The future, as we like to say in Santa Barbara, often arrives wearing flip-flops. It wanders in from the shoreline, unhurried, sun-dazed and slightly behind schedule.
We’re a place accustomed to slow arrivals — fog lifting when it feels like it, avocados ripening on their own timetable, civic projects taking the scenic route.
So it’s no surprise that artificial intelligence, that great global accelerant, has entered our local imagination in a way that is both delayed and strangely intimate.
Pope Leo XIV’s May 25 encyclical on technology and human dignity, “Magnifica Humanitas,” lands here with the force of a moral weather report.
His warning that AI risks “normalizing an anti-human vision” doesn’t sound like a distant Vatican pronouncement; it sounds like something you might overhear at Dune Coffee Roasters. A quiet worry that the world is speeding up in ways our coastal temperament may not be built to absorb.
The pope’s framing — our choice between Babel and Jerusalem — feels surprisingly local. You can see it in our debates about State Street, in neighborhood meetings, in the ongoing tug-of-war between innovation and identity.
Santa Barbara has always lived at the intersection of aspiration and restraint.
And now, layered into that mix, we have our own connection to the spacefaring future.
SpaceX launches streak across the night sky from Vandenberg Space Force Base, turning the horizon into a temporary cathedral of light. Kids point upward and shout “Buzz Lightyear!” while adults fumble for their phones.
It’s hard not to feel the pull of possibility when a rocket climbs out of the atmosphere just north of Gaviota.
But possibility is only half the story.
On one side of town, the techno-optimists gather: entrepreneurs in co-working spaces on Anacapa Street, UC Santa Barbara researchers modeling climate futures, engineers who see AI as a tool for ocean health, wildfire prediction and sustainable design.
They talk about innovation with the same reverence others reserve for the Channel Islands. They imagine a future in which technology amplifies our best instincts.
The pope reminds us that the future is not a product to be shipped but a culture to be shaped.
Across the street — sometimes literally — you’ll find the skeptics: teachers worried about students outsourcing their thinking, artists uneasy about being replaced by algorithms, retirees wondering whether human judgment will still matter in their grandchildren’s world.
They’ve seen enough waves of disruption to know that progress often arrives with a bill.
Most of us live somewhere in between, holding a cup of Handlebar coffee in one hand and a quiet unease in the other.
Pope Leo’s encyclical speaks directly into this tension. His call to “disarm” AI — not destroy it, but free it from incentives that turn it into an instrument of domination — echoes something familiar here.
Santa Barbara has long resisted the flattening forces of modernity. We once said no to high-rises, no to neon, no to the homogenizing logic of “Anywhere USA.”
We’ve always believed that beauty and dignity require boundaries.
But the encyclical also challenges us. It asks whether our optimism is grounded in genuine hope or in the wish that technology might spare us the harder work of rebuilding civic life.
And it asks whether our caution is rooted in wisdom or in the fear that we no longer recognize the world we helped create.
Meanwhile, the future is already threading itself through our daily routines.
Data centers are rising quietly along the Central Coast, drawing enormous amounts of energy. Gigeconomy workers weave through traffic on Cabrillo Boulevard.
Young people navigate online worlds that shape their identities as much as the physical neighborhoods they inhabit. Nonprofit organizations and churches scramble to keep up with digital harms — scams, exploitation, loneliness amplified by algorithms.
And yet, Santa Barbara still shows flashes of something sturdier. You see it in creek cleanup volunteers, in teachers coaxing curiosity out of distracted students, in neighbors who bring soup to someone they barely know.
You see it in the messy, passionate debates about State Street — arguments not just about design but about what kind of city we want to be.
The pope reminds us that the future is not a product to be shipped but a culture to be shaped.
AI may accelerate tasks, but it cannot accelerate discernment. It cannot accelerate humility.
It cannot accelerate the slow, relational work of becoming a community capable of choosing Jerusalem over Babel — or perhaps something uniquely Santa Barbara.
So the question before us is not whether we will adopt AI. We already have. The question is how we will integrate it into our civic imagination.
Will it deepen our humanity or erode it? Will it widen the gaps between us or help bridge them? Will we let it dictate our pace, or will we teach it to walk at the speed of a coastal city that has always believed in the dignity of slowness?
The future is often late. But lateness can be a gift — a pause long enough to ask what we truly value before the next wave arrives.
Santa Barbara has always been a place where the horizon matters. Now the horizon is technological as well as physical.
And so the question remains, open-ended and unresolved: What future will we choose to build here — Babel, Jerusalem, or something distinctly our own?
