P. A. Chacko S. J.
The 2025 theme for International Workers’ Day is: “Decent Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Automation.”
Work done by human beings is contribution to nation building. It stimulates progress and development. Work is divine as it participates in God’s continuing creative work. Christians believe that God, the Prime Mover, created the world. What a magnificenr work.
Every work has its nobility. The wise words of Sophocles are loaded with meaning:
“Without labor, nothing prospers.”
The labour strike of1886 and of the following years in America did not go wasted. Even in the midst of state repression, police atrocity and bloody massacre of workers, the movement for fair wages, regulated working hours, human rights, and a just ambience for all workers picked up momentum.
Marx and Engels had already set the ball rolling in the Manifesto with the famous slogan: “Workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.”
This rallying cry has reverberated all through the centuries for freedom from labour slavery, and from oppressive capitalist system that sucks the blood of the workers for its own benefit.
The challenge pausing before the workers’ world today is whether robots and AI will make them unemployed and starving. Already hotel managers, waiters, cooks are being replaced by robots. They are getting into the IT industry, engineering world and professional quarters too. In other words, the fear, generally expressed, is that AI will be in the driving seat unless the program makers use their intelligence to streamline the AI world.
AI may be able to help us in many ways such as better health care, safer transport system, cheaper products and services, faster information etc.
But, should that mean our tailors will dismantle their machines, or drivers will get back to cattle grazing, and our working class will wind up their operation to give space to AI and its minions?
There are lots of questions in this grey area.