the bubble deflates, with consequences that could prove devastating for the economic and social equilibrium of the world.


The Deactivation of the Human Mind

Whatever the ultimate fate of economic investments in intelligence-automation technology, they are not destined to leave no trace. Destruction is the primary arena in which AI manifests itself: the destruction of the environment required to fuel its technical infrastructure and the military destruction of territories and populations. These are the marks that artificial intelligence is already leaving on contemporary history. Yet there is another effect that Doctorow largely overlooks: the cognitive one.

The military system is not the only user of AI. Another user is the mind of Homo sapiens, already partially deactivated. Over the past three decades, digital technology and its networked applications have been ravaging our attention spans while disabling faculties such as spatial orientation and the capacity to socialize in the physical presence of others. This new technological paradigm, however, goes further. It increasingly substitutes for writing and, in doing so, threatens to undermine the capacity for thought itself—if, as Jack Goody persuasively argued in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), thought is fundamentally bound to the practices of writing.7

Given the fragmentation of attention and the progressive unlearning of writing, thought may become the most distinguished victim of the emerging cognitive mutation that results from the application of AI into processes of learning and communication. Logical-critical capacity is being delegated to the cognitive automaton, and Homo sapiens is progressively being reduced to a mere appendage of it: incapable of focusing attention on an object for more than a few seconds, incapable of writing, and incapable of thought.

The history of technology has always induced mutations—of varying depth—in the ways of life and modes of cognition of its human users. Yet the automation of intelligence threatens to erase the cognitive autonomy that Pico della Mirandola, in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), identified as the defining condition of human dignity.8 At the moment of Adam’s creation, God granted him a freedom that entailed the renunciation of perfection. Adam relinquished the perfect identity between name and thing in exchange for the freedom to name things himself. Now, it seems, God is taking back what He once granted us: the freedom of human language. In exchange, He offers the (dubious) perfection of Artificial Intelligence.

Symbolic organization is now emerging from lithium and silicon. For the first time in history, we are constructing an infrastructure from which the capacities for symbolic utterance and symbolic interpretation emerge. A capacity to construct and project symbolic worlds is taking shape—one no longer dependent upon biological matter. Computation, and the material substrates in which it is embedded, is becoming an agent of symbolization and world-projection. The sentient organism is no longer the sole generator of worlds.

If agency is defined as the capacity for enunciation and the interpretation of signs, then the cognitive automaton is poised to replace the human being as a semiotic agent. The android (the Construct, the artificial) and the human (the Born, the organic) now compete in the process of world-generation. Yet the organism confronts a twofold disadvantage in comparison with the android: it is sentient, and therefore suffers; it is conscious, and therefore doubts. The android neither suffers nor doubts. It does not tire, and it does not waste time reflecting.

It is easy to imagine who wins.


Marx’s Prophecy, Reversed

It is well known that Marx, in one of his most visionary texts, formulated a prophecy that today appears to be coming true in a perverse twist through the automation of cognitive activity.

In the section of the Grundrisse commonly known as the “Fragment on Machines,” Marx observes that knowledge functions as a driver of productivity while simultaneously serving as a factor in the automation and displacement of human labor. As he wrote:

Capital . . . works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production. . . . Through this process, the direct labour time employed is reduced to a minimum. . . . Capital thus works towards the dissolution of labour as the determining principle of production and of the creation of wealth. . . . It reduces labour time on the one side to a minimum, while on the other side it posits labour time as the sole measure and source of wealth.9

Thanks to the application of intelligence as a driver of automation, human beings would no longer need to subordinate their time to the necessity of producing what society requires. Intelligent machines would perform that task, leaving humans finally free to pursue their own pleasures. Unfortunately, things did not turn out that way.

History has inverted the scenario Marx envisioned. Cognitive labor—the general intellect—failed to establish itself as an autonomous force. Consequently, the history of the past 50 years, following the defeat of egalitarian movements, has been marked by the subjugation of cognitive labor to the automatic logic of capital. Subjected to this destructive logic, the power of intelligence has given way to a spectral world. Human beings have not emancipated themselves from wage labor in order to cultivate their pleasures; instead, wage labor has subsumed cognitive activity, even as the need for labor steadily declines, replaced in some instances by intelligent machines and, in the majority of cases, by enslaved labor.

What Marx envisioned—and enabled us to envision—was communism: the collective governance of the powers of knowledge and technology, and the self-management of knowledge workers, aimed at their own well-being and the common good. Utopia? No. A reasonable project that nevertheless failed.

As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value . . . The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head . . . social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.10

This has indeed happened, but in reverse: the general intellect has been subordinated to the valorization of capital and permeated by the principles of competition and war. This does not mean, however, that we have finally entered a realm of computational harmony orchestrated by a coherent malevolent design. There is no single coherent malevolent design, but rather many, all in conflict with one another. Belonging to conflicting subjects, the computational automaton feeds war rather than harmony. The communist project—redistribution of wealth, reduction of labor time, and the primacy of social interest over the interests of the enterprise—was the only possibility for averting the unleashing of capitalism’s destructive tendencies. The primacy of profit has accelerated the devastation of both the environment and the mind. Perhaps no one can now avoid the extinction of the human species. But should we really regret it?


The Bitter Cup, Averted

“Classical thought kept the soul distinct from matter, and the essence of the subject separate from the mechanisms of corporeality. For their part, Marxists contrasted subjective superstructures with infrastructural relations of production. How can we speak of subjectivity today without acknowledging that the contents of subjectivity depend increasingly on a multitude of machinic systems?” — Félix Guattari, Cartographies schizoanalytiques (1989)11

A hybrid subjectivity is emerging on the horizon of the twenty-first century. In the near future, human beings may stand on the verge of disappearance, decimated by war, climatic cataclysms, and, above all, declining birth rates. The planet will be inhabited by a hybrid population composed of artificial androids and modified organisms. The androids will be connected to the automaton; they will be capable of nonsexual reproduction, able to perfect their synthetic brains, and able to increase their efficiency for specific tasks.

The modified organisms—who already constitute the majority of those born in the new century—are flesh-and-blood beings of human origin, cognitively formatted according to the operational rules of the automaton. By mid-century, given the continuing collapse of birth rates, they will consist primarily of elderly survivors kept alive by prostheses designed to replace almost everything that was once flesh, alongside an ever-shrinking minority of young people communicating silently through cerebral implants. They will be progressively liberated from the imperfections of sensibility that plagued humanity for a hundred thousand years. They will have barred the way to physical suffering and, above all, to the psychic pain generated by empathy.

By replacing the sentient body with mathematical function, we will finally have cast aside the bitter cup we were forced to drink when we were human.

 

  1. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2026).
  2. Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late (New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026), 201.
  3. Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, 202.
  4. Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, 202.
  5. Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), 40.
  6. Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, 74.
  7. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
  8. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert Caponigri (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1956).
  9. Karl Marx, “Fragment on Machines,” in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 704–6.
  10. Marx, Grundrisse, 705–6.
  11. Félix Guattari, Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Paris: Galilée, 1989), 9.