What Is a Human Being For? AI, Work, and the Future of Flourishing
A conversation with Pope Leo XIV, New College Berkeley, and the question of what we dare to become
Tonight (Wednesday, October 14), I have the privilege of joining a remarkable group of thinkers for a conversation hosted by New College Berkeley: Magnifica Humanitas: Truth, Work and Human Freedom in the AI Age.
Our conversation will engage the fourth chapter of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which addresses some of the most urgent questions raised by artificial intelligence: What happens to truth when machines can manufacture convincing falsehoods? What becomes of freedom when algorithms increasingly shape our choices? And what happens to the dignity of human work when machines can perform more and more of the tasks we once believed required human beings?
I’m particularly grateful for the invitation to reflect on that third question: the dignity of work.
But I find myself drawn toward a question beneath it.
What is a human being for?
I suspect how we answer that question will shape not only the future of artificial intelligence, but the kind of world we are becoming together.
We are more than what we produce
We live in a culture that has become remarkably skilled at measuring human worth in terms of productivity.
How much can you accomplish? How efficiently can you accomplish it? How quickly can you generate results? How much economic value can you create?
These are not necessarily bad questions. Productivity can serve genuine human needs. Efficiency can free resources for other goods. Technological innovation can relieve suffering, expand access, and make possible forms of care and creativity that previous generations could scarcely imagine.
I am not interested in romanticizing a world before artificial intelligence, nor am I particularly interested in joining the chorus of those who see every technological development as a threat.
I am genuinely curious about what AI might make possible.
But I am troubled by how easily we accept the underlying assumption that a person’s value is determined by what they produce.
If productivity is our primary measure of human worth, what happens when a machine becomes more productive than a person?
If efficiency is our highest good, what happens to the slow work of loving, listening, healing, teaching, mentoring, accompanying, and belonging?
And if we have organized our economy around the assumption that people must continually demonstrate their usefulness, what happens when technological systems make increasing numbers of people economically unnecessary?
These are not simply questions about the future of employment.
They are questions about our theological anthropology—our understanding of what it means to be human.
Work is not the source of our dignity
One of the gifts of Pope Leo’s encyclical is its insistence that human dignity cannot be reduced to economic utility.
From the perspective of Christian theology, human beings do not earn their dignity through labor. We receive dignity as a gift of being created in the image of G-d.
Before we produce anything, before we contribute anything, before we demonstrate competence or usefulness, we are already worthy of love, belonging, and care.
This is profoundly liberating.
It means that the unemployed person is no less human than the executive. The child is no less worthy than the engineer. The elderly person, the person living with disabilities, the exhausted caregiver, and the person whose labor goes unrecognized are not somehow less valuable because their contributions cannot easily be measured by economic systems.
Human dignity precedes productivity.
Yet this does not make work insignificant.
Quite the opposite.
Work can be one of the beautiful ways human beings participate in the ongoing creativity and care of G-d. Through work, we cultivate, repair, nourish, teach, build, heal, organize, and contribute to the flourishing of our neighbors and the world.
At its best, work is not merely something we do to survive.
It is one of the ways we participate in love.
But not all work is dignified simply because someone is employed. Work can also degrade, exploit, exhaust, alienate, and diminish human beings.
This is why the dignity of work must never become a theological justification for keeping people busy, employed, or economically productive at any cost.
The question is not simply whether AI will preserve jobs.
It is whether the emerging arrangements of work will honor the dignity of workers, distribute benefits justly, strengthen communities, and contribute to the flourishing of all and everything.
The Jesus Way interrupts our assumptions
As a practical theologian, I find myself returning to the life and teachings of Jesus.
Jesus was not indifferent to work. His parables are filled with laborers, farmers, merchants, shepherds, builders, and household workers. His ministry unfolded among people whose lives were profoundly shaped by the economic realities of their time.
Yet Jesus continually disrupted the assumption that human worth could be measured by social standing, economic productivity, or usefulness to those in power.
He welcomed those deemed expendable.
He dignified those whose labor was invisible.
He interrupted systems that treated people as instruments of wealth and power.
And he invited people into a Kin-dom where the first become last, the overlooked are welcomed to the table, and greatness is expressed through service rather than domination.
I wonder what might happen if we approached artificial intelligence through this Jesus Way.
What if our primary question were not how AI might make corporations more productive, but how it might help liberate people from degrading labor?
What if technological advances made it possible for more people to have the time and resources to care for children, accompany aging parents, participate in neighborhood life, create beauty, restore ecosystems, and deepen relationships?
What if the benefits of automation were shared rather than concentrated?
What if we measured technological progress not primarily by increases in output, but by whether people and places were becoming more fully alive?
These questions may sound idealistic.
But I would argue that they are also profoundly practical.
Every technological system embodies assumptions about what matters, whose interests count, and what kind of future is desirable.
AI is no exception.
The question is not whether values will shape its development.
The question is whose values, whose interests, and whose vision of humanity will prevail.
A prophetic dare toward flourishing
One of the challenges of this moment is that we are being invited to imagine the future within the narrow confines of our existing economic arrangements.
Will AI replace workers? Will it create new jobs? How will businesses adapt? What skills will remain valuable?
Important questions, certainly.
But perhaps not imaginative enough.
What if the arrival of AI is also an invitation to reconsider our deeply held assumptions about work, wealth, time, human value, and the good life?
What if we dared to imagine economic arrangements in which the gains of technological innovation were shared more equitably?
What if we recognized caregiving, community-building, ecological restoration, and the work of reconciliation as essential contributions to our common life, whether or not the market adequately compensates them?
What if the purpose of technological advancement were not simply to produce more with fewer people, but to create conditions in which more people could flourish?
Of course, such a future will not emerge automatically.
Technological possibility is not the same as moral progress.
It will require public policy, corporate accountability, democratic participation, labor protections, and serious attention to those most vulnerable to economic disruption. It will require listening to workers themselves, especially those whose livelihoods are already precarious.
And it will require communities of faith to recover a more compelling public imagination.
Not simply an imagination shaped by fear of technological change.
Nor an imagination captivated by every new promise of technological salvation.
But what I have come to call a shalomic imagination: a way of perceiving and participating in the world that longs for right-relatedness, justice, peace, belonging, and flourishing for all and everything.
Shalom is not merely the absence of suffering.
It is the presence of relationships, practices, institutions, and ecological conditions that make flourishing possible.
And that includes our working lives.
What are we becoming together?
I am especially grateful that tonight’s conversation will bring together people with different areas of expertise and experience.
I have much to learn from those who understand the technical, legal, political, and cultural dimensions of AI more deeply than I do.
My contribution will come from the particular vantage point of practical theology, which is less interested in theology as an abstract system of ideas than in how our deepest convictions become embodied in the everyday stuff of life.
The question I keep returning to is not simply, What can artificial intelligence do?
It is, What kinds of people are we becoming as we develop and use it?
What habits are we cultivating?
What relationships are we strengthening or weakening?
Whose dignity is being protected?
Whose suffering is being overlooked?
What possibilities for liberation are opening, and what new forms of domination might be emerging?
And perhaps most importantly, what practices might help us participate more faithfully in G-d’s shalom amid this extraordinary technological transformation?
I don’t come to tonight’s conversation with all the answers.
I come grateful for the invitation, curious about what I might learn, and hopeful that we can resist the temptation to frame the future as an inevitable contest between human beings and machines.
The future is not simply something that technology will do to us.
It is something we are already helping to shape through our choices, relationships, institutions, and shared imagination.
My hope is that we might have the courage to insist that technological progress be measured by something more beautiful than speed, profit, or efficiency.
That we might dare to build a world where people are not valued because they are useful, but where our tools, economies, and institutions become useful because they serve people, communities, and the living world.
And perhaps that is the invitation before us.
Not simply to safeguard the dignity of work in an age of artificial intelligence.
But to rediscover the dignity of being human.
And to ask what kind of work love is calling us to do together.
Join the conversation tonight
Magnifica Humanitas: Truth, Work and Human Freedom in the AI Age
Hosted by New College Berkeley
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
5:00–6:30 p.m. Pacific | Online via Zoom
I’ll be joining Dr. César “CJ” Baldelomar, Dr. Rebecca Hernandez, and Delight Roberts for this conversation exploring Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical and its implications for our common life.
Event details and registration
Peace, dwight
