It wasn’t supposed to be this way, Vice President JD Vance complained to tech and corporate leaders gathered at the American Dynamism Summit in Washington last March. “The idea of globalization,” he said, “was that rich countries would move further up the value chain, while the poor countries made the simpler things.”
Implicit in the neoliberal economic wave, described by Vance and authored by policy setters in Washington and New York, was the notion that while low-end manufacturing jobs would move to the Global South, “good jobs” would remain in the West, particularly the United States. That hasn’t exactly panned out.
“It turns out that the geographies that do the manufacturing get awfully good at the designing of things,” Vance said. “There are network effects. . . . The firms that design products work with firms that manufacture. They share intellectual property. They share best practices. And they even sometimes share critical employees.”
While millions of people were lifted from poverty in China, India, and Southeast Asia, many low-skilled U.S. workers were left behind. At the beginning of this profound transition, it was labor and left-wing activists who raised objections to the inevitable human and communal wreckage that globalization would effect. Their objections were ridiculed and dismissed. Now, on the populist right, the abandonment of the U.S. working class has been politically weaponized.
The vice president takes for granted that high-value jobs should have remained in the United States. The Trump administration purports to pursue their restoration. But from a corporate standpoint, there is little economic justification for beginning that reshoring project. Left unasked is: Who has a higher moral claim to work with dignity? Why are the claims of workers in Asia and elsewhere not as valid as claims of workers in the West?
That ethically tricky issue may be left unresolved. A new industrial transition is beginning even as we grapple with the lingering trauma of the last one. Artificial intelligence does not care who “owns” jobs. AI does not agonize over the ethical balance required to retain or restore dignified work in the West while alleviating the worst deprivations of poverty in the developing world.
AI is coming to sweep employment away from all regions and all economic sectors. This time it is not just blue-collar workers who have something to fear. White-collar workers may be even more vulnerable to replacement by AI’s digital machinery. Entry-level jobs are evaporating around the world.
The last industrial transition is petering out in a crisis of migration and xenophobia that is creating social dislocation around the world. The cheerleaders of the AI revolution are forging ahead with the same moral indifference as the leaders of the last one, and this transition will likely end with even greater communal and social turmoil for the biological machines who thought themselves at the pinnacle of earthly priorities. Is there a global force that can stand in their way?
“What name do you choose?” an American cardinal was asked in Rome last May. “Leo,” he said, signaling his intention to put the resources of the global church against the upheaval that lurks ahead.
Just two days into his new pontificate, Pope Leo offered the church’s “trove of social teaching” as a moral rampart before “another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice and labor.”
The church had been among the institutional actors that agonized over the human impact of globalization, and now it is the church that may help hold back the worst effects of the coming AI revolution. It will surely have its work cut out for it.
This article also appears in the September 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 9, page 42). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash/Sufyan
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