Adobe Images 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 inputs. A worldview that classifies human beings as lower-value capital risks dissolving the moral premise that makes economic exchange possible.
Pope Leo XIV agrees with Adam Smith. On May 25, he released his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” He signed it on the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the 1891 letter on labor in the first industrial revolution.
Leo makes Smith’s point in different words: The dignity of each person is “neither acquired nor earned.” Powerful interests, he warns, can reduce a person to a resource to be used, or to what he produces.
The message of human disposability is manifesting itself in public policy and the workplace, mostly through silence. A new Milken Institute-Harris Poll finds that 80 percent of Americans want the government to begin AI workforce transition programs now. Sixty-eight percent say they are facing the transition alone; 41 percent of workers report receiving no employer AI support in the past year. Eighty-eight percent of business leaders agree that no individual company can solve workforce readiness on its own.
The consensus among workers, executives and graduating students is clear: the country needs a serious look at what we will do if AI disrupts the labor market.
It is too early to know the scope of the disruption we face. The Budget Lab at Yale reports that its AI-exposure metrics remain flat and within historical ranges. The economic immigration group finds no detectable AI disruption in exposed occupations, with labor force exit lowest among the most exposed. Aggregate unemployment remains low, at 4.3 percent in May 2026. Other studies find reasons for concern among younger workers, especially in the tech sector, without concluding we face a broad collapse in employment. We do not yet know whether this transition will resemble electrification, the China shock, or something entirely new.
That uncertainty argues against rushing to implement new programs that may overshoot or undershoot the actual problem. But it also raises the urgency of preparing policy options to address needs as they arise. Some of the possible components are familiar: wage insurance during transitions, individual training accounts, portable benefits for gig and contract workers, expanded apprenticeship pathways, and tax treatment that levels the field between investment in equipment and investment in worker skills.
Sixty-nine percent of Milken-Harris respondents believe AI can create more opportunities than it eliminates. Booing grads are asking whether there is a plan for cushioning negative effects on workers. Winters’s answer is a reminder that a shared understanding of human dignity and intrinsic worth cannot be taken for granted. It must be at the center of our concerns and backed by policy.
Brent Orrell is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-director of the AEI-Urban Commission on AI and the Future of the American Workforce.
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