People on both sides of the artificial intelligence debate tend to imagine technology as so many tools, dutifully improving on the basis of our increased scientific knowledge. This progression is roughly thought of as being equivalent with history: human beings mark the passing of time by the inevitable improvement of their tools, to the point that one generation can be distinguished from another on the basis of whatever “state of improvement” their tools happened to be in: were they using smoke-signals, carrier-pigeons, telephones, dial-up, internet, or virtual reality.
This view endows technology with a strange, independent life—it improves, it develops, it grows—even as it demotes the creator of technology, humankind, to a mere occupant of that living technological history: we react to technologies, we try to keep up with technology, sometimes we even resist technology, slowing its advance down, but we are, at every point, factors within a history that exceeds us.
Obviously, this is an illusion. Only since the industrial revolution could tools be imagined as reliably evolving and improving. The view that technology is active, while humanity is passive, is a neat cover for the fact that some people, usually wealthy and powerful, actively produce, maintain, and enforce the use of certain machines, while other people, usually poor and weak, can only passively receive the new world that the powerful create. The idea that this 200-year-old state of affairs simply is history is a comforting anesthetic for both parties: after all, if we are all simply undergoing history, then the wealthy are no more responsible for which machines they choose to create than they are for which month follows September. And if humanity is merely a pious observer of a living technological history, then the poor, operating and living off these machines, are always living at the peak of history and the summit of an inevitable improvement: how could they complain?
Thus the wealthy promote automated labor systems, which they could in fact make or not make, as if they were an inevitable next stage in technological evolution. The poor, even as they are oppressed by such systems, ooh and ahh at “artificial intelligence” for the very same reasons. They might bemoan it if it means the loss of a job, but they embrace it “off the clock”—as consumers enjoying the fruits of the automation of other people’s jobs (i.e., Netflix and Amazon). This leads to an awkward stance, which nevertheless seems to characterize most people’s working philosophy: “technology is always improving except when it doesn’t benefit me.” Resistance is framed as futile even by those people who offer it, as they never oppose automation from any universal stance, but only from self-interest. The assumption remains that we are reacting to the inevitable fruits of an endlessly improving technological history; we would just like to slow history down a little here and there, for our own benefit; buying enough time to get retrained for some other job.
Technology is a way of approaching the world; a mode that human beings enter into in order to get something out of it. It does not take shape of its own accord, but according to who we think man is, what we think he needs, and how we think he ought to live. It professes, in its own mode, a view of an ideal human condition. We might be tempted to describe technology as a way of meeting human needs. However, which things will be determined as “needs” does not belong to the tool, but to its maker—and for us, its makers are the rich and the powerful.
Once we admit this, we can begin to see that our technological devices have a telos beyond their immediate purpose: they enable man to flourish, yes, but according to a contingent vision of what flourishing entails. For the wealthy, what counts for flourishing is presumed according to their own, largely liberal, anthropology. The machines that make up our lives are desired, made, and maintained by people who hold to the basic tenets of our current ideology, liberalism—thus always effectuating liberalism as the overarching telos of their own existence.
The internet, with an infinity of possible uses, is usually considered as a supremely value-neutral technology: “It is what you make of it.” Yet, as Marc Barnes writes, concerning our largely pornographic use of the internet:
“The use of internet-technology is almost always the use of a tool that is owned, maintained, provided and continuously updated by wealthy men from developed nations who preach the basic values of liberal capitalism…The internet reflects the capital that creates and maintains it.” [1]
One of liberalism’s main credos is that choice arises arbitrarily from the will, rather than emerging from a reception of and consent toward a good within the given social hierarchy. The internet provides the near perfect environment for liberal action—granting man unlimited power to attain information and human contact. The mode of internet-using man—that is, an arbitrarily free, placeless individual facing an endlessly manipulatable world held out for the realization of his will—simply is the realization of a liberal description of man that the real world tends to thwart. That is to say, reversing the cliche: “You are what it makes of you.”
The incorporation of artificial intelligence into society is no different; it presupposes the innovator’s view of human activity’s replaceability. In an article published in Wired, Jarod Lanier and E. Glen Weyl issued a warning against those who fail to see AI as a semblance of an ideology—one that fails to appreciate human agency in its fullest. They write:
“AI” is best understood as a political and social ideology rather than as a basket of algorithms. The core of the ideology is that a suite of technologies, designed by a small technical elite, can and should become autonomous from and eventually replace, rather than complement, not just individual humans but much of humanity. [2]
Lanier and Weyl echo Marc’s argument: that the technical elite’s anthropological and political thought shaped the development of the technology they produced. The developer molds the public, spearheading modern society’s worldview.
So, what liberal view produces the desire for and so the production of automated labor systems? In short, automation embodies a view toward labor which values its objective purpose over its subjective purpose; i.e., profit over the worker. The automation of labor makes intuitive sense from the capitalist’s standpoint because there is no need to pay a machine a living wage, provide health benefits, or pay $4,000 to kill its child. Assuming a full orientation toward profit-maximization, automated labor seems to be an inevitability; and unsurprisingly, its use is indirectly prophesied by the founders of liberal-capitalism.
Adam Smith set the stage for widespread justification of free-market capitalism by claiming that the inherently self-interested man—who pursues his individual financial well-being—actually promotes the greater good by improving efficiency in the creation of wealth. In The Wealth of Nations, he wrote: “The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labor, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labor.” [3] By focusing on each’s own task, individual workers garner specific dexterities that complement others’ individual skills within the market—achieving the greatest productive powers of labor. The market becomes an amalgamation of each individual’s thrift, culminating in an efficient mechanism that promotes maximum wealth creation.
The Austrian school economist, F.A. Hayek, posited a similar sentiment in his view of the spontaneous order. In Road to Serfdom, he wrote: “It was men’s submission to the impersonal forces of the market that in the past has made possible the growth of a civilization which without this could not have developed; it is by thus submitting that we are everyday helping to build something that is greater than anyone of us can fully comprehend.” [4] Here, the individual is for the market, not the market for the individual. The growth of civilization relies on the market, which is beyond our individual comprehension—requiring our submission to its unintelligible power for the greater good of wealth creation, which we can then enjoy. This core tenet of liberalism overrode employers’ previous obligation to care for their workers; they were enabled, and are still enabled, to act towards them as the market, and not their conscience, dictated. They benefited, and still benefit, by prioritizing the objective end of labor (profit) over the subjective end (the laborer and his flourishing).
How does this ploy affect the worker? While each focuses on his particular task in submission to the god that is the growing market, the worker’s dignity is sacrificed. The division of labor brings about an increase in overall production, yet it destroys man’s aptitude and well-roundedness. Adam Smith concedes:
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become….His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it. [5]
Constantly laboring on his monotonous task within the chain of production, the worker loses skills that are irrelevant to his job. He is dehumanized and atomized into a machine-like character, losing his “intellectual, social, and martial virtues,” and becomes an individual made for his one task. It is not self-interest or the market that saves man from this condition, but intervention from the state. Without the state, the impersonal forces of the market would continue to run their course, naturally atomizing the laboring class for the sake of maximizing overall profit. The state is needed solely for the purpose of barely preserving the economic system which would otherwise destroy itself through its complete dehumanization of its laborers. The unhindered free-market sacrifices the well-being of the laborer in its movement toward maximized wealth generation, and would be allowed to fulfill itself except that its workers cannot become completely depraved without harm to productivity.
The literal automation of the worker (his replacement with an actual robot) makes sense within the liberal paradigm. Man’s intellectual and social virtues, which notably define him as a human being, serve no purpose for the market—they may even hinder its profits (think of proclivities to engage in casual conversations near the water cooler or read the newspaper each morning). Therefore, if a further specialized laborer—who increasingly resembles an atomized cog in a machine—improves the overall efficiency and wealth of an industry, why not just replace human workers with actual machines?
Corporations hire consultancy firms like McKinsey & Co. to untap potential business growth; and in most cases, they achieve cost savings by recommending layoffs. According to a public report, McKinsey claims that “performing physical activities and operating machinery in predictable environments” [6] has an 81% automation potential (indicating the proportion of time that can be saved by automating the task): music to the ears of the capitalist who owns the means of production, but a horror to the laborer.
Admittedly, the introduction of any new technology results in some creative destruction, as the improved productive efficiency makes a certain number of jobs unnecessary. Displacement cannot be deemed evil as such, but must be qualified—it is a prudential matter that requires a careful consideration of both the subjective and objective aspects of labor. An example of automation that has potentially harmed the common good can be found in the introduction of the gas-powered tractor in the early 20th Century. Here, farmers experienced more productive capacity alongside a decline in agricultural employment: from 40% of total American employment in 1900 to less than 2% in 2000. [7] I would consider this totalizing introduction of automated labor imprudent, hurting numerous workers and, therefore, the common good—never mind its effect on American soil and diet. Yet, within the liberal paradigm, the idea of not automating work for the sake of laborers is not even a point of consideration; a consequence of an ideology instilled by an economic elite that prioritizes the objective over the subjective nature of work, of wealth output over the well-being of workers.
While innovations can certainly prove advantageous to laborers and ultimately the common good, this appears unlikely within our social order. It would require sincere consideration for the particular and personal. It would require technological devices which actually enable and dignify labor as their first end, rather than merely enabling more profits—thereby undoing the principles of liberal-capitalism. In actual fact, liberal society’s prioritization of capital over labor makes us less careful regarding our methods of production: we seek blanket procedures for mass production anywhere and everywhere. With the help of intelligent machines and artificial chemicals, illegal immigrants who lack familiarity with native soil and climate can produce effectively—providing cheap labor to replace pre-existing farmers. We have lost sight of the particular for the sake of an end that seemingly everyone within the liberal order can call their telos: more wealth.
In contrast to liberalism, the Catholic tradition instructs us to prioritize the subjective nature of work over the objective. The reason we work, the reason we produce things at all is, first and foremost, for the flourishing of the workers. Writing Centesimus Annus in 1991, Pope John Paul II observed an economic order in which laborers struggled to adapt their skills with the rapidly evolving methods of production. He argued that workers are “to a great extent marginalized; economic development takes place over their heads, so to speak, when it does not actually reduce the already narrow scope of their old subsistence economies. They are unable to compete against the goods which are produced in ways which are new.” Justifying efforts to promote a societal reconsideration of the worker, he formulated a framework founded on the premise that labor ought to be celebrated as a gift from God—that the worker’s dignity must be protected, regardless of the overall economic output. He writes:
Not only has God given the earth to man, who must use it with respect for the original good purpose for which it was given to him, but man too is God’s gift to man. He must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed. In this context, mention should be made of the serious problems of modern urbanization, of the need for urban planning which is concerned with how people are to live, and of the attention which should be given to a “social ecology” of work. [8]
However tempting it is to follow the liberals and view labor solely as a means to production, this is a mistake; we ought to concern ourselves with how labor impacts human ecology in its entirety. While it is economically beneficial to cram a large population into a city for mass factory production, this hurts the worker’s well-being—which is self-defeating. The logic of this is conferred by the Pope’s theory of the universal destination of goods. He writes in another encyclical:
The original source of all that is good is the very act of God, who created both the earth and man, and who gave the earth to man so that he might have dominion over it by his work and enjoy its fruits (Gen 1:28). God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favoring anyone. This is the foundation of the universal destination of the earth’s goods. The earth, by reason of its fruitfulness and its capacity to satisfy human needs, is God’s first gift for the sustenance of human life. But the earth does not yield its fruits without a particular human response to God’s gift, that is to say, without work. It is through work that man, using his intelligence and exercising his freedom, succeeds in dominating the earth and making it a fitting home. In this way, he makes part of the earth his own, precisely the part which he has acquired through work; this is the origin of individual property. Obviously, he also has the responsibility not to hinder others from having their own part of God’s gift; indeed, he must cooperate with others so that together all can dominate the earth. [9]
According to the Pope, all goods have an intrinsic orientation to the common good. Man must not forget that his work is a response to a gift from God; he cannot make arbitrary use of the earth, but must view his labor as an act of co-development with God that must be directed to the benefit of all of God’s children. It is for this very end, the Pope says, that we have private property and labor.
Some readers may take the Pope to prioritize the greater good over the individual—offering some sort of utilitarian perspective resembling the liberals—but this cannot be the case. The common good does not nebulously exist above and beyond laborers but is in fact them, and so production must be oriented toward their own well-being. This is why
[capital goods] cannot be possessed against labor, they cannot even be possessed for possession’s sake, because the only legitimate title to their possession—whether in the form of private ownership or in the form of public or collective ownership—is that they should serve labor, and thus, by serving labor, that they should make possible the achievement of the first principle of this order, namely, the universal destination of goods and the right to common use of them. [10]
Considering the universal destination of goods toward the common good, the objective end of labor cannot be prioritized over the subjective, because the entirety of subjects (i.e., the workers) is the common good. This directive is two-fold: to provide for the worker’s subsistence and for the very aim of improving his work. Metaphysically speaking, “labor is always a primary efficient cause, while capital, the whole collection of means of production, remains a mere instrument or instrumental cause.” [11] Therefore, capital is for labor rather than labor for wealth, as the liberals view it. Pope John Paul II warns against inverting this relation, claiming that “when man is seen more as a producer or consumer of goods than as a subject who produces and consumes in order to live, then economic freedom loses its necessary relationship to the human person and ends up alienating and oppressing him.” [12] Failing to view labor as a gift for man, labor is considered a mere means to wealth, causing our alienation from the economic system and enslavement to the forces of it—resembling Hayek’s promotion of our submission to an unintelligible market.
Aiming towards the common good, prudential judgment must consider both the objective and subjective aspects of labor when considering new technological innovations. If technologies offer reduced labor costs but hurt the worker, they ought to be abandoned. It appears that AI automated labor would fall under this umbrella—only benefiting business owners and highly skilled engineers who program and upkeep the software. While AI will most certainly reduce costs and improve efficiency, we must understand that work is not for the sake of maximizing profit but for the worker himself.
The types of technology introduced in the modern epoch would be nonexistent in Christendom; totalizing innovations capable of displacing large swaths of workers can only be a product of the liberal-capitalist ideology that values wealth over workers. We prioritize broad financial outcomes—to the benefit of those in power—thereby neglecting the dignity of the person behind the work, which cannot as easily turn a profit. As a consequence, our economy presupposes a political philosophy which calls us to submit to the unintelligible powers of the market and naturally reduces laborers to brutish automatons. In contrast, the Christian inverts the liberal’s priorities, focusing his attention on dignifying each person in the particularity of his vocation—and only secondarily does he concern himself with profit. He only considers new technologies that can benefit the laborer in his specific task, rather than broad revolutionary-style implementations that hurt workers for the sake of greater financial outcomes.
The introduction of artificial intelligence to replace human laborers ought not be viewed as a serendipitous possibility within a plethora of options but as an inevitable development of liberal ideology. So long as we continue to presume the truth of the liberal philosophy, resistance to automation will only ever appear romantic at best and merely self-interested at worst. Real resistance is only possible through conversion to the teachings of the Church, that is, through freeing our minds from liberalism’s presuppositions of an inevitable technological history and of work as a mere instrumental means to an end; understanding, instead, that labor and its output is primarily for the laborer himself.
[1] Marc Barnes, “Porn the Evangelist,” New Polity, 2020.
[2] Jarod Lanier and E. Glen Weyl. “AI is An Ideology, Not a Technology,” Wired, 2020.
[3] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund Glasgow edition, 1981), 13.
[4] F.A. Hayek, Road to Serfdom (London: Rutledge, 1944), 210.
[5] Adam Smith, 782.
[6] https://www.ncci.com/Articles/Pages/II_Insights_QEB_Impact-Automation-Employment-Q2-2017-Part1.aspx
[7] Ibid.
[8] Centesimus Annus §38.
[9] Centesimus Annus §31.
[10] Laborem Exercens §14.
[11] Laborem Exercens §12.
[12] Centesimus Annus §39.