“The dignity of work” is a somewhat old-fashioned phrase that’s seldom uttered these days. The left tends to view it with suspicion because it sounds like a justification for mandatory work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps. The right rarely utters it because it risks implying that this dignity should be rewarded with labor rights. So leave it to the pope to enliven our conversation about artificial intelligence by reviving the idea that work is intrinsic to human dignity.
The dignity of work, or better yet “the dignity of labor” (since we’re referring to work specifically within the economic sphere), is a necessary concept as the AI era dawns because the tech lords are trying to persuade us that eliminating the possibility of labor for a great swath of the population would be a blessing to humankind. In fact, it’s a nightmare that would sideline vast portions of humanity from a basic societal function and consign them to poverty. To the inequality of wealth and income would be added a new inequality of participation. AI’s billionaire proponents think cutting workers out of the AI economy won’t be a problem because to these oligarchs, labor exists only as a burden. It has no dignity.
Pope Leo XIV disagrees. We take for our text the pope’s first encyclical, released on Monday and titled “On Safeguarding the Human Person In the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” Under the heading, “The Dignity of Work at a Time of Digital Transition,” Leo writes that “Work is not simply an instrument; it expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives. It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment.” More than “a means of sustenance,” work is “a context for expression, relationships and contributing to the community.” Remove it from all but “a small fraction of the population” and the result is “forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment.” To Leo, this is a kind of “anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace.” Amen.
If the pope’s invocation of work’s dignity sounds platitudinous to you, recall that in 1930 John Maynard Keynes published an essay (“Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”) predicting that right about now humanity would “for the first time … be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” As I’ve explained elsewhere, Keynes was right about the math but wrong about the distribution. The relentless rise in income inequality starting around 1979 was not on Keynes’s bingo card. Nor did Keynes anticipate how even many fabulously rich people who could afford to hang it up would continue to work, because work gave their lives meaning.
Consider the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. As I understand it, all the man does is work and fuck. Musk embodies Max Weber’s Protestant ethic by working 24/7 to amass and expand his net worth of $832 billion. But he also pauses frequently to spread his seed as widely as any wastrel coupon-clipper, fathering 14 children with four different mothers that we know of. (Two of the mothers were his own employees.) Musk is both workaholic and libertine; how to resolve this paradox? By recognizing that for Musk, rutting isn’t a leisure pursuit (well, not only a leisure pursuit) but rather a vaguely eugenicist program to populate Planert Earth with more humans of high intelligence like, well, Elon Musk.
Earlier this year, Musk echoed Keynes’s end-of-work prediction in a speech:
AI and humanoid robots will actually eliminate poverty…. My prediction is that work will be optional. It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that…. Money will stop being relevant at some point in the future.
Like Keynes, Musk presumes that economic growth will be distributed in roughly equal fashion, even though (unlike Keynes) Musk has witnessed the decline and fall of the New Deal order and the end of wages rising in lockstep with productivity gains. Musk has zero reason to believe AI’s bounties will be shared with the general population. But set that aside. Musk is describing exactly the cultural regression Leo talks about in his encyclical. It doesn’t occur to Musk to be bothered by it because because Musk doesn’t respect the dignity of labor.
In this, Musk differs from Keynes. Like Pope Leo, Keynes understood that “freedom from pressing economic cares” would be no bed of roses. Keynes, was, after all, English, and therefore witness to the last gasp of the English aristocracy between the wars. (See Jean Renoir’s 1939 film The Rules of the Game.) To judge from their example, Keynes wrote, the outlook for how an “ordinary person, with no special talents” should occupy himself was “very depressing!” Most of these titled persons, Keynes concluded, had “failed disastrously.” Their inherited wealth denied them the dignity of labor.
The dignity of labor is not a new concept, not even in an encyclical. Thomas Carlisle is credited with identifying it as a Christian virtue at the height of England’s Industrial Revolution (“Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works”), and Leo’s new encyclical repeatedly cites an earlier encyclical (1891) by an earlier Pope Leo (XII) that denounced employers who “degraded” workers “with conditions repugnant to their dignity as human beings.” In 1981, Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical specifically on labor in which the phrase “dignity of work” appeared four times. “Man’s life is built up every day from work,” John Paul II wrote, “from work it derives its specific dignity, but at the same time work contains the unceasing measure of human toil and suffering, and also of the harm and injustice which penetrate deeply into social life within individual nations and on the international level.” (John Paul II had Poland’s Solidarność
uprising on the brain.)
I have high hopes for the dignity of labor’s revival. Actually, a small one was underway already. President Joe Biden spoke frequently of “the dignity of work,” and after he lost the 2024 election Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown (now running again in Ohio) created a Dignity of Work Institute.
Has the dignity of labor been used as a club against discontented working people? Certainly. “I believe in the dignity of labor,” John D. Rockefeller, Jr. sniffed, “whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.” But its more powerful expression was in the speech Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered to sanitation workers in Memphis shortly before his 1968 assassination. “The person who picks up our garbage,” King said, “is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity. But … it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.” That’s the spirit Leo invokes in his new encyclical. Its return is welcome.
