Who Are the Victims and Those at Risk of Becoming Victims? When it comes to mining, particular attention must be paid to those who are most vulnerable: Indigenous communities whose livelihoods depend on their land, forests, rivers, and water sources; small-scale farmers; fishers; poor families; women, children, and older people; as well as communities with the least bargaining power in legal, economic, informational, and political matters. They may become victims when land loses its social function, when water sources are polluted or disappear, when the environment is damaged, when livelihoods are disrupted, or when their social and cultural life is transformed without their genuine consent.

In the affluent community where I live, I walk down the street wearing a t-shirt of the elite Jesuit institution I once attended. It’s as if I presumptuously assume that the t-shirt will alleviate the prospect of being seen by surveilling gazes. Yet, I am instantaneously reminded as car doors lock when I walk beside them, and as purses clutch when I pass by, that my body is rendered as a site of suspicion. I am reminded that my Blackness precedes my existence. I am reminded that my darkened body occludes the presumption of innocence. I am reminded that my dark skin has eviscerated my humanity and has turned me into an object of fear.

When Omar came upon the place in a neighborhood on the outskirts of town, he saw a white rosary hanging over the door and felt a sense of relief. He had been told it was a shelter run by nuns. He had been sleeping poorly for several days and walking in very difficult conditions. His feet were injured, his shoes were torn, and his clothes—which had been wet and had dried on his body over the past two weeks—were terrible. The smell was unbearable. His wife and two young children had been taken in three days earlier at another location, where they could regain their strength. He, being a man, was not allowed to stay in the same space; that was the safety policy they had explained to him.

Every political community arises, to some extent, from a promise of protection. But that promise cannot be understood in a narrow or reductionist way. Protection does not mean only defending against danger, containing threats, or neutralizing risks. It also means upholding the conditions that make a truly human life possible: belonging, recognition, education, work, health, participation, relationships, and rights. A society does not protect only when it prevents someone from being attacked; it also protects when it prevents someone from being abandoned, rendered invisible, or excluded from the community to which they belong.

Artificial intelligence makes Matthew Carnes’s proposal to move towards an economy of solidarity and reconciliation, grounded in the dignity of every person and the common good, especially urgent. Faced with a technological transformation that renders precarious work invisible, perpetuates discrimination, and threatens to concentrate the benefits of increased productivity, the text invites us to ask not only how much value innovation creates, but who shares in that value, who is excluded, and what conditions enable human flourishing. Lifelong learning, social protection, and the participation of those displaced by these changes emerge as essential conditions if artificial intelligence is to serve decent work rather than an economy without workers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the world of work on several fronts simultaneously. It alters the conditions of those who work to make it possible, often in invisible and precarious jobs; it changes hiring, organizational, and career advancement processes, where automated decisions can reproduce historical inequalities under the guise of neutrality; it heralds a new labor paradigm in which part of the economic value may grow without a proportional increase in human labor; and it transforms the way we educate professionals who will have to coexist with it, altering both teaching methods and the competencies required of graduates.