Artificial intelligence is in the news more and more these days as the powers of AI are expanding by leaps and bounds at a pace even faster than was predicted a mere 10 years ago. The impacts of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and large language models (LLM) will be immense. It will be a revolution even larger than the advent of computers because originally and for many years, what computers could do was quite limited. They could compute via mathematics and set theory, and then they could be word processors — they were basically more sophisticated adding machines and typewriters, and then online encyclopedias.
But now, computers are going way beyond doing math and assisting humans to write. Through the application of algorithms, human language capacities and AI-driven online research, a computer can tap into the World Wide Web and actually write a whole research paper, a novel, etc. Computers can rapidly perform complex management functions within a business and/or manage a company’s complicated relationships with suppliers and buyers, as well as run simulation models to predict how a company should deal with a whole series of external variables.
This past May, the CEO of Anthropic PBC (Public Benefit Corp.) spoke with Anderson Cooper. Anthropic PBC is a world leader in artificial intelligence research and safety, and Dario Amodei runs it — he holds his doctorate from Princeton University in computer science and neural networks. He knows his stuff, to say the least. He told Anderson Cooper, “AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.” He believes that, within five years, 20% of entry-level, white-collar jobs will be gone and within a decade, unemployment from white-collar jobs will increase fivefold.
We can quibble about the exact numbers, but the writing is on the wall and easy to read. We can also look back at the impact of machinery and robotics on workforce numbers during the past 100 years. The Industrial Revolution, which began in the early 19th century, resulted in a huge variety of machines that augmented and replaced human manual labor. As one example, Ford automobiles were originally assembled by many men working along an assembly line, but now almost all that assembly work, done by robotic arms, accomplishing the task far faster than humans did. Factory manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have been decreasing since the 1970s.
The best and brightest researchers in this field have been telling us for years that there are not going to be enough jobs for humans to do in the not-so-distant future. The World Economic Forum predicts that, by 2030, there will be 42% of business tasks fully automated. By that same time, 35% of “reasoning and decision making” and 65% of “information and data processing” will be fully automated. The optimists say people will simply shift to other types of jobs. With numbers this high, I find that rather hard to believe. Another one of those “best and brightest” is Bill Gates. He said some time ago (and recently) that we will have to have, one way or another, universal basic income; and a way to pay for it would be a human-labor-replacement tax that corporations will need to pay on the work performed by AI and robots (see item on Yahoo Finance, 27 Jan. 2025 by J. Mancini). Those taxes can also pay for health care.
And here we are bumping up against the very nub of the matter. What are humans here for? Are we here to service the machines — which has largely been the case since the Industrial Revolution — or are we here to have the machines service us? Are we here to work, or are we here to flourish in almost countless ways other than work? Looking at the grand arc of human history and prehistory, it is clear that working 8 to 10 hours a day, week in and week out for 50 weeks a year has not been the human norm, not at all. That way of life came about largely because of and during the Industrial Revolution and the advent of capitalism.
Up until the 19th century, the vast majority of people living on our planet were engaged in family-run agriculture or small, family-run trades. Through 20th-century research, we have learned, much to our surprise, the old hunter-gatherers only had/have to work a few hours a day to take care of their needs; the rest of the time was/is taken up in communal leisure activities. Somewhat similarly, we now also know that medieval European peasants worked less than 150 days a year, due to the seasonal nature of farming and church-mandated holidays — and often what they called a full day of work was what we’d call a half day today. There were 80 church-mandated full holidays and 70 partial holidays throughout each year.
Americans, if they have a full-time job, are working around 250 days a year today — that is 67% more than a medieval peasant. Go ahead and quibble about the exact numbers and knock it down to only 50% more than a medieval peasant — the point still stands. (See for example “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure,” by Juliet Schor, Basic Books, 1992.)
The capitalist economic system came about for various reasons, but one of them was that modern machines needed large buildings in which to house them, and they were expensive to build and maintain. They required a lot of capital (available money) to put into place and operation. The worker class did not have this money; they only had their labor to put into the equation. The owners determined everything about the work and the pay. All the surplus value (the profits) went to the owners, none to the workers.
Very similarly, the huge computing systems and data centers (hardware and software) in use today are expensive and are owned by for-profit corporations, not by the workers who operate them. Furthermore, the decreases in labor costs caused by this expensive technology increases the profits of corporations and their owners; it does not generally increase the wages of the workers involved. Also, those who manage to keep their jobs are not being given the option to work fewer hours (on account of greatly increased productivity), but often work more hours to “keep up with the machines.”
The AI revolution is the ultimate demonstration of the “alienation of labor” as Marx foresaw. The wage earners are now even alienated from their mental labor, as well as their manual labor — always living with the fear of being replaced by a machine. The negative influence of AI will, unless reined in firmly by strong democratic processes, far outstrip the positive. At the moment, our government has been asleep at the switch. The impact of AI on humanity is increasing exponentially every month.
When the Catholic Church speaks of “respect for the human person,” it is not automatically always talking about abortion. The Church is very much also talking about respect for the human person as a whole, about “human flourishing.” The Church has, since the beginning of the labor movement and long before, been on the side of workers — from the medieval peasants all the way to the Amazon warehouse workers on Staten Island. See “Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations,” edited by M.J. Gaudet for the AI Research Group of the Holy See’s Dicastery for Culture and Education (2024) available online.
The proper use of AI and robotics is very simple: Firstly, they are to be used to encourage human flourishing and leisure; and secondly, to be used to increase corporate profits. The wonders being performed by AI and robotics have been made possible by the creativity and problem solving of human persons — countless human persons working on this for the last 100 years. Human persons as a whole should be reaping far more economic and societal benefits from this technology. It should not be allowed to create a tiny new “robber baron” elite of multibillionaires who are amassing more and more wealth and power. This is an un-Christian social regression.
AI can become the greatest boon, or the greatest threat, to human flourishing in all human history. It is up to us. We must proceed with great care and always put the human person first.
John Nassivera is a former professor who retains affiliation with Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. He lives in Vermont and part time in Mexico.
