Will AI massively kill jobs?
Or will it bring a new dawn of human leisure and creativity?
One of the smartest observations I have read lately about AI comes from economist Alex Tabarrok, co-founder of Marginal Revolution.
In a brief post Tabarrok argues that the same AI technological disruption can be described either as a nightmare or as a gift. Say AI could produce 40% unemployment, and it sounds apocalyptic. Say AI could make possible a three-day work week, and it sounds almost utopian. But the two scenarios are not as different as they appear. The difference lies in how society distributes the gains.
That matters enormously for Christians. AI is not only a technical question. It is a moral question. If this new technology greatly increases productivity, the central issue will be whether human ingenuity is used to protect the dignity of the person or merely to maximize efficiency, concentrate wealth, and discard the weak.
A civilization shaped by Christian anthropology should be able to see the difference. The human person is not a unit of labor. Man is not made for the machine. Work has dignity, yes, but so do rest: contemplation, family life, worship, creativity, and care for others.
Tabarrok argues that history gives us some reason for confidence. Over the last century and a half, human beings have already seen the amount of life spent working fall dramatically, while leisure, childhood, and retirement expanded. That did not have to end in collapse. It can happen again. But it will not happen automatically, and certainly not morally by accident.
That is why the AI debate should not be reduced to fearmongering or boosterism. The real battle is over whether human ingenuity will be guided by a true vision of the human person. If it is, AI could help recover something modern life has steadily eroded: time to live as human beings, not merely to function as producers. If it is not, the same technology could become one more instrument for degrading labor and hollowing out human dignity.
The future of AI will depend in no small part on whether we still have the wisdom and courage to insist that progress must serve the human person, not the other way around.