Just for this week we are doing a bit of crossover into °FAI. It’s a topic I think is very important.

Here’s the rundown. Episode 15 °FAI is the one where we ask the harder question about AI, who’s steering it? With Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical putting AI ethics on the front page, it’s a good moment to revisit the groundwork. AI in Apparel Manufacturing: The Ethics Episode (°FAI 15)

We started with the upside, and a lot of it lands right in our world. The episode’s deep dive on AI in apparel manufacturing imagines on-demand “micro-factories” that build garments as orders come in. Instead of forecasting bulk runs destined for the landfill. A customer gets 3D body-scan, design software generates the pattern, digital textile printers lay it down using far less water, dye, and chemistry than conventional methods. Automated systems cut for maximum yield, and robotic arms handle the sewing. Machine-vision quality control already flags dozens of common fabric defects at better than 90% accuracy. Adidas, Nike, and Ministry of Supply are testing AI-assisted robotic knitting, and outfits like Software Automation are building sewbots. For a trade that’s fought waste and overproduction forever, that’s a real opportunity.

The same automation that trims waste also trims jobs.

Then the episode turns. We dug into the value-alignment problem, Berkeley’s Stuart Russell on why a machine that’s certain of its objective starts behaving like a psychopath. The blunt reality that these are, at bottom, labor-replacing tools. That’s not theoretical anymore: a 2025 MIT study estimates AI can already do work equal to 11.7% of the U.S. workforce.

We also sat with critics, Berry, Heschel, Merton, who warned, long before ChatGPT, about cultures so hypnotized by their tools that everything else gets diminished. And we looked at documented bias in AI image and facial-recognition systems. The energy and carbon cost of training large models, and the pull toward a data-mining surveillance economy.

Magnifica Humanitas

That’s the thread Pope Leo XIV picks up in Magnifica Humanitas, the new encyclical we break down in FAI: The Pope Weighs In. He flags the hidden human labor behind AI, underpaid data labelers and content moderators. Plus the mining that feeds our devices, in a chapter pointedly framed around “new forms of slavery.” For an industry that already wrestles with ethical sourcing, that one lands close to home.