The day's top item on HN: an argument that the U.S. economy is effectively "dead" beneath healthy-looking aggregates. Growth and markets keep climbing, but new-business formation, job-switching, and mobility have stalled, with activity concentrated in a handful of large players and AI/asset bubbles.
Ben Thompson's weekly roundup, covering the backlash to Italy's AI mascot "Luce," how publishers might actually monetize AI-generated answers, and a piece on social mobility in China.
The NTSB pulled its public docket system offline after researchers used published images of cockpit-voice-recorder data to reconstruct the actual audio of pilots in a recent crash — a case where cheap AI tooling defeats a privacy protection the agency has long relied on.
Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical takes direct aim at "technological messianism" — the belief that AI and technical progress can stand in for human relationship and moral formation — warning against the illusions AI creates and defending the irreplaceability of actual human connection.