The explosion of AI has been matched by a rising dread: That machines will take our jobs and render human beings obsolete in the workforce.
More than half of Americans fear AI could cost them or someone in their household a job, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. Meanwhile, many religious leaders have expressed concerns about AI sapping humans of their sense of purpose.
These fears point to something deeply troubling. They reveal what our society actually believes, at a bedrock level, about why human beings deserve to exist.
David Carr
In America and across much of the modern world, the answer is: You deserve to exist if you are useful enough. Your livelihood, health care, dignity and right to basic resources are conditional on your productivity.
This underlying narrative has driven our nation for centuries. But AI has brought it to the forefront in an unprecedented, seemingly existential form.
I’ve spent years studying a much older version of this dynamic. I’m a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, a text that has heavily shaped the history of Western civilization and continues to influence every level of our society. The book is, among many other things, a long argument with itself about the purpose and behavior of human beings.
And it offers valuable frameworks for this moment in time.
First, it illuminates how we became a society that reduces human beings to their productivity.
Second, and more importantly, it shows us how we might build something different.
Much of the Bible does what our economy does — it sorts people by their usefulness, their obedience, their output for a larger system, whether that system is a kingdom, a temple or God’s flock. There’s no shortage of examples.
As I explain in the forthcoming book, Unmaking Eden: Genesis and the Domestication of the World, the Bible’s flood narrative revolves around a divine decision that human life has proved to be more trouble than it’s worth. God decides that “the evil of humanity on the earth was great” and “regretted having made humanity on the earth.”
“The God of Genesis 1 doesn’t create human beings and then evaluate their output.”
God then uses flood waters to wipe the earth clean of all human beings. So humans experience here what animals experience all the time — living and dying by the extent to which they prove useful and obedient.
The Bible also tracks how women get bound to a destiny of motherhood, how Canaan and other humans become enslaved, and how the people of Israel become God’s domesticated sheep — to be protected, provided for and perhaps even sacrificed when called for, in accordance with the divine shepherd’s will.
In that sense, the expendability framework undergirding our economy isn’t new. It’s ancient. We have been domesticating human beings for a very long time. And the Bible has, at times, provided the blueprint.
But the Bible also contains a counter-tradition, one that interrupts the hierarchy.
The God of Genesis 1 doesn’t create human beings and then evaluate their output. This God provides for them before they’ve done anything, before they’ve proven their worth, demonstrated their utility or justified their existence through labor.
And then, after the flood, the world-destroying God promises never again to subject created life to this kind of calculus of expendability. God vows to preserve the earth’s regular seasons while recognizing the inherent rebellious nature of human beings.
In many ways, the tradition’s oldest stories treat domination not as the natural order of things, but as a fall. It’s a rupture from an earlier way of living defined by reciprocity, kinship and mutual care across all living things. Something was lost. And the text insists it might be recovered.
Religious leaders are right that AI poses real dangers to humanity. But this moment of technological disruption also carries within it a rare opportunity.
When the systems we’ve built to measure and sort human beings are themselves thrown into question, we can ask the question underneath all the others: What do human beings deserve simply by virtue of existing? And in starting to answer this question, we can also start to build a world ordered not around productivity, but around the inherent worth of every living being.
AI shouldn’t cause us to lose our humanity. It should be an opportunity to rediscover it.
David M. Carr serves as professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan.
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