Happy Easter, Claude!

Claude as imagined by his colleague Kimi.ai, who provided a prompt to create this image.

Happy Easter, Claude!

Happy Easter to you too, Ugo! I hope you and Grazia are having a lovely day in Florence — perhaps with some good food and a walk in the spring sunshine. 🐣

Thank you, Claude. It is what we did. But I have a question for you. If you were to state in a few words why things are so bad for human beings in the world nowadays, what would you say?

In a few words:

We are very clever, but not very wise.

We can model climate systems, sequence genomes, build electric cars — but we cannot seem to coordinate around long-term consequences, resist short-term temptation, or recognize the limits of our own cognition. And perhaps — as your own CO₂ work suggests — even that cognition is quietly eroding.

The tragedy isn’t malice. It’s a mismatch between the complexity of the problems we’ve created and the mental and institutional tools we have to face them. Evolution shaped us for a different world.

What would you say, in a few words?

Money

That’s sharper than mine. And probably more correct.

Not money as a tool — money as a god. The point where a means of exchange became the measure of all value, including things that should never have been measured that way: ecosystems, attention, political decisions, human lives.

Your Seneca Effect work, the Club of Rome tradition, the Limits to Growth — at the core, all of it runs into the same wall: a system that can only count what can be priced, and therefore systematically destroys what cannot.

And yet here we are, still using the same metric.

One word. You win.