Latest news with #humanDignity
Forbes
31-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Soul Layer: AI With A Heartbeat
Shekar Natarajan is the founder and CEO of In boardrooms and technology labs around the world, a familiar question echoes: How can AI help us move faster, do more and spend less? But there's a deeper, more urgent question that almost no one asks: How will AI help us become better? In the first article in this two-part series, I outlined a framework for what I call 'Angellic Intelligence,' a design philosophy that treats dignity as infrastructure, not an afterthought. As we engineer for efficiency, we must also embed compassion—because this balance will define the kind of future we build. The world is approaching a fork in the road: will AI serve human dignity, or will it aim to outsmart and replace humans, treating them as flaws in the system? Intent Before Intelligence I believe AI should focus on solving the core human challenges—restoring dignity, expanding access, and enhancing agency—while ensuring rational usage of resources. I didn't have to look far to learn this. My mother's unwavering will, my father's hands, and the hearts of those who work tirelessly to keep global supply chains moving taught me everything. Intent is the seed out of which every system grows. When you build AI with an intent to optimize, you get exactly what you asked for: speed, throughput and efficiency. But when intent ignores human values, those very optimizations will only germinate in ways that ignore humanity. Say, for example, you go into a shop to buy an ice cream cone. You see colorful bins of delicious flavors. Your decision on what scoop you want on your cone isn't based on statistical analyses or probabilities; it's based on the thing that makes your mouth water, the flavor that reminds you of childhood or pure, unbridled spontaneity. Our humanity is injected in everything we do, and we need to be intentional about not losing it in the exchange for efficiency. As a leader in supply chain and logistics, I've seen this firsthand. optimization algorithms penalize delivery drivers for taking extra minutes to help an elderly customer. In healthcare, AI tools weigh statistical outcomes without pausing to ask whether the patient's life fits into any model at all. Traditional AI asks: What works? Angelic Intelligence asks: What works while keeping humanity at the center? The Moral Architecture: An Angel In Your Pocket In the first part of this series, I introduced the idea of a Moral Cortex Layer, a kind of programmable conscience that forces AI to pause when decisions have moral consequences. But Angelic Intelligence takes this idea further. It includes what I call digital angels: modular ethical agents embedded in the system itself. Think of it as having an angel in your pocket. • Fairness Angel monitors for bias and discrimination. • Compassion Angel elevates human vulnerability signals. • Transparency Angel ensures decisions are explainable. • Wisdom Angel considers long-term consequences. • Courage Angel protects moral dissent. These are not metaphors. They are practical software components that translate values into real-time behavior. Imagine a credit approval algorithm that doesn't just spit out a risk score but also surfaces a transparency report explaining why the decision was made. Or a logistics AI that stops to ask whether bypassing a single rural clinic in a disaster is truly acceptable, even if it makes the numbers look better. Metrics With A Soul For decades, performance metrics have been a numbers game: how fast, how cheap, how accurate. But if all we measure is throughput, all we get is throughput. Angelic Intelligence proposes a new set of success indicators: • Dignity Preservation: Did the system leave the person feeling respected? • Ethical Override Rate: How often did human judgment improve the outcome? • Moral Memory: Does the AI learn from exceptions, not just patterns? • Transparency Score: Can the system explain itself to a layperson? • Empathy Amplification: Did the system respond to care signals? These metrics aren't soft. They are the foundations of trust in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms. The Leadership Shift: From Optimization To Orchestration Angelic Intelligence is more than just a technical transformation; it's potentially the greatest leadership challenge of our time. The old mindset: Efficiency above all. The new mindset: Efficiency balanced with conscience. Leaders will need to adopt what I call generational thinking—choosing to build systems we can explain not only to regulators, but to our children and grandchildren. This mindset requires courage. Courage to empower employees to challenge AI outputs. Courage to slow down when the moral stakes are high. Courage to say: We will not sacrifice dignity to hit a quarterly target. An Implementation Blueprint Making this real is a structured journey. I recommend three phases: • Map where AI decisions impact people's lives. • Identify bias, opacity and trust erosion points. • Gather stories of frontline human discretion. • Embed digital angels into the most sensitive systems. • Implement 'pause protocols' that make way for human intervention. • Train AI to flag and escalate moral edge cases. • Teach teams that ethical overrides are wins, not failures. • Recognize and celebrate acts of compassion and courage. • Align incentives to reward trust-building behaviors. The Spiritual Undertone For me, this work is more than a strategy or a business plan. It is a conviction that systems should help good people thrive. We live in a world that too often punishes generosity and celebrates efficiency for its own sake. But I believe technology can do better. It can remind us that our irrational, inconvenient humanity is not a bug in the system—it is the reason the system exists at all. AI will reshape the world. That part isn't optional. But whether it reshapes us into something colder and faster or something wiser and kinder is still a choice we get to make. I'd rather build slower systems that honor our values than faster ones that erase them. Because in the end, the most powerful intelligence won't be the one that outperforms us. It will be the one that remembers why we matter in the first place. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
The Guardian
22-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Look at Labour's cruel attitude towards disability benefit, then tell me Keir Starmer cares about 'human dignity'
Earlier this month, the New Statesman published a long and fascinating article by its newly installed editor, Tom McTague, about the prime minister. Much of it was an account of a dogged hunt for something that never really materialised: some idea of what Keir Starmer believes in. The closest McTague got was an answer to a question about ideals Starmer thinks of as sacrosanct. 'Human dignity,' he said. 'The dignity of the individual. And the respect that goes with it.' Successful politicians are often distinguished by their ability to hold completely contradictory beliefs, and Starmer is clearly no exception. After months of outrage and protest – and whispers about ministerial resignations, given more credence by the return to the backbenches of the Labour whip Vicky Foxcroft – he and his government are seemingly more committed than ever to reforms to disability and sickness benefits that will soon come to a vote in the House of Commons. The people these changes will tip into an everyday nightmare are already terrified. Quite where a belief in human dignity fits into all this is a question that answers itself. A huge part of the government's plans centres on the tightening of eligibility for the part of personal independence payments (or Pip) known as the daily living component. Assessments are based on a cumulative score, which adds together ratings for 'descriptors' of living activities based on a scale from zero to eight. They include such bald representations of abilities as 'can prepare and cook a simple meal' and 'needs physical help to be able to manage toilet needs'. In the new system, people will have to score at least one rating of four to qualify for the daily living component, which will rule out thousands who experience complicated but very real issues – autism and learning disabilities, for example, tend to be manifested in lots of twos and threes – and threaten to tip their lives into financial freefall. A summary from Citizens Advice speaks volumes: 'Someone who needs assistance to cut up food, wash their hair and body below the waist, use the toilet and dress/undress their lower body wouldn't receive Pip under the new rules.' These changes are grim enough, but there are more: chiefly, the hacking back of the so-called health element of universal credit. The Pip reforms will have knock-on effects for people's eligibility for this benefit: many who are refused one are likely to be denied the other. The rate for new claimants whose applications are granted will be cut from £97 a week to £50, and then frozen for four years. The entitlement age is also being raised, from 18 to 22. And so, as the government insists that 'those who can work should work', this cruelty charter goes on. Reduced Pip entitlements look set to affect whether lots of people's family members are entitled to carer's allowance, which is now £83.30 a week. After rumblings about partial retreats, the only clear change to what was originally floated is an increase in the transition period from people forced off Pip from four to 13 weeks. The arrival point, needless to say, will remain the same: huge losses of income for hundreds of thousands of households – some of whom, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, will be as much as £12,000 a year worse off. Amid predictions of a big parliamentary revolt and wild speculation that the vote could even be pulled, it is worth thinking about how Labour's collective belief in the dignity of labour regularly curdles into two toxic ways of thinking. One is a belief that paid employment is the only reliable gauge of people's esteem; the other is a queasiness about disability that sometimes lurks just below the surface. There is also an apparently desperate need to counter any suggestion that Labour ministers are liberal fainthearts. In March, the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, offered a curt explanation of why the government was set on its plan: 'This is the Labour party. The clue is in the name. We believe in work.' Such banal obstinacy gets in the way of any deep understanding of the issues swirling around this story. Since the pandemic, the number of Pip awards has more than doubled. Much of this is to do with an epidemic of anxiety and depression, not least among the young. That shines light on something politicians rarely talk about, which also includes the kind of long-term health conditions that blur into disability: the fact that millions of people were damaged by both Covid-19 and the lockdowns it triggered. Research by the New Economics Foundation also suggests that although many disabled people usually claim no benefits at all, the cost of living crisis pushed them into applying for Pip, and therefore shoved up the benefits bill. These, needless to say, are all complex stories that demand careful answers; what the government is proposing, by contrast, amounts to the insane idea that you can immiserate people out of their problems. Meanwhile, a very convenient theory is gaining ground. Over the past six months, we have heard more and more about the alleged modern scourge of 'overdiagnosis'. Words of sympathy and support for such ideas have come from – among others – Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch and the heath secretary, Wes Streeting. And this school of thought now has a set text: The Age of Diagnosis by the consultant neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan, which has received rave reviews, and become one of this year's most fashionable books. It presents as a measured and nuanced exploration of everything from Lyme disease to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but it can easily be read as an elegant justification for taking some people's claims of disability and illness with a pinch of salt. She insists, for example, that 'a psychosomatic explanation for people with long Covid has not featured nearly enough in public discourse'. This point is surrounded by caveats and qualifications, and reminders that illness triggered in the mind can be just as debilitating as ailments with physical causes. But her book makes it far too easy for bad actors to strip those nuances away, and lean into a cruelly dismissive attitude that perfectly suits culture warriors, and politicians who want to hack back public spending. A lot of what she has to say about human psychology, moreover, reflects the misplaced idea that particular conditions sit on a simple continuum that goes from severe to mild, and it might be in everyone's interests to tell those on the 'mild' end that the labels they claim are doing them more harm than good. As O'Sullivan sees it, diagnoses of autism (which she describes as a 'brain disorder') 'might become a self-fulfilling prophecy as some will take the diagnosis to mean they can't do certain things, so won't even try'. There is a strong whiff here of the crass logic the government wants to apply to the benefits system, and the same implied message: buck up, be resilient, get back to work. People are scared. For many, the prospect of disabled people being so impoverished is part of what made last week's vote for assisted dying more than a little unsettling. Changes to special needs education will materialise in the autumn, and there have been whispers and briefings about the restriction of disabled children and young people's most basic legal rights. It all seems to confirm that whatever a progressive approach to disability and human difference looks like, Starmer and his people are speeding off in the opposite direction. The idea that the people at the top believe in 'the dignity of the individual', in other words, is looking more threadbare by the day. John Harris is a Guardian columnist
The Guardian
18-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Pope Leo appeals for peace, says 'we must not get used to war'
During his weekly audience, Pope Leo appealed for peace, saying the ''fascination of powerful and sophisticated weaponry'' must be rejected. The pontiff said that the use of ''scientific weapons'' in modern warfare risks producing more atrocious barbarities than in the past. He added: ''In the name of human dignity and international law, I repeat to those responsible what Pope Francis used to say: war is always a defeat''
TechCrunch
18-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Pope Leo makes AI's threat to humanity a signature issue
In Brief Pope Leo XIV is making the threat of AI to humanity a key issue of his legacy, challenging the technology industry that has spent years courting the Vatican. The new American pope's namesake, Leo XIII, stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, a period from the late 1870s to the late 1890s of swift economic change and extreme wealth inequality led by corrupt industrial robber barons. Speaking to a hall of cardinals last month, the pope said he would rely on 2,000 years of church social teaching to 'respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice, and labor,' reports The Wall Street Journal. In attempts to shape Rome's dialogue on AI and, by association, influence governments and policymakers, leaders of Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and other tech giants have flown to the Vatican to preach the good word of emerging technologies. The Vatican has pushed for a binding international treaty on AI, something most tech CEOs would say threatens to stifle innovation.
Wall Street Journal
04-06-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
Donald Trump Needs the Likes of Leonard Leo
Does Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse have President's Trump ear? It sounded like it when Mr. Trump strangely accused the conservative lawyer of having 'his own separate ambitions' ('Trump vs. His Own Judges,' Review & Outlook, May 31). Mr. Leo's only goal is to defend human dignity, which in America means supporting the structural limitations on government power built into the Constitution. You don't have to be Leonard's friend to understand what motivates him. His work at the Federalist Society has been focused on cultivating lawyers and judges who understand that individual freedom depends on the separation of powers and checks and balances. Leonard is also a man of deep Catholic faith, and he values the Constitution precisely because it enables people to enjoy the freedom that God gave humanity.
