Rerum Novarum and AI

As I read through Rerum Novarum for the first time with a Lenten small group at Casa Alma–the Charlottesville Catholic Worker–I could not help but feel its timeliness. Some literature from well over one hundred years ago struggles to feel fresh and relevant to today’s world, but not Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical. 
An era with transformative new technology that rips people away from traditional forms of labor, impacts the most basic levels of human interaction, incentivizes massive restructuring of capital, fuels unemployment, discontentment, and both wild fear and optimism in equal measure. The Industrial Revolution of Pope Leo XIII’s day? Certainly. The Digital and now AI Revolution of Pope Leo XIV’s day? It would also seem so. Both Pope Leo XIII-–and from early signs, Leo XIV—found themselves in an era needing a renewed emphasis on human dignity and solidarity, and both appear to have taken up that mantle.

Anthropic is the company behind Claude, one of the most popular AI models, which recently made headlines for refusing to allow the Pentagon to use its model for mass surveillance or autonomous murder. While this may not appear to be an unreasonable moral standard to hope for in a major company, their competitor ChatGPT was happy to quickly sign a deal with the Pentagon instead. Lord, in your mercy.

The Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was recently interviewed by Ross Douthat of The New York Times about his company’s growth and the future of AI in society. Mr. Amodei comes across as polite, thoughtful, and perhaps even principled. He writes essays about the possible utopian and doomsday scenarios ahead (presumably written by himself instead of by Claude, but it’s getting harder to tell), and he is humble about his knowledge of world events. 

But even grading on quite a generous curve by comparing him only to other AI CEOs, I was horrified that he, as the leader of a major AI company, is likely to be a major geopolitical actor in the years to come, akin to a head of state. Without any personal malice towards the man, this strikes me as nearly as dystopian a scenario as some of the apocalyptic warnings about AI casting off humanity’s restraints. I did not vote for Dario Amodei; no one voted for him. Our American systems of government have serious flaws, but at a bare minimum, to win a national election you must have a large pool of support within the general population. Anthropic and other similar companies have no “consent of the governed,” but we will be highly dependent on their choices in the years to come. Even more troubling, their incentives are for the profit and hegemony of their own product, not the flourishing of the human race. 

So what to do? History provides some examples, and fiction provides more. 

Leo XIII, of course, used Rerum Novarum to push back on capitalists and socialists in different ways, but he advocated strongly for the rights of workers to organize into unions for collective bargaining. In a society where large corporations have so much power compared to common citizens, worker collectives are one of the few ways to balance that asymmetric relationship. The long line of trades-based unions in education, service, transportation, and manufacturing have done great good in supporting individual workers’ rights in the face of capital. In today’s world, however, the digital and AI revolution appears poised to impact not only individual fields of employment, but vast swathes of the economy. This will likely include, interestingly, not only blue collar jobs (as in past technological developments) but also white collar jobs. Might this broad impact actually help marshall a collective action unseen even at the height of the union era? Not everyone today is employed in a sector with a strong labor union, but everyone lives in a world that is becoming dominated by a handful of technology companies. The largest US union, the National Education Association, will always be capped by the number of educational employees. But a new collective of all people impacted by the digital revolution could aim for 90% of the population! A “union of life” or “human union” ? Could there be an opportunity to muster a broad-based collective for restrictions on new technologies and companies, favoring human dignity? 

Even more dramatically, fiction provides another possible future. In the science fiction series Dune, humanity in the book’s past developed a radical hostility towards “thinking machines” after initially delegating many decisions to them. After a few generations of violent rebellion against the machines and their creators, humanity determined a new maxim: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” We hope to avoid its necessity!

In Rerum Novarum section 49 Leo points out that while the guilds of the medieval era were in many ways a great force for good in society, we cannot simply reinstate them as they were. Instead, he stresses the need for new ideas and solutions to the new problems of the day, which labor unions partially addressed.  

In our own time, what cooperative forms of organizing might yet be emerging from the hazy future? A violent rebellion against Google and ChatGPT? Certainly Popes Leo XIII and Leo XIV—not to mention Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin—would reject such an idea and encourage us to be more creative. A single-issue party voting as a bloc to enforce safeguards on AI development, or to break up the large tech companies into smaller competitors? A new push for universal basic income, or a stronger safety net? A “fair trade” equivalent for products or art produced free from AI? An AI tax-and-dividend for all people, similar to Alaska’s oil dividend to all residents? 

I don’t know what could take the place of guilds in support of human dignity and solidarity, but a Catholic Worker reading group feels like as good a place as any to cast about for direction. I hope you will join me in pondering what Rerum Novarum in particular and Catholic Social Teaching in general have to offer our present moment.