Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily look at the stories shaping our digital world.
Pope Leo the Fourteenth has issued his first major encyclical, and he chose artificial intelligence as the subject. Titled Magnifica Humanitas, the document warns that the AI boom risks concentrating dangerous levels of power in the hands of a small number of technology companies and their leaders — a striking intervention from the Vatican into a very twenty-first century debate.
Shifting from moral philosophy to spacecraft, Japan's space agency JAXA has confirmed an arrival date for the BepiColombo mission to Mercury. The joint JAXA and European Space Agency project has been traveling since two thousand eighteen, carrying two orbiters to study the planet's surface and magnetic field. Getting to Mercury is deceptively hard — the sun's gravity makes it one of the most challenging destinations in the inner solar system.
And on a more personal scale, one writer's account of what happened when Google absorbed Fitbit is making quiet rounds online. The story is familiar: a product people genuinely relied on for health tracking slowly degraded after acquisition, features vanished, and the experience hollowed out. It's a small story, but it captures something real about how big platforms absorb and often diminish the things they buy.
That's what's moving today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
