Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, there has been an ongoing conflict between workers and the technological advances which workers have assumed (rightly) are meant to replace them. The whole point of automation is to render whoever performed that task superfluous. For the longest time, this concern was limited to those in blue collar jobs, especially the unskilled jobs of the factory floor or the warehouse. Artificial intelligence is widening the scope of this conflict, opening a new front that now involves white collar workers as well. Prominent CEOs of technological companies are quick to address these concerns, stating in the same breath that AI will not replace workers but will take over their work so that they’ll have to adapt to new jobs servicing the AI. Why, say, a graphic designer would want to become a “prompt engineer” that can get an AI to produce designs instead of continuing to create those designs herself is something these CEOs may never even consider. It is always the workers who need to change and be “re-trained” to adapt to whatever fashionable technology CEOs decide to impose on their companies for the sake of profit. I think, rather, that it is CEOs who need some retraining.
Or perhaps it is better to say that it is all of us—CEOs and managers and workers alike—who need to think anew on these weighty matters. As I have written before, technology is not neutral. It is revelatory; it makes tangible what we believe about reality. In the case of technologies in the workplace, it reveals what it is we believe about work and its role in human life. Martin Heidegger was concerned that because modern technology reveals creation as a “standing reserve,” man would end up seeing himself as standing reserve. This certainly seems to be the case with respect to human work. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens: “the danger of treating work as a special kind of ‘merchandise’, or as an impersonal ‘force’ needed for production (the expression ‘workforce’ is in fact in common use) always exists, especially when the whole way of looking at the question of economics is marked by the premises of materialistic economism.”
Despite the entrance of sin and corruption into creation, God’s original plan for man’s work remained unchanged.
What “materialistic economism” means is this: that economic criteria are valued more than any others, and because economics pertains primarily to material things, the material is preferred to the spiritual. This is why St. Paul can speak of greed as idolatry. The modern conception of work is characterized by this materialism and is thus an easy prey to the danger John Paul II warns against. To speak of the “workforce” is not the only Freudian slip by which this becomes apparent. We also speak of “human resources,” of “human capital” as if workers, like the materials and tools used to produce goods, were a standing reserve, waiting to do the bidding of those who profit from their work. We speak of them as if they lacked the spiritual dimension that distinguishes man from all other things on this earth.
We cannot even begin to speak properly about the ethical concerns surrounding the development of new AI technologies and their impact on human work if we do not first understand what human work actually is. John Paul II’s thoughts on this are a useful guide, and we will draw on some of the principles enunciated in the above-mentioned encyclical to do this.
Following the saintly pope, we must start at the beginning, in the book of Genesis. God created man in his image and likeness and placed him in the garden of Eden that he might guard and till it. Because he was made in the image and likeness of God, man was intended to work, in imitation of God, who worked in creating the cosmos. Man, even in the prelapsarian state, was not to remain idle. Rather, he was to work and through his work, to bring creation to an even greater perfection—and himself with it. In doing so, he was collaborating (literally “working with”) God. In a world without sin, this would have been effortless and delightful, with nature responding gracefully and promptly to our gentle guidance. With the Fall, toil and trouble became a part of work: “By the sweat of your face shall you get the bread to eat” (Gen. 3:19), a note of disorder entered the world, including the world of human work. Despite the entrance of sin and corruption into creation, God’s original plan for man’s work remained unchanged. This is a point we must constantly keep in mind because it is the ground on which John Paul II can argue that “work is ‘for man’ and not man ‘for work’ (LE, 6).”
This is the first principle required to think correctly about work: the primacy of the human person. This primacy derives from the fact that it is the human person, the image and likeness of God, who does the work and that all other elements of production—tools, processes, capital, technology included—are the fruits of human labor. These latter are what John Paul II terms the objective dimension of work, while the worker himself constitutes the subjective dimension. Wherever the objective dimension is prized above the subjective, we will run into grave ethical problems. This is exactly what has happened so that the Industrial revolution could even come to be. And with the workers finding themselves increasingly alienated from their work and increasingly at odds with their employers, the ethical problem of prioritizing the objective over the subjective dimension of work has given way to the “class struggle” that Marx theorized was what moved history forward. He was wrong, of course, but he was wrong because his critique was not radical enough: he missed the point that the source of the alienation comes from the splintering of the integral act of work which renders it less than intelligible, and that makes it something beneath the dignity of the workers.
Human work, to be properly human, must be logos-filled.
Consider the way in which a craftsman works to make a new product. He is, let’s say, tasked with making a table. He does not go about following a series of mechanical steps to build it. The first thing he does is gather and ponder all the relevant and particular factors that need to be considered: what the table will be used for, how much the customer can afford, the availability of materials and time to do the work, and so on. He needs to give his work some forethought, and this demands prudence. Then he needs to design the table, conscientiously reflecting on how the different parts are to go together forming a whole, how it will look, how it will feel, how it will do what it is supposed to do. All the factors that he had considered in his plan are brought back into his reflection, and they are arranged and ordered. Perhaps some of them are changed as he realizes that they do not fit the image that he has been forming in his mind. Then, he sets out to bring into the world what he has conceived in his intelligence. This requires manual dexterity and experience, patience and care. It cannot be rushed but must be done according to the demands of the idea that is being realized, as well as the characteristics of the materials being used and the circumstances in which it is being brought about. And even when this is done “manually”—obviously the craftsman will make use of many tools, even some of them automatic—it is thoroughly intellectual. What the craftsman has envisioned intellectually is brought into being in physical reality.
As Heidegger has stated, the artisan gathers three of the four classical Aristotelian causes—the final, the formal, and the material—and through a careful deliberation, brings the thing into existence. Heidegger points out that “careful deliberation” is in Greek logos, which again denotes its profoundly intellectual character. Human work, to be properly human, must be logos-filled. All properly human work is like this, not just that of the artisan. The farmer must also deliberate carefully about how to do his work, as must the soldier, the janitor, the artist, the scientist. Note that the intellectual character of work is not exclusive to some kinds of jobs, rather, properly human work cannot but be intellectual. And it is so because the human being is a rational animal; the work proper to him must bear this note of rationality. It should also be noted that the rationality being addressed here is not reducible to calculation or logical reasoning. Reason is here understood as a participation in the intelligibility of the world, and is thus not restricted to those tasks that we commonly associate with the intellect. It is, rather, the way in which rational animals move and live and have their being in the world. And because the human person is not only a rational animal but a social one as well, this reason is not individualistic. The careful deliberation that makes work human often occurs as a dialogue (from the Greek dia-logos, an exchange of logoi!) between colleagues, or between workers and collaborators. This dialogue even occurs within a hierarchy (think of the architect doing his deliberation and then the construction workers doing their own, in light of the orders they receive from the architect). This kind of work, therefore, is an intelligible whole, an act that involves the entirety of the human person and her relationships.
Contrast this with how Adam Smith, in his tremendously influential The Wealth of Nations describes the work of a factory:
In the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head required two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.
What Smith labels the “division of labor” would perhaps be better termed the “breakdown of labor” because it consists in fracturing work into isolated, mechanical tasks. Smith rightly sees that it is this fracturing that enables machinery to enter the workplace. Work has been splintered this way to increase productivity, so that profits might grow. Furthermore, these profits can be maximized by hiring unskilled workers. By breaking down work, the workers’ intelligence is no longer required, and their work is no longer logos-filled. The intelligibility of the work-act is thus eliminated, becoming meaningless. The subjective dimension of work is destroyed for the sake of the objective: the craftsman devolves into the proletarian. Smith does not think that this is a bad thing, even though he realizes that it will have detrimental effects on workers, effects which need to be countered through other means. That these detrimental effects could be avoided by preserving the integrity of work, even at the expense of profit, does not seem to occur to him.
Thus we can see that the imposition of AI in the workplace is in fact the logical next step in a social process that has been going on for a long time already. This process, whereby the fruits of work have become more important than those who do the work is not only ethically questionable, but it is also socially pernicious, for it brought Marxism in its wake. By perverting the nature of human work, we obscure the image of God that man is, thus distorting what it means to be human. It is not the workers who need to adapt to AI or to any other technology being introduced into the workplace, but the latter that needs to serve the worker. Anything other than that is an injustice that cries to heaven for vengeance.