When the chief executive of one of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence companies says that his industry must slow down, we should listen.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned that AI capabilities are advancing faster than our ability to understand and control them. His concern — and much of the public debate — centers on the catastrophic possibility that increasingly autonomous systems could escape human control.
But another danger may arrive long before extinction.
The danger is not only that AI may cease to obey us. It is that society may cease to value those whom AI replaces. In a culture that has long tied personal worth to productive work, what happens when millions of people are no longer needed to produce?
To understand that danger, look backward. In medieval Europe, a villein was a peasant bound to the land and obligated to serve a lord. The term began as a social description, but it did not stay that way. Over time, “villein” became “villain” — shifting from villager or peasant to someone uncouth, morally suspect, and finally wicked.
That transformation reflected a durable social logic: if people occupy the bottom of a hierarchy, the hierarchy eventually teaches that they belong there — and that their character explains their position. Economic rank becomes moral judgment.
Then the black death disrupted the structure that sustained those judgments. The plague killed at least one-third of Europe’s population and created a severe labor shortage. Surviving workers could demand higher wages or leave for better opportunities. England’s Statute of Labourers attempted to suppress wages and restrict mobility, but economic reality had changed. Labor was no longer expendable; it was scarce.
The black death did not create markets or mobility; it made them increasingly unavoidable. It weakened a system that had allowed economic hierarchy to masquerade as moral truth.
We are now entering another rupture — one moving in the opposite direction. AI and robotics are transferring human work to machines, not only in factories and warehouses but across occupations once protected by education, judgment, and creativity. The question is no longer whether some jobs will disappear. It is how much human labor may ultimately remain necessary.
In feudalism, the laborer was both necessary and despised. That tension mattered. A ruling class could demean workers, but it could not entirely disregard people upon whom its survival depended.
Automation dissolves that restraint.
A society that depends upon its workers must acknowledge them. A society that no longer depends upon large portions of its population is under no comparable pressure. Once economic dependence disappears, a dangerous progression becomes possible: Not needed becomes not productive. Not productive becomes not valuable. Not valuable becomes not worthy.
We can already hear the language forming: They need to reskill. They are being left behind. They are not contributing. These expressions sound pragmatic, but they can become the modern vocabulary of dismissal — transforming structural upheaval into personal indictment.
This is the inversion of the black death.
The plague reduced labor supply and increased human leverage. Automation reduces labor demand and may reduce perceived human worth.
Amodei argues that AI’s creators owe it to humanity to keep their technology under control. He is right. But that obligation extends beyond preventing machines from destroying humanity. It includes preventing human beings from devaluing one another as machines assume more of what people once did.
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A society that no longer needs everyone’s labor must decide whether it still recognizes everyone’s humanity. We have seen the progression before: from villein, to villain, to obsolete.
The question is whether we recognize it before economic redundancy hardens into moral judgment.
Morgan P. Lorio is a retired orthopedic spine surgeon, healthcare policy author, hospital chaplain, and former president of the International Society for the Advancement of Spine Surgery.