You Have Inherent Value: An Ancient Lesson About New Machines
For 135 years — and again this week — Catholic leaders have been warning against evaluating humans by what we can produce. It's time to turn that lesson into law.
Author’s Note: This is my final column on AI and labor for Hard Reset. (I’m grateful to them for giving me this space, and I have no doubt we’ll work together again soon.) It’s been a tremendous pleasure to cover the beat for you, as this has been a particularly thoughtful and active audience, full of people clearly working hard to sort out a way forward for dignified work in an age of undignified demands. I decided to finish my time here with a look at what I consider the most positive recent development in the fight for worker protections, the Pope’s recent encyclical about A.I.
Keep up with my coverage of tech, power, and the invisible forces shaping our lives over at The Rip Current, where I continue to file several times each week, or follow The Rip Current on YouTube or TikTok, our main social platforms. I’m also now a CNN contributor, so tune in there! Thanks for reading.
On a Tuesday in May of 1891, in a Vatican still adjusting to the harsh electric lights recently installed in its corridors, Pope Leo XIII signed a long meditation on the fate of factory workers. The industrial revolution was by then roughly sixty years old. Fourteen-hour shifts were common. Child labor was legal. A man who lost a limb to the machinery he worked had no claim on the company that owned it and put him there.
Leo, although an accomplished scholar, didn’t write about those conditions in the language of politics or economics. He wrote about them in the language of the human soul. The working man, he argued in the encyclical Rerum Novarum, was not a unit of production. He (and Leo of course used “he” as the pronoun) was made in Imago Dei, “the image of God.” Fundamental human dignity — just the fact that you’re here, breathing on this Earth — should, Leo pointed out, outweigh every wage negotiation, every contract, every commercial decision about what you as a worker are worth.
“New developments in industry, new techniques striking out on new paths, changed relations of employer and employee, abounding wealth among a very small number and destitution among the masses,” Leo wrote, had caused conflict to break out across the industrializing world. His encyclical’s answer was not to reject the new economy. It was to insist that the economy answer to something older than itself.
On May 15, 2026 — 135 years to the day — Pope Leo XIV signed a new encyclical making the same ancient argument about human beings. Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence was released to the world on Monday. Our Pope Leo, who says he took his name from Leo XIII largely because of what the 1891 encyclical sought to accomplish, is contuining a line of argument that stretches from the factory floor to the server farm, from the spinning jenny to the large language model, and he insists that the same moral question runs through all of it:
What are human beings worth when the economy no longer needs what they provide?
“Building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected.”
-Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, May 25, 2026
The question matters now because we are watching it being answered — by markets, by venture capital, by product roadmaps.
The AI companies deploying these systems will tell you their technology will someday create more jobs than it destroys. Economists are weighing whether that’s true, and recalculating how goods and resources will move in a world of intense and sudden unemployment. Federal lawmakers are making speeches about their employment and Terminator concerns.
But none of them seem to see it the way the papacy has for over a century: that the question of what workers are worth should not be answered by the market, because the market doesn’t know, doesn’t care, and cannot be trusted with determining what a person is.
What Pope Leo XIII wrote about the horrors of 19th-century employment and the threat it posed to human dignity was a philosophically powerful argument. (It was also a dramatic departure for the church, which until then had stuck to questions of God rather than questions of humanity.) But his argument also took a journey from the bishops reading Rerum Novarum all the way to the architects of the New Deal, forty years later. Tracing it helps us see today that moral language, carefully tended, can eventually become law.
That 1891 language ran through one man in particular. The priest-economist John A. Ryan presented a moral argument for a living wage, grounded in Catholic anti-individualism and natural rights traditions, which helped fuel early minimum wage campaigns, a radical political position at the time. In 1906, his influential book A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects brought together Catholic social teaching with American republican ideals to argue that everyone has an “indestructible” God-given right to a “decent livelihood.” He went on to be the first social action director for the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the forerunner of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, lobbying for not just a national minimum wage, but the right of workers to organize in labor unions — another radical suggestion made in Rerum Novarum.
In 1919, the National Catholic War Council issued the Bishops’ Program for Social Reconstruction — a plan for social reform written by Ryan combining Progressive thought and Catholic theology — which proposed government intervention as the most effective means of affecting positive change for working people and the poor. The program advocated minimum wage legislation, the elimination of child labor, state-run insurance for the sick, unemployed, and elderly, and housing for returning veterans. Labeled “socialistic” by its critics at the time, much of the Program was implemented during the New Deal years.
Ryan said he considered the resulting National Labor Relations Act — the one that gave a heads up through a WARN notice to anyone laid off last week at Meta, or in March at Oracle — as “probably the most just, beneficial, and far-reaching piece of labor legislation ever enacted in the United States.” Later, he described the Fair Labor Standards Act as the culmination of his life’s work. He gave the invocation at two of Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugurations. For his strong backing of Roosevelt he would be called the “Right Reverend New Dealer.”
Ryan is a pivotal historical figure, that rare actor who turns moral teaching into enforceable law. Leo XIII wrote about the fundamental value of all humans, no matter what they do or make, in 1891. Ryan turned that theological premise into an economic argument — an “indestructible right” — by 1906. The bishops turned it into a policy platform in 1919. Roosevelt turned it into the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Forty-seven years from encyclical to federal law. The moral language didn’t just inspire the legislation — it became its logic.
Leo XIV has now addressed the looming prospect of mass unemployment due to AI adoption, calling it “a true social calamity that especially requires the State to exercise responsibility.” He draws explicitly on his predecessors: citing John Paul II’s 1981 encyclical on human work, Laborem Exercens, noting that his predecessor recognized unemployment as “a grave evil,” with Leo adding that “exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli” could lead to “human and cultural impoverishment.”
“The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means, and the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good,” Leo XIV writes.
His sharpest words are about what AI ideology does to the way we see each other. “Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective,” he writes in paragraph 51, in language that would have had Leo XIII nodding along.
“Human dignity does not depend on a person’s abilities, wealth, or position in life, nor on the right or wrong choices made; instead, it is a gift that precedes and transcends each person, endowed by God as an expression of his unfailing love,” he adds in paragraph 50.
That second sentence is Imago Dei translated for the era of product development. It is a direct answer to the efficiency argument that is being used right now to justify every layoff, every automated system, every welfare algorithm that cuts someone off for missing an appointment they couldn’t get to.
These papal writings are not the first to grapple with the question of human value. They are, in fact, where several very old arguments converge.
In Judaism, Rabbi Noam Newman has articulated that “dignity is a special feature of human beings that is implanted by God and is integral to human nature,” extending to “all humans, whether Jewish or not Jewish, neighbor or outsider.” The commandment to respect and love the stranger, he notes, appears over three dozen separate times in the Torah itself.
In Islam, the Quran’s 17th surah states, as scholar Syed Rizwam has explained, “We have honored the children of Adam” — not Muslims, not believers, but all children of Adam. Scholars of Islamic teaching call this concept al-karamah al-muta’asilah — inherent dignity — a gift to all of mankind that can never be lost or taken away from a human regardless of their actions, religion, orientation, or status.
In Buddhism, a person’s dignity is derived from humanity’s shared “Buddha-nature” — everyone’s potential for a state of awakening defined by wisdom and compassion.
These religions differ in who or what they worship, but they share the idea that the value of a human being is not a function of what they produce.
The Efficiency Argument — that we are worth what we contribute, that those who contribute less deserve less, that a system that replaces a human being with a faster, cheaper process has done something morally neutral and commercially positive — is not just economically contested. It is, across virtually every major religious and humanist tradition in human history, philosophically wrong.
What Magnifica Humanitas does — and what Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum did — is give that position institutional weight, historical memory, and literary framing. And one after another Leo XIV knocks down the standard practices and talking points of Silicon Valley.
As Leo XIV argues, applying moral and ethical principles to AI models cannot happen once it has wreaked havoc on society. You can’t just ship and fix it later — our values must be applied in its construction. And no one gets to hide behind their job title, or behind the hallucinations and biases of the models. He’s explicit about who bears responsibility: “For AI to respect human dignity and truly serve the common good, responsibility must be clearly defined at every stage: from those who design and develop these systems to those who use them and rely on them for concrete decisions.”
And he pushes back directly at the industry’s favorite rebuttal — that caution is just fear of progress: “Calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress; instead, it is an exercise of responsible care for the human family.”
State legislatures in California, Michigan, and Colorado are already debating whether AI systems can make life-altering decisions — about SNAP eligibility, parole, child welfare assessments, credit scores — without human review. Federal lawmakers are watching, mostly without acting. The encyclical is addressed, as the document itself states, “to all the Catholic faithful, to all Christians and to men and women of goodwill.” It is not a theological document just for people who pray. It is a moral argument for people who vote, and for people who make laws.
Ryan’s 1919 blueprint sat on a shelf for fourteen years, labeled radical, before Roosevelt found it useful. Now Leo XIV has again updated 135 year-old arguments for a moment when we’re going to need a moral reason, rather than an economic or political one, to protect one another:
“Building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected. Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations. All too often, we place our hope in unlimited ‘upgrades,’ in forms of progress that exacerbate inequalities, and in immediate solutions incapable of healing people’s wounds. As a result, while some pursue the illusion of unlimited self-assertion, many are deprived of basic necessities. The Church reminds us, with a firm yet humble voice, that true fulfilment is not achieved by eliminating weakness but through harmonious growth. It is found where freedom and responsibility are intertwined with mutual care and true solidarity, and where progress is measured by the dignity of each person and the good of all peoples.”
Further Reading
Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence — Full text of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, Vatican.va (May 15, 2026)
Rerum Novarum — Pope Leo XIII’s foundational 1891 encyclical on labor, capital, and the condition of the working class
“An ‘Indestructible Right’: John Ryan and the Catholic Origins of the U.S. Living Wage Movement, 1906–1938” — Duke University Press, the definitive scholarly account of Ryan’s role in shaping New Deal labor law
“It’s Time to Reclaim the Pro-Worker History of Catholic Social Teaching” — Religion News Service, tracing the 1919 Bishops’ Program to the New Deal
“In His First Encyclical, Pope Leo XIV Says AI Must Serve Humanity, Not the Powerful Few” — Religion News Service, May 25, 2026
“Abrahamic Faiths Share Belief on Human Dignity” — Chicago Catholic, on the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian convergence around Imago Dei
Msgr. John Ryan and the Catholic Connection to Social Security — NETWORK Lobby, on how the 1919 Bishops’ Program became the architecture of the New Deal