Reflections

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.

The inseparable link between those minerals and artificial intelligence haunts my daily life here. I do not approach this link through the archive, but through the ground I was born and raised on. To tell this history is not to complain about a stranger who wrecked our region; it is to take responsibility for what is happening in my country. And so, reading Pope Leo's new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (MH), I begin with the question that has long followed me: When will the majority of Congolese finally benefit from their own immense natural wealth, rather than paying for it with their suffering, and, too often, their lives?

The Industrial Revolution asked whether economic progress could be reconciled with workers' dignity. It also challenged the assumption that economic progress is inherently good. Can greater productivity alone be called progress if it comes at the expense of human dignity, social cohesion, or the natural world? More than a century later, artificial intelligence poses a different but equally profound challenge. Machines are no longer transforming only how we produce goods; they are beginning to transform how we think, decide, create, and even relate to one another. The question before us is therefore not merely technological. It is anthropological.

Artificial intelligence is often presented as an immaterial technology, yet it rests on a very concrete infrastructure: devices, data centers, and networks whose manufacture requires minerals such as tin, gold, cobalt, lithium, and copper. For this reason, reading AI from the perspective of socio-environmental justice means looking toward the territories where its supply chains begin: communities marked by conflict, precarious economies, ecological damage, and violations of human rights.

Magnifica Humanitas offers us — especially those of us who work in education from a tradition of faith and commitment to justice — a profoundly enriching challenge. It calls us to govern AI with wisdom: to build the structures that protect the dignity of the most vulnerable; to form persons capable of thought and decision; and to ensure that the organization of our own institutions is coherent with what we teach.

In Europe today, a refugee is identified first by a biometric system, before the perilous journey they endured to flee danger is heard. At the United States border, an asylum seeker may be told to seek protection through a phone application before a human being listens to how their rights were violated by violence and persecution that brought them there.

Whom does facial recognition recognize? Who gets recommended for a job by an AI hiring algorithm? How does bias shade the output of an image-generation model? Whose choices are reflected in all of the multifaceted decision-making that is part of generating and deploying AI models?