AI Should Serve Humanity, NOT Replace or Endanger It
As companies race to develop and deploy AI systems, there is a race to replace: humans replaced as creators, counsellors, caregivers and companions; and in most jobs and decision-making roles – concentrating ever more power in unaccountable institutions and their machines.
This race to replace poses risks to societal stability, national security, economic prosperity, civil liberties, privacy, and democratic governance. It also imperils the human experiences of childhood and family, faith, and community.
Artificial intelligence should serve humanity, not the reverse. AI was trained on the sum total of human knowledge. It should belong to and work for all of us, promoting dignity, liberty and the thriving of all life on Earth.
There is a better path, where trustworthy and controllable AI tools amplify rather than diminish human potential, empower people, strengthen families and communities, preserve self-governance and help create unprecedented health and prosperity.
This path demands that those who wield technological power be accountable to human values and needs, in support of human flourishing. If we want technology to support a flourishing future, we need to be clear what that future is, and what we want the technology to do. We also need to protect against the things we don’t want.
What is needed to create AI that truly serves humanity? It is an indictment of our governments that one of the most serious attempts at answering this question has come not from them, but from the Pope in a recently published encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.
In it, the Pope writes at length on AI’s impacts on human dignity, truth, work, and peace, calling for strict international oversight, bans on AI weaponry, and protections for workers.
What is Needed to Create Pro-Human AI
To create AI that respects human dignity, furthers human flourishing, and supports human wellbeing, several measures are needed.
Firstly, we need regulation. There are lots of excuses made by governments about why regulating AI isn’t possible. Some argue the technology is moving too fast for any of us to fully understand, or that we won’t be competitive if we tie ourselves up in red tape. But these are not good reasons not to regulate – and there is precedent for how to do it.
Very few politicians understand the details of drug development, but there is still a clear regulatory framework for any company that wants to bring a new drug to market. They have to prove it is safe and are held accountable if it is not. The same should be true for AI products, which are even more dangerous on a collective scale than novel medicines.
Secondly, we should prioritise deployment of AI for the public good. Computing power is limited, and demand is outstripping supply, which is why there is this mad rush to build data centres everywhere. There is a real risk computing power simply goes to the highest bidder. But there are so many collective challenges where AI breakthroughs could benefit millions. This is where we should be spending our precious computing power.
One way to do this might be putting aspects of AI infrastructure in public ownership. Imagine publicly-owned computing capacity allocated to public-interest problems decided by a citizens assembly. What if data centres were only allowed to be built if a clear allocation of their output was put to good public use?
Thirdly we need to rewire our economies so we can cope with a massive employment transition in the next 30 years. Work won’t end, but it will change. AI might do for knowledge work what automation did for manufacturing. But for advanced economies where many jobs are about knowledge work, that spells trouble – because work is the national tax base. If fewer people work because more jobs are done by non-tax-paying AIs, we will soon see massive holes appear in public finances, and rapidly widening gulfs in inequality. We will need innovative taxation models to fill the hole and redistribute that money to those in society who need it. We could tax for-profit use of data centres, or the companies, or likely both.
Finally, we need a kill switch. The technology gets more powerful by the month, and the risks are growing. Recently, both OpenAI, and their biggest rival, Anthropic, have reported AI agents escaping from supposedly secure test environments and hacking real-world companies. We’re facing the prospect of models that are too powerful to even test safely. AI systems should never escape ultimate human control. Ever.
(Edited excerpts from “What People Actually Want From AI – And How We Get It” by Bert Wander [The Other Side of The End of the World, 17 August 2026]; The Pro-Human AI Declaration)
Read more:
“What People Actually Want From AI – And How We Get It” by Bert Wander
https://bertwander.substack.com/…/what-people-actually…
The Pro-Human AI Declaration