AI and the New Price of the Human

Automation may reveal the value of care, judgment, and trust — but recognition must not become exclusion.

Two discourses coexist in the face of AI.

One warns that automation may subordinate human dignity to technical logic. The other imagines that AI will make more valuable what it cannot fully replace: presence, care, situated interpretation, and trust.

Both processes seem to be happening at the same time.

The real problem begins when we confuse value with cost.

Just because something becomes valuable again does not mean it should become inaccessible. One of the best cultural consequences of artificial intelligence could be that it forces us to better recognize what cannot be reduced to efficiency: a clinical gaze that does more than detect symptoms, or a class that does more than transmit information.

The risk is that this recognition is immediately translated into price. That the human is not protected for its value, but turned into a scarce, differentiated, and expensive experience. That AI occupies the cheap and universal layer of everyday life, while access to another human being is reserved for those who can afford it.

Imagined with Flow

The dilemma cannot be solved with a moral warning alone.

Between value and price, a third actor is needed: a collective decision capable of preventing everything valuable from being captured by scarcity.

We already know something of this story. The Industrial Revolution also promised efficiency, abundance, and progress. But when the relationship between value and price was left to production alone, the result was not automatically a fairer society. It became necessary to build rights, institutions, regulations, and forms of social protection; to remember that people were not only their labor power.

We can read the recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas as a historical echo of this need. Collective transformations often demand a language capable of ordering their consequences. During the Industrial Revolution, one decisive actor in channeling this collective need was the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum. The third actor found its emergence in the Church. But history does not repeat itself exactly. Does an encyclical still work today?

Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than the institutions capable of discussing its consequences. Companies are defining uses, prices, access, and infrastructures before there is a real public conversation about who should benefit from that efficiency.

And that absence is not neutral. When collective force dissipates, price takes its place.

The challenge is not to stop technology in order to preserve old forms of cost, but to build a collective emergence capable of protecting the value of the human. A language that can give shape to a society where artificial intelligence expands access without turning human presence into a scarce good.

Where the human retains its value without acquiring a price.