AI: Apocalypse never?

Is Ezra Klein too optimistic for claiming that AI will not bring chaos or disruption?

A reasonable optimism about AI is not only compatible with a Catholic outlook. It should be. Ezra Klein’s essay on the New York Times is valuable precisely because it resists the fashionable fatalism that treats mass unemployment as inevitable and treats every new AI advance as proof that human work is about to collapse. He argues, plausibly, that history gives us reason to think technological revolutions often reconfigure labor more than they annihilate it, and that as automation expands, specifically human goods—attention, care, presence, trust, taste, judgment, relationship—may become more valuable, not less.

That basic instinct fits well with a Catholic realism. Christianity has never taught that human beings are doomed to be crushed by every new tool they create. It teaches, rather, that creation is intelligible, that human ingenuity can bear good fruit, and that labor, properly ordered, can be ennobling. So there is nothing un-Catholic about hoping that AI might free people from drudgery, expand prosperity, and even push society to rediscover forms of work and service that are more deeply human.

But Catholic optimism should probably be a little sterner than Klein’s. It must keep a closer eye on sin, power, and disorder. Wealth does not distribute itself justly. Technology does not automatically deepen solidarity. And the very relational capacities Klein thinks may become more valuable are, in fact, already being eroded by loneliness, isolation, and the technological habits of modern life. In that sense, his hope is reasonable, but it depends on preconditions that our society is actively weakening.

That is where Catholic optimism becomes both more cautious and more serious. We can believe AI will not necessarily bring a job apocalypse, while still insisting that it may wound workers, hollow out communities, and worsen inequality if left to market logic alone. We can believe that more “human” forms of work may flourish, while also recognizing that a culture formed by screens, fragmentation, and self-absorption may not be ready to supply the kind of mature human presence those jobs require.

So the Catholic position is neither panic nor naïveté. It is a realistic optimism: hopeful that AI can be integrated into a more human economy, but clear-eyed that this will not happen on its own. It will require moral formation, stronger families, better institutions, and a genuine defense of the dignity of work. In other words,

Klein is probably right to reject the apocalypse. But Catholics should add that the better future he gestures toward will only arrive if human beings still have the virtue to build it.