Mankind must not sacrifice human dignity at the altar of AI

On May 19, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters announced cuts of more than 15 percent across the bank’s roughly 52,000 support staff by 2030, replacing them with AI. Unfortunately, he made plain what this decision meant: “It is not cost-cutting; it is replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we are putting in.”

Winters is not alone. Goldman Sachs President John Waldron recently described portions of his firm’s operations as a “human assembly line” primed for automation.  

The reaction to this quiet-part-out-loud, efficiency-driven view of AI has been global. Eric Schmidt was booed at the University of Arizona commencement for praising artificial intelligence, as were speakers at the University of Central Florida and Middle Tennessee State.  

Some ways of talking about human beings are always out of bounds. Sorting people by economic value into those who merit work and those who should be sidelined is one of them, and any society that tolerates it moves toward social and political conflict. 

Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments” describes a commercial order built on reciprocity and mutual recognition. The social characteristics that draw us to “truck, barter, and exchange” are, in the end, what produce technological change. Markets work best when participants regard one another as persons with innate dignity, not as disposable production........

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