Was the presence, during the presentation of the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo Extensively commented on, the text takes a lucid look at the many questions raised by artificial intelligence, from the environment to democracy, from ethics to geopolitical balances, and even its effects on the labor market.
The encyclical provides a welcome counterpoint to the dominant discourse of the technology giants on this last subject. This speech is based on the intuitive and partially true idea that AI would be an augmentation technology. Used well, AI can make it possible to work not only faster, but sometimes better by freeing yourself from menial tasks and improving the quality of the service provided.
Potential cost and labor savings
This is also the meaning of the formula according to which the employee would have less to fear from AI than from the colleague who knows how to use it better than him. Clever, this formula tends to discreetly move a collective question towards individual responsibility. However, the idea reaches its limits when we stop looking at the augmented employee and look at the organization that employs them. If the same result can be obtained faster, better and with fewer resources, the productivity gain can also translate into potential savings in costs and labor.
The dominant discourse then invites us to reason in clear terms. Technology that produces faster, better and cheaper can lower prices, stimulate demand, open up new uses and create new professions. This response, however, becomes fragile when it is established as a general law. It assumes scalable and price-sensitive demand.
However, many tasks that can be substituted by AI relate to necessary but limited functions such as compliance, administration, reporting, documentation or complaints management. Their cost can fall without their consumption increasing in the same proportions. If new tasks and functions begin to appear, they most often relate to controlling the automation itself. Above all, nothing says that they emerge on the same scale as automated tasks nor that they are not themselves automatable by ever more efficient AI systems.
Employment of young graduates reached
This representation becomes even more insufficient with the transition from AI as a one-off tool to AI as a system integrated into company processes. This is the challenge of the so-called “agentic” phase, that is to say an AI no longer in the form of an assistant mobilized at the request of the employee as part of a one-off task, but of agents deployed by the organization to carry out parallel or sequential tasks integrated into a process. Complex and costly, the deployment of agentic AI in companies is still in its infancy but augurs a much more profound transformation of employment.
The encyclical also reveals, implicitly, one of the great unthoughts of this speech: the destination of productivity gains. How can we imagine that a significant part of these gains would go to employees via wages if the demand for labor in the most affected professions and sectors is on a downward trend? Why imagine that the sharing of these gains would be equitably distributed between a handful of high-tech companies on one side, and a myriad of countries and user and dependent companies on the other?
The question of professional trajectories also remains out of scope while the first visible signals show that the adjustment to employment is particularly affecting young graduates. A company may, by calculation, prefer the use of AI to recruiting a junior; collectively, all risk drying up the pool of skills they will need tomorrow.
Work, a place of learning
It is often these automatable tasks that allow you to discover a profession and develop expertise. In this respect, the encyclical usefully shifts the debate by reminding us that work cannot be reduced to a source of subsistence, and, therefore, that the idea of a universal basic income is not a panacea. Work is also a place of learning, cooperation, recognition and accomplishment.
A careful reading of the encyclical invites us not to stick to the naive observation according to which the great technological transformations of the past have, ultimately, created millions of jobs and allowed the advent of an era of abundance. This observation too often replaces the study of the social, political and institutional conditions which made this improvement possible, and tends to elude the human and social cost of the transition phases.
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