If AI Takes Our Jobs, What Are We For?

Annabel Beales spent years doing secretarial and administrative work before finally pursuing the career she had wanted since childhood: writing.

She paid roughly a month's wages for an eight-month copywriting course and in 2023 she finally landed what she considered her dream job: interviewing gardening experts and writing articles about growing potatoes, planting trees, and other topics for a garden center.

About eight months in, the assignments started drying up.

One day, Beales overheard her boss give a colleague an instruction: “Just put it in ChatGPT.” She asked her manager directly whether AI was going to replace her, and was assured her job was safe.

Six weeks later, just before Christmas, she was laid off. “Losing my dream job was devastating,” she later recalled.

Pope Leo XIV has been thinking about exactly that question.

When he explained why he had chosen his papal name, Leo pointed to another pope and another industrial revolution. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum as factories, industrial capitalism, and a newly organized working class were transforming daily life. The encyclical defended workers' right to organize, addressed wages and working conditions, and helped establish modern Catholic social teaching.

And Catholics weren't alone in treating labor as a religious concern. In 1908, the newly formed Federal Council of Churches adopted a “Social Creed” calling for a living wage, shorter hours, an end to child labor, protections against workplace injuries, and one day of rest each week. The following year, the American Federation of Labor designated the Sunday before Labor Day as “Labor Sunday,” dedicated to the spiritual and educational sides of the labor movement.

Sometimes that church-labor alliance became quite literal. Presbyterian minister and former machinist Charles Stelzle arranged exchanges in which ministers attended union meetings and labor representatives visited churches. On Labor Sunday, some unions even marched together to church to hear sermons about workers' concerns.

Leo XIV saw a parallel with artificial intelligence, which he said shortly after his election was presenting new challenges for “human dignity, justice and labour.”

Then he pushed the comparison further.

His May 2026 publication Magnifica Humanitas asks readers to imagine a highly advanced society in which employment is available to only a small fraction of the population. Leo worries not only about lost income, but about what he calls “forced inactivity”: people losing daily tasks, responsibilities, stimulation, and opportunities to contribute.

That is not the world we live in yet. The International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations agency focused on work and labor standards, reviewed the available evidence in June and found that large-scale AI job displacement remains limited so far. Earlier ILO research concluded that most jobs exposed to generative AI are more likely to be transformed than eliminated.

So this is, for now, a thought experiment.

For centuries, religions have argued about what work is for, what kinds of work are moral, what employers owe workers, and when people should stop working altogether.

But what if someday we simply don't need nearly as much human labor?

Is Your Job Your Calling?

Christianity has supplied some of the West's strongest religious language for treating ordinary work as something more than a paycheck.

During the Protestant Reformation, it was Martin Luther who broadened the idea of vocation, or “calling,” beyond priests and monks. A farmer, craftsperson, parent, merchant, or public official could serve God through the responsibilities of ordinary life. The holiness came not from having a religious job, but from serving other people through the work placed in front of you.

In his 1522 Estate of Marriage, he imagined a father doing one of the least glamorous jobs available: washing his baby's dirty diapers. Someone might mock such menial work, Luther wrote, but from the perspective of Christian faith, “God, with all his angels and creatures, is smiling.”

Centuries later, sociologist Max Weber connected strands of Protestant thought with the disciplined “work ethic” that helped shape modern capitalism. Work can become a measure of character. Being busy can look virtuous. A career can become part of the answer to the question, “Who are you?”

Catholic teaching puts an important limit on that idea.

Pope John Paul II during his tenure argued that work possesses dignity because a human being is doing it. His formulation was blunt: work is “for man” and not man “for work.”

That distinction gets much more interesting once machines can do more of the labor.

If human dignity comes before the job, then losing the economic need for someone's labor cannot logically make that person less valuable. A machine may replace a task. It doesn't inherit the worker's moral worth.

The Religion That Commands You to Stop

Christianity can make ordinary work sacred. Judaism adds a rather different command: sometimes you are required to stop.

The Ten Commandments tell people to labor for six days. Then comes the boundary. On the seventh, work stops.

The Sabbath command in Exodus extends beyond the individual believer. Sons and daughters stop. Servants stop. Foreign residents stop. Even working animals stop. Rest isn't a prize awarded after squeezing enough productivity out of the week. It is built into the religious order of time.

Twentieth-century Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel famously called the Sabbath a “palace in time.”

Heschel thought stopping had something to teach human beings about their own importance. On the Sabbath, he wrote, a person learns that the world “will survive without the help of man.”

That line sounds almost tailor-made for the age of automation.

Jewish law also limits what employers may demand from workers. Leviticus forbids withholding a worker's wages overnight, while Deuteronomy instructs that a poor laborer be paid the same day because the worker depends on that money.

Taken together, those teachings refuse to make productivity the measure of a human life. Work matters, workers have rights, and there is also sacred time in which producing things deliberately stops.

That doesn't make the Sabbath a religious version of unemployment. Shabbat is structured rest, filled with meals, prayer, family, community, study, and ritual. It is time away from economic production, but it isn't empty time.

That distinction could become important if technology gives people more hours in which no employer needs them.

Would we know what those hours were for?

Can a Job Be Morally Wrong?

Buddhism approaches work from another direction.

'Right Livelihood' is one part of the Noble Eightfold Path, eight interconnected practices that form Buddhism's path toward liberation from suffering. Alongside such practices as 'Right Speech', 'Right Action', and 'Right Mindfulness' sits a surprisingly practical question: How are you making your living?

One early Buddhist text tells lay followers to avoid working in businesses that market in five types of goods:

• Weapons
• Living Beings
• Meat
• Intoxicants
• Poisons

The list comes from a very different economic world, but the premise is recognizable. Making money doesn't automatically make an activity morally neutral. How you earn matters.

Islam likewise puts commerce inside a wider moral life.

The Qur'an instructs believers to leave trade when called to Friday prayer. Once prayer is finished, they may return to the world and “seek the bounty of Allah.” Earning and worship both have a place, but business doesn't get to claim all of life.

Islamic tradition also has unusually strong language about employers who exploit their workers. One teaching of the Prophet Muhammad says that among those God will oppose on Judgment Day is an employer who reaps the benefits of a laborer's work and then refuses to pay what is owed.

These traditions don't simply ask whether somebody has a job. They ask what the job does, how the work is performed, and how the human beings involved are treated.

That complicates the fear that eliminating a job must always be a bad thing. Few people would insist that dangerous drudgery should be preserved merely because somebody once received wages for doing it. Buddhist 'Right Livelihood' goes further by suggesting that some profitable jobs may not be worth preserving at all.

But that argument can sound awfully abstract when your job is the one that is disappearing.

What If the Paycheck Really Does Disappear?

Jadun Sykes had been artistic since childhood. He studied game design and art, taught himself Photoshop, and at 21 became a graphic designer for a technology company.

He stayed for six years and eventually became the company's only graphic designer. Then the company began using generative AI for tasks including writing and image creation. One day, Sykes says, human resources told him his role was no longer needed because much of his work could be performed using AI.

What bothered him wasn't just losing the salary.

That question gets closer to the problem than any forecast about how many jobs AI might eliminate.

A job can provide money, certainly. It can also provide routine, mastery, colleagues, status, personal pride, and an easy answer when a stranger asks that classic icebreaker: "What do you do?"

But employment isn't the only possible source of purpose.

Atheism and agnosticism don't come with a shared doctrine about work or human meaning. Secular humanism offers one answer: people can find meaning through relationships, creativity, service, learning, and improving life for others without believing that purpose has been assigned by a deity. When Pew Research Center asked Americans what gave their lives meaning, atheists were especially likely to mention hobbies and activities, while family was important across religious and nonreligious groups alike.

Religion has been making versions of the same distinction throughout this article. Luther could see vocation in a father changing diapers. Judaism makes time away from production sacred. Buddhism refuses to treat every profitable job as worth doing.

Suppose, then, that machines eventually allow society to produce what people need with dramatically less human labor. Even if the enormous economic question of distributing that abundance could be solved, another problem would remain: Would all that newfound time feel like freedom, or emptiness?

That is Pope Leo XIV's concern about “forced inactivity.” Work currently gives people more than income. It can provide relationships, responsibility, stimulation, and the feeling that they are contributing to something.

A secular-humanist response might turn the question around. Perhaps employment never needed to carry so much of our identity in the first place. Raising children, caring for relatives, making art, helping friends, volunteering, studying, worshiping, or serving a community can all make a life useful without generating a paycheck.

So the question AI presents isn't simply whether machines will take our jobs.

It is how much of being human we have allowed the job to define.

Labor Day emerged from the upheaval of industrialization, when workers demanded recognition in an economy being radically reshaped by machines and factories. More than a century later, AI may eventually force us to confront the meaning of work from the opposite direction.

And without a job telling you how to spend most of your waking hours, what would make you feel useful?