Someone asked me if I thought people moving from business into the Arts was in part a response to the proliferation of AI, adding that he wondered whether that was linked to universities looking to more actively teach Creativity and Critical Thinking to support the appropriate management and use of AI. This was before Pope Leo XIV issued Magnifica Humanitas. On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. At that the time I made the following response as a tentative expression on a complex topic.

Speaking entirely personally, I don’t think it’s a response to AI proliferation or, if it is, only recently and in a minor way. I say this because, as a phenomenon, the move has roots that pre-date the rise of AI by three, maybe four, decades. Rather than AI, I’d hazard a guess that the nameable drivers of that exodus are awareness of, and a desire to respond practically to, the deepening socio-environmental crisis, a therapeutic need after a punishing job and, intellectually, an awareness of the rise of eco-feminism and so of relational thinking.

There are two reasons, in my view, why all this hasn’t been taken up in the media in anything like the way AI has. The first, obviously, is gender-related – almost all the people I know, or know of, who’ve made this cross-over are women. (I work with some eco-arts projects that are almost entirely made up of women – I’m invited in and stay because deep mapping encourages ecological, relational thinking). The other, related, reason is the economic and political investment in maintaining the status quo and the relationship between power and Elon Musk’s world of boys with toys like weaponised drones.

I think another factor in this is the crisis in our education system, one that’s particularly obvious in university science teaching. I’ve been working for a while as an “informed” outsider involved in my daughter’s care with an interdisciplinary group of medical science people at Edinburgh University. They’re aiming to improve the research culture for interdisciplinary data scientists, trying to ensure that multiple voices – including those of patients and carers – are properly heard when addressing the growing number of wicked” problems at the intersection of health, the environment, etc, and to devise ways to foster a more inclusive, collaborative environment. The very real problems they’re trying to address have regularly been carried by past science graduates into business, the NHS and the “care” industries.

It’s become clear, at least to me, that the fundamental issue is not, as a lot of people would like to believe, that science and industry need more “imaginative”, lateral-thinking, people. It’s that they need what our education system fails to teach – the humility and open-mindedness to really listen to other people with views that differ from our own, to find common ground, and so ways to address what’s required. It may be true, as Sarah Thornton has argued, that “top” artists are seen s ‘models of unrivalled creativity’ due to ‘their ability to make markets for their work and ideas’, to ‘inspire entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders of all kinds; … professionals increasingly positioned by the wider world as ultimate individuals with enviable freedoms’, but all that’s predicated on the same old assumptions that have got us mired in our current socio-environmental mess.

A core element in eco-feminist thinking, and so at least somewhere in the peripheral vision of enquiring women in HE, is the rise of relationally and the resulting challenge to the whole mesh of specialist, discipline-based assumptions on which the hierarchy of authority in universities, the sciences, and to a large extent in industry, is still based. So, I’d guess that the move out of business into the arts, particularly by women with the range of skills that allows them to work productively there and make some kind of living, is a response to an interweaving of these issues.

I should say that I know very little about the rise, or the complexities, of AI, nor about how universities are responding to these. I’m also an agnostic. However, because I felt that my answer above was given too hastily and is perhaps too bound up in certain of my current preoccupations, I read Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter, which is not simply addressed to Catholics, but also to ‘men and women of goodwill’.

I find that I share many of Pope Leo’s views and aspirations, although inevitably perhaps not all. What most impresses me is that the letter demonstrates an understanding of our situation in the face of AI that is profoundly relational, placing AI perceptively in the wider context of our eco-social situation. So, what follows below is my revised response to the question of why some people are moving from the business world into the Arts, drawing on Pope Leo’s insights.  

The letter clearly identifies the current lack of any adequate ethical scrutiny of the world’s dominant economies and criticises the ‘technocratic paradigm’ that reduces ‘everything to an object to be dominated’, resulting in very real threats to the dignity of human labour by a mentality that’s indifferent to ‘the pursuit of the common good’ and blind to the fact that individuals ‘learn to recognize that they themselves are interconnected and jointly responsible for the res publica’. He insists that everyone has an inherent right to benefit from the natural world that sustains us and is openly critical of the status quo allowing its benefits to ‘accrue solely to a select few’, adding that this ‘applies not only to material goods, but also to immaterial and cultural goods’. It insists that the principle of shared access should apply to: ‘new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data’. That the benefits of these are: ‘concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access … widens ‘the gap between the included and the excluded, between those who can participate in the digital revolution and those who remain on the margins’. 

The letter notes that AI ‘is now embedded in decision-making processes across many sectors and at multiple levels: in communication, management and control’, and adds that while certain benefits follow for this, the current rapid and uncritical adoption of AI exposes us to many risks, not least environmentally. It points out that: ‘Current AI systems require enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions, and place heavy demands on natural resources. As their complexity increases, especially in the case of large language models, the need for computing power and storage capacity grows too, which requires an extensive network of machines, cables, data centers and energy-intensive infrastructure. For this reason, it is essential to develop more sustainable technological solutions that reduce environmental impact and help protect our common home’. 

Thinking more broadly about the context in which AI is being developed he is emphatic that a civilization’s quality ‘is measured … by the care it is able to offer, by its ability to recognize the other as a face not merely as a function’. Wishing ‘neither to demonize nor idolize technological tools’, he stresses that we should ‘utilize them on the basis of a fundamental principle, namely that truth is a common good and not the property of those with power or influence’. He is equally concerned with the importance of work as an expression and enhancement of ‘the dignity of our lives… a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment’; noting that AI is transforming the organization of markets and that the resulting competitiveness ‘is rarely concerned with social sustainability’. He asks that ‘political leaders, labor organizations, the business world and the scientific community’ rapidly develop ‘adequate shared regulations and protections’, not least ‘at the international level’. It also argues that AI needs to be understood in relation to the need: ‘to move beyond the current metrics of development’ since these ‘almost systematically neglect aspects essential to the overall wellbeing of people and the environment’. To rectify this, it proposes: ‘the introduction of new parameters’ to ‘allow for a comprehensive and timely assessment of how legislative and regulatory decisions impact the dignity of work, shared prosperity, inequality reduction and environmental protection’. 

Given the letter’s perceptive and inclusive understanding of the broader socio-environmental context within which AI is playing an increasingly important role, I would now suggest that, in addition to my original response, reasons for people leaving business for the arts may relate to finding themselves increasingly at odds with the values of dominant economic paradigm. Alternatively, it may be because they believe the arts offer forms of work more compatible with a sense of human dignity and value. Whatever the case, to focus on the problematic aspects of AI, without seeing it in the wider context Pope Leo identifies, is to blind ourselves to the nature of the real issues facing us.