The Week of the Discarded — A Pope in Paris Against the “Paradise of Machines”, a President at the UN Who Wants to Rename AI, and China’s “Wall-Hung” Young

Two liturgies, four days apart, on the same subject. On Tuesday the 22nd, from the rostrum of the UN General Assembly, Donald Trump proposed we stop calling it artificial intelligence at all: “the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It’s not fake.” The right name, he said, is superintelligence, and the rule of the century fits in five words — “whoever wins superintelligence wins.” On Friday the 25th, at the Élysée and then at UNESCO, Leo XIV used the same hours to say the precise opposite: minds must urgently be trained in “ethical discernment”, or we risk what he called, quoting Georges Bernanos, a “Paradise of Machines” built on blind obedience and irresponsibility, and the danger is not technical but anthropological — lives “judged according to the criterion of efficiency and, when deemed no longer productive, rejected and discarded.”

Hold on to that last word. Discarded is the thread running through seven otherwise unrelated days. In Rome the cabinet passed a decree banning face coverings in schools and capping non-Italian-speaking pupils at 30 percent per class — a measure that, by the education minister’s own arithmetic, will touch roughly a thousand classrooms, 0.3 percent of the national total. That is not schools policy; it is a boundary drawn for the benefit of the people watching. In Shenzhen, meanwhile, the internet has settled on a new word: guàbì, “hung on the wall”, like an object left there and forgotten. It describes young people who have given up the search for steady work and for relationships at the same time — not the proud refusal of tang ping, but a quiet ejection from the circuit.

Then there is politics, which in Europe moved in two opposite directions in the same week. In Germany the AfD, having taken nearly 38 percent in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and pushed Merz’s CDU out of the state parliament altogether at 4.9, spent Wednesday handing the chancellor a governing agenda and claiming the mantle of people’s party. In Britain, the reverse: Reform UK slipped to third, behind Labour and the Conservatives. The populist tide, it turns out, is not weather. It depends on who is occupying the space on the other side.

And in the United States the Democrats reach the final forty days eleven points ahead — and lose, by a single vote on the floor, the resolution that would have ended the war with Iran. Winning the polls and losing the institutions is the working definition of an opposition that does not yet hold power.