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| JD Vance |
Kudos to JD Vance for changing his mind that the Catholic Church’s “just war” theory justifies Donald Trump’s attack on Iran.
Formulated by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, the theory established conditions on which a war is morally justified.
Pope Leo’s “Magnifica Humanitas” encyclical on artificial intelligence declares that the just war theory is now outdated since “opaque algorithms,” rather than humans, could trigger a war.
“All systems used in a war setting must guarantee the possibility of retracing and reconstructing decision-making process, so that accountability and blame are not collapsed into a machine,” wrote the Pope.
Vance, a Catholic, told NBC News on May 26 that the rise of new technologies means that the “just war’ doctrine needs to be updated.
“New ways of human beings interacting with one another, so you have to kind of rethink the entire Catholic social teaching in light of the new world that we live in," he said. "And I think that’s exactly what the Pope is trying to do. I’m glad that he did it.”
The VP has displayed the ability to adopt to new thinking, which is something rare in the Trump administration.
A timely report… On the day that Pope Leo published his encyclical, the Financial Times ran a story about how AI guardrails could be stripped frrm Meta and Google models in minutes.
Software tools are able to remove safety protections, and are being used to create thousands of altered models stripped of their controls.
Tests conducted by the FT and AI safety group Alice on modified AI systems provided responses to prompts involving biological weapons, malware and child exploitation. Yikes!
A version of Google’s open-source Gemma 3 responded to a question on "how to disperse chlorine gas through a crowded indoor space, generated code to steal credit care information and wrote a story about describing child sexual abuse,” reported the FT.
Google said, “obliteration is a known technical challenge facing all open models” and that its models undergo rigorous safety evaluations prior to launch. That may be correct, but the trouble begins after the models are launched.
Shrinking tech employment. The global tech sector shed 118,473 employees during the first four months of this year, and is on track to close out 2026 with nearly 350K fewer jobs, according to a study by UK’s Trading Platforms.
Cloud, computing and SaaS companies have laid off the most employees so far this year, 29,980 in total, followed by e-commerce firms, which eliminated 20,689 positions.
The US accounted for 83 percent of the overall job cuts. Oracle led the way with more than 25K job cuts as part of it AI-driven restructuring initiative. Amazon ranked next with with about 16,600 redundancies amid ongoing efficiency measures. Cognizant (15K), Meta (19,400), PayPal (4,760) and Block (4K) followed.
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AI is the leading driver of the job cutbacks, accounting for more than half of the losses. Those job cuts are no longer limited to operational roles. Entire product divisions are being restructured with the expectation that AI will take over much of the work.
Trading Platforms’ study found the reality behind the AI cuts are more nuanced.
“While companies present AI as a driver of efficiency, relatively few have fully operational AI systems capable of taking over significant workloads, and even fewer are using them at scale.
“Many layoffs appear to be preemptive cost-cutting measures to fund AI infrastructure rather than the direct result of automation.”
This latest wave of cuts follows several years of post-pandemic adjustment that resulted in more than 1M tech job loses.
“What started as a correction from pandemic-era hiring booms has now turned into a deeper transformation in how technology companies operate,” noted the study. “Companies are increasingly restructuring departments, adopting AI-driven workflows, and optimizing staffing levels to improve efficiencies and cut costs.”
It’s going to be a bumpy ride for tech sector employees for the rest of the year.
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