Artificial intelligence, the fastest-growing force of change in society today, has captured the imagination and concern of leaders in fields such as education, economics, defense—and even religion.
Pope Leo XIV, the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics globally, singled out AI as the catalyst for a new industrial revolution and said social justice should guide how human dignity is protected as the technology expands into every facet of life.
The man born Robert Prevost in Chicago was elected May 8 in Rome. New popes by tradition select a name to signify the aims of their papacy, and in his first meeting with the church’s College of Cardinals, Pope Leo XIV said he was following in the footsteps of Pope Leo XIII, who expressed concern about the dignity of workers in the late 19th century industrial revolution.
“The public administration must duly and solicitously provide for the welfare and the comfort of the working classes,” wrote the first Leo in 1891.
That’s still true, the newly elected pope said in his address to the cardinals: “The church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
Labor and human dignity
For those following the impact of AI on jobs, a much-quoted 2023 economic study from Goldman Sachs stands out. The economists looked at tasks included in more than 900 occupations and estimated that two-thirds of US occupations could be affected by AI-powered automation. Worldwide, the study concluded that AI could displace 300 million jobs.
Historically, jobs displaced by automation have been replaced by the creation of new roles. In fact, as researchers led by MIT economist David Autor have found in examining 80 years of census data, most jobs today are in occupations that that didn’t exist in 1940.
As an announcement on the study said, “Most work is new work.”
But how these changes are handled gets to Pope Leo’s point about protecting human dignity. Ethicists raise questions about job displacement, privacy, and accountability, among other issues. A report from USC Annenberg identified more than a dozen areas of concern, including potential bias and fairness in hiring.
Another gilded age?
For some of us, AI concerns live next to a broader set of questions around information and technology in general. In fact, there’s an uncomfortable similarity between the concentration of power in some companies today and the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
Industrialization in the late 1800s had led to long hours, low wages, and harsh working conditions for many workers. It also saw the rise of the robber barons and the great accumulation of wealth in a few hands. These developments led to reform movements that focused on social welfare, including the advent of labor unions, minimum wages, women’s rights, an end to child labor, and universal education.
At the same time, the Industrial Revolution led to an expansion of the middle class and improvement in quality of life unprecedented in human history. Electricity made life safer and easier. New inventions, from telephones to cars, airplanes, radios, and television, brought people closer together, created new industries, generated wealth, lifted millions out of poverty and created our modern world.
Pope Leo of that era noticed the conflict around the ruthless business practices of the time in a statement on the “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.”
“The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable, in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen,” he wrote.
Some may argue that today’s tech companies are more of a threat to the world than the 1890s robber barons. Their grip is not on steel and railroads, but information, which has the capacity to change human existence in fundamental ways. Some, it appears, have a view that technocracy is more important than democracy—that the future of the world should be driven by what technologists say is most beneficial, instead of what people coming together in a democratic society say.
Higher education’s challenge
Our higher ed system offers an exploding menu of new programs and courses in response to the surging student demand. That’s part of an important trend toward a growing alignment between educators and the needs of an increasingly tech-driven economy.
It’s critical to help more students achieve post-high school credentials of value—both for their sake and the nation’s economic success. At Lumina Foundation, we’re working toward a national goal that by 2040, 75 percent of the adults in the U.S. labor force will have degrees or other credentials of value leading to economic prosperity.
Reaching that goal in 15 years requires a partnership between institutions, employers, government, and funders—and that’s just the beginning. The challenge goes beyond designing better courses at affordable prices, while offering counseling and other services to help more students complete their credentials. Indeed, education has a long-recognized role in promoting community-driven values like citizenship and democracy. That means working to help more people obtain credentials of value that will strengthen economic prosperity, while preserving human dignity and promoting active civic engagement.
In short, there’s a competitive tension between democracy and technocracy. As a society, we are right to focus on wages and good jobs, because they are important and are metrics we can measure. But we also must focus on the benefits of learning that go beyond wages, and how we can articulate those when we envision what economic prosperity looks like.
This is the hard part. Measuring those kinds of benefits is complex and difficult to articulate simply. Of course, there are no easy parts in helping more people get the education and training they need for good jobs. But even as we stretch to reach those goals during this period of immense challenge and awesome opportunity, we must demand a place for the human dignity that Pope Leo XIV so eloquently spoke of.
This article was originally published in Forbes.