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The Lack of the Ack, Sixteen Years On

In February of 2010, I wrote about a small but symptomatic failure in our digital manners. Young people, then aged eighteen to twenty, would send you a message, receive your reply, and disappear. No acknowledgement, no “Ok,” no “Got it,” just the digital equivalent of someone slamming the door after asking you a question through the mail slot. The piece was called “How to Ack Back,” and the argument was that the etiquette of the early internet, the discipline of acknowledging every transmission, had been lost on a generation that grew up assuming delivery was guaranteed and silence was a defensible reply.

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Magnifica Humanitas: The Pope Writes Like the Machine He Fears

On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical letter “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” The document runs roughly 35,000 words across five chapters and a conclusion. It positions itself as the 135th-anniversary successor to Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, recasting that founding labor encyclical for the age of machine intelligence. The framing image is biblical and Manichean. Humanity is presented with a choice between two ancient construction sites. One is the Tower of Babel, where collective effort produces dominance and dehumanization. The other is the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, where shared responsibility under God produces communion.

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Has Technology Ever Reduced Labor?

Has technology ever reduced labor? The question sounds rhetorical. We carry small computers that answer any factual query in seconds, our laundry tumbles itself clean while we sleep, our cars drive themselves on highways our great-grandparents traveled by mule. Of course technology has reduced labor. The question barely needs asking.

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The Box You Cannot Check

The clinic intake form on the clipboard at the front desk has two boxes next to the word “sex.” A patient who is neither of the two options has been given three choices: pick one box and lie, write something in the margin, or refuse the form. The receptionist will not read the margin. Data entry clerks will not transcribe it. EHR systems will not store anything outside the two values the form lists. The patient walks out of the clinic with a treatment plan based on a box that does not correspond to their body, their history, or their current endocrine state. The form has done its job, which is not the job it claimed to do.

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The Conditional Button

The mid-block crosswalk at a flashing-yellow pedestrian signal does work. A pedestrian presses the button, the overhead lights flash yellow, drivers slow or stop, and the pedestrian crosses. The system responds visibly, with no covert work happening underneath. The button does what it claims. But the same system also fails, often, in ways that have nothing to do with the button itself and everything to do with what is wired several layers behind it. A reader pointed out that drivers in his city tend to keep rolling through the flashing yellow if the pedestrian is still on the curb, and only stop once the pedestrian commits to the street. The same reader noted that drivers in his town do not give flashing yellow signals the obedience they give to red lights. Here in Jersey City the same mid-block button gets a more reliable yield because the lights are tied to traffic enforcement cameras, and drivers know that yield failures can become citations they actually have to pay. The button works because what is wired behind it works.

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The Dishonest Button

The mute button on the top of an Amazon Echo of a certain vintage is supposed to disconnect the microphone. A small icon of a crossed-out microphone sits next to the button, and pressing it turns on a red LED that confirms the disconnection. Software controls this button, which means the microphone remains electronically capable of capturing audio after the LED turns red, and the only thing preventing that capture is a line of code in the firmware. Security researchers have documented the capability and the manufacturers have acknowledged it. Whether the capability was ever exercised in practice is a separate question that the user pressing the button cannot answer from the front of the device. Bloomberg reported in April 2019 that Amazon employed thousands of workers worldwide whose job was to listen to Alexa recordings, and similar contractor review programs were acknowledged by Apple and Google for Siri and Assistant later that year. Subsequent Echo models added a hardware microphone disconnect that physically interrupts the microphone circuit when the mute button is pressed. Press the mute button on a smart speaker without that hardware disconnect and you are pressing the third kind of button in this series.

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The Honest Button

The crosswalk button at the corner of my downtown intersection has an LED above it that lights up red and says “Wait!” when you press it. The traffic signal does not change any faster. No wire runs from the button to the signal timer. The LED is connected only to the button itself, and it does the single job of telling the pedestrian to wait. A reader who pressed one of these recently described pushing it three or four times rapidly anyway, because it’s fun. They are correct on both counts. The button is fun. The button is also a different kind of object than the placebo buttons it replaced.

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