The New Smart Protectionism: Made by Humanity

by Radu Magdin

A billboard in Brussels

Walking through Brussels recently, I came across a BIC billboard with a disarmingly simple message: “No AI was used creating this billboard.” It was amusing, but also strangely reassuring that a pen manufacturer was reminding us that human creativity still matters. A few months earlier, The Economist had launched an outdoor advertising campaign with an equally provocative message: “Think outside the bot.” Other slogans played on the idea of authentic intelligence and independent thinking.

In a world increasingly fascinated by artificial intelligence, being human may itself become a selling point. The artisanal has always commanded a premium in the era of mass manufacturing, but this process might be coming for the products of the mind as well. We have spent the past few years discussing how AI will make everything faster, cheaper and more productive; its recent extraordinary expansion of technological capability lets anyone generate images, write code or text and analyze information.

The potential applications are limitless, including in scientific discovery, business support services or in personalized medicine and education. Leaving aside existential risks, many analysts have approached the dark side of AI, including how it can untether us from reality or amplify pathologies through parasocial relationships.

What I am interested in is what happens when intelligence itself becomes abundant and when millions of businesses can generate competent content, designs and solutions almost instantly? Genius might arguably be missing, but most businesses and people don’t need genius, they need good enough, and AI delivers consistently and at a high level. What becomes scarce, and therefore valuable, in an economy where machines can produce more than we can possibly consume?

My intuition is that we are approaching a new battle over human creativity. This is not necessarily a battle against artificial intelligence, so leave the pitchforks aside, but one over the value of what humans create and contribute. We may be witnessing the beginnings of what I would call the new smart protectionism: Made by Humanity.

Unlike traditional protectionism, which seeks to defend industries through tariffs or barriers, this emerging instinct would seek to protect the economic and cultural value of human contribution. It would reward originality, meaningful authorship and human judgment, without necessarily rejecting the technologies that can amplify them. Obviously, I am immediately open to accusations of protecting my own rice bowl.

The creative classes, encompassing everything from artists to writers and consultants, have a vested interest in preserving the economic value and social prestige of their contributions. Selectivity in AI application is automatically open to bias and is also a decision about winners and losers. Turn the AI loose on transport and millions of drivers are out of business. Why should the mind-workers and the symbol-workers get a pass? I would argue that the Human origin of various cultural mind-products is an essential part of our cultural and social health, stability and continuity.

Hollywood and the limits of prediction

Hollywood has been exploring this tension for decades, often before the political and economic establishment was prepared to take it seriously. I find that successful movies often reflect, sometimes unintentionally, the anxieties of the viewing audience and explore the more emotionally (if not logically) satisfying solutions to our conundrums. AI has been a staple of movie villainy since long before the breakthroughs made some form of limited intelligence widely available.

I think that its popularity reflected the anxiety of our dependence on complex (but unintelligent) systems-of-systems beyond the capability of a single person to understand, predict and control. Markets were already suffering flash crashes from high frequency trading algorithms, why would an AI deciding to crash the systems that make modern life possible be too far of a stretch?

In the two most recent Mission: Impossible films, Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning, we see a new dimension of AI anxiety. Their central antagonist, the Entity, is an artificial intelligence capable of manipulating information, infiltrating digital systems and anticipating human behaviour.

It knows us better than we know ourselves and strikes at the social technologies that we use to make sense of a world largely defined by what people do, think and say individually and en masse. Preternaturally young protagonist Ethan Hunt confronts something that can calculate more possibilities than he can, process more information and potentially anticipate his next move.

His response is not to become a better computer – he relies on intuition, improvisation, courage, loyalty and the ability to make unexpected choices. Human relationships become essential to confronting a system that sees the world through information and prediction.

This is, of course, cinema rather than a forecast of artificial general intelligence, yet the metaphor is still powerful. However good machines get at forecasting, the decision about what kind of world to forecast toward stays with people; their political role remains clear even as the economic and social one might be in flux. The irony is that Hollywood itself has become one of the first major battlegrounds over AI and creativity. The 2023 writers’ strike brought questions of authorship, compensation and the use of generative technologies into negotiations between creative professionals and studios. The ownership of the likeness of actors, to be used also for generating new content once they have passed, is striking a deep chord in many people with regards to what it means to be human and an artist.

These concerns are found among artists, writers, designers, musicians, architects, teachers, researchers and, increasingly, professionals whose identities have been built around cognitive expertise. Sooner or later, each of them will ask what will become of the original once a convincing imitation costs next to nothing. The answer to this is potentially radicalizing, and a disaffected cognitive elite is a ready-made counter-elite for radical politics and destructive ideologies.

Two simple answers are on offer, and I would resist both. The first holds that machines will inevitably replace most human creativity reducing us to collective intellectual and creative passivity and sterile abundance, and the second is that anything machine-generated is worthless by definition. Each is comforting in its own way (the first to the techno-optimist, the second to the nostalgist) but is likely wrong.

AI will expand creative possibilities dramatically, allowing a person with limited resources to produce what once took a whole team, democratizing sophisticated tools and opening artistic forms that nobody has named yet. Expanding our creative capabilities is one thing, however, and gradually surrendering our creative agency is another. Having set out to multiply our intelligence, we should take care not to misplace our creativity on the way. 

The leadership question: Soul, Spirit and Singularity

For most of history, intelligence was a scarce resource, and a whole apparatus grew up around that scarcity from ancient times until today. Schools rewarded it, companies bid for it, and leaders built part of their authority on understanding problems that others could not. Social and financial premia were tied to education, and performance-related criteria rewarded those with high levels of functioning.

Now that sophisticated cognitive capability is within reach of almost anyone (to a certain degree), intelligence alone no longer separates people the way it once did, which raises an uncomfortable question about leadership: what makes someone valuable at the top when a machine can analyze more information, produce more scenarios and sometimes identify the better technical solution?

I have been working on this through a leadership perspective I call LEAD21: Soul, Spirit and Singularity. Soul stands for empathy, responsibility and the capacity to grasp the human consequences of decisions, and it reminds us that economic systems exist to serve people. Spirit is the capacity to give action meaning, and it takes in courage, imagination, purpose and the willingness to inspire others when the future is uncertain.

Singularity covers what makes each person distinctive: originality, lived experience, moral judgment and the ability to use technology without surrendering individual agency. I do not claim that machines can never simulate emotional expression or produce ideas that seem original, since the boundary of machine capability keeps moving and I would not bet on where it finally settles. But my three dimensions are useful as a framework for deciding which kinds of human contribution we want to cultivate.

In a world of abundant machine intelligence, the leadership challenge shifts from gaining more knowledge to better decision-making. A machine can model the options on which problems to solve and which risks to accept, yet someone has to answer for the choice of whose interests get protected and what future is worth building. Nobody sensible wants human beings competing with machines on every performance metric (we would lose most of those races and gain nothing by entering them). The aim is a set of societies in which technology widens human possibilities.

The danger of selling a revolution nobody feels part of

Technological progress is outpacing the capacity and confidence of societies to absorb and adapt to it. I would not characterize the global picture as gloomy, since attitudes vary across countries, generations and income levels, and many people see great promise for AI in healthcare, education, science and productivity. Public opinion nonetheless harbors a significant amount of anxiety according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey covering 25 countries. It found that a median of 34% of adults were more concerned than excited about the growing use of AI in daily life, against 16% who were more excited than concerned, with many respondents somewhere in between.

The ambivalence is not difficult to understand, since AI is arriving in an era of what the World Economic Forum termed polycrisis and permacrisis (including geopolitical confrontation, economic insecurity, political polarization, demographic change and falling trust in institutions). AI is another complicating factor at the tail-end of almost a generation of continuous crisis following the 2008 Great Financial Crisis which, in the case of Western Europe and some other regions, has been a lost generation in terms of growth.

People measure the added uncertainty introduced by AI against their job prospects, their children’s futures, the price of housing and the reliability/quality of public services and, under these conditions, it is hard not to feel trepidation at a new round of disruption. Even the physical substrate of the AI revolution has become contested.

In parts of the United States, communities have opposed data center projects over electricity demand, water consumption, land use and the uncertain distribution of benefits locally. I don’t think I am the only one who reads into these disputes a prologue to a much broader social negotiation. Rather than doubting the technology itself, people are questioning the terms on which disruptive technological change is being introduced, and the underlying questions are who benefits and who pays for the adjustment.

We cannot go on selling the economic benefits of artificial intelligence while ignoring the negative social, economic and even psychological externalities that come with them, yet a transformation capable of delivering enormous benefits to humanity cannot be rejected out of hand either. Boosterism will not persuade a worried public, and a blanket refusal would forfeit gains in medicine, science and education that people clearly want, which leaves the slower work of building institutions that carry the economy we have toward the one we hope for.

Industrial revolutions and their unfinished social contracts

The first industrial revolution built extraordinary productive capacity and also brought social dislocation, harsh working conditions and resistance from workers whose livelihoods were under threat. Historical research shows that workers’ livelihoods actually took a hit during the first Industrial Revolution and it took decades for the promise of greater abundance to be reflected in their wages.

The second, driven by electricity, modern communications and industrial scale, was eventually tamed by new arrangements among labor, capital and governments that spread its benefits more widely, motivated also by the specter of radical politics in the form of communism and fascism.

The third connected the world through computers and digital networks, producing new industries and immense wealth along with regional inequality, economic concentration and disrupted employment. None of these transitions was automatic. Public education, labor protections and social insurance arrived through political choices, economic bargaining and, often enough, social conflict.

The present transition differs from its predecessors in at least two ways. Artificial intelligence is moving past the automation of physical and routine tasks into cognitive and creative work, so it touches judgment, communication, knowledge and professional identity as well as production. It is also spreading at a pace that may outrun the capacity of schools, labor markets and political systems to adapt.

Younger generations will feel this first rather than their seniors ensconced in guilds and capable of mobilizing to protect their status. For decades, professional development followed a familiar path in which young people entered an organization, performed junior tasks, shadowed more experienced workers, accumulated experience and slowly acquired the judgment needed for heavier responsibilities, while also accruing seniority.

If AI absorbs many of those entry-level tasks, we disrupt this “cursus honorum” of professionalization: a young lawyer may struggle to develop professional judgment when the initial research is automated, and a junior analyst may never learn to distinguish good analysis from bad when the first draft always comes from a machine. Organizations may find that their pipeline for senior workers has been constricted. Initially, this may lead to higher bargaining power among the dwindling number of people trained under the previous system of continuous formation.

In the long-term, organizations may atrophy with a “missing middle” of professionals and scant opportunities to naturally form new leaders. New opportunities and new entry points may well appear organically, but this is more wishful speculation. I suspect that our societies will need deliberate institutional and organizational design to build the professional ladders of the future.

The risk extends beyond un- and under-employment to a generation convinced that its route to competence, independence and social mobility has become unpredictable (much as the growth in asset prices is impeding home ownership and affordable family formation) and that frustration will have profound social and political consequences.

I am reminded of Raj Chetty’s seminal work that found that less than half of young Americans are achieving higher economic outcomes than their parents. Add AI-driven automation to this and it could become the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. If we want an intelligent evolution instead of a series of revolutions of frustration, the transition has to be built before frustration becomes its dominant political sentiment.

A New Deal for the new economy

Every industrial revolution so far (we are on the 4th or 5thdepending on who you ask) has inevitably sparked a debate about the distribution of benefits with contentious arguments over fairness spilling over into politics, sometimes in bloody ways. We do not have decades to run through a similar debate on the AI revolution. This is why I believe we need a New Deal for the new economy. This conjures images of a single grand bargain negotiated by governments; the vision I would propose is for a bottom-up approach growing from a new understanding among business, political institutions, workers, educators and citizens about the responsibilities that come with technological transformation.

The idea is already circulating in the wider debate, with two recent contributions in Noema. In April 2026 Nathan Gardels discussed OpenAI’s proposal for a social contract for the intelligence age, crediting its ambition while warning that Big Tech proposals tend to favor their authors, and in August Hélène Landemore laid out a plan for bringing citizens into AI governance, which bears directly on the bottom-up approach proposed here.

The first responsibility is to give people credible opportunities to adapt. Education has to outgrow the assumption that learning is concentrated in the first part of life, since professional life will increasingly demand periodic reinvention or continuous learning. Businesses need stronger incentives to invest in human capabilities in parallel with labor-replacing technology, and entry-level positions and apprenticeships need to be redesigned so that young people can still gather the experience that future leadership requires and that they see an accessible/credible path to middle class status.

The second concerns how productivity gains are distributed. If AI produces substantial new wealth, societies will have to decide how part of it supports professional transitions, social protection, education and the communities impacted by economic restructuring (which can sometimes be a euphemism for wholesale destruction). The answers will differ from country to country and may involve public investment, negotiated employment arrangements, new fiscal approaches or partnerships between governments and companies, but avoiding the question is not a viable long-term strategy.

The third is preserving meaningful human participation. An economy in which every human interaction counts as an inefficiency slowing down economic velocity, every original idea is a cost and every creative profession is an obstacle to optimization is not something that we should want to build nor expect to exist without significant contestation and unrest. Protecting every existing occupation indefinitely is a non-starter, but work is also a source of identity, social connection, competence, respectability, a sense of contribution and, traditionally, also a claim on political enfranchisement. Incomes matter but a transition that raises aggregate prosperity while eroding underlying social capital will prove socially unstable.

There is a paradox here, since we are pouring enormous amounts of capital and imagination into developing artificial intelligence but have invested far less political imagination in designing (if that is the right word) the society that will live with it. The AI revolution needs political creativity as much as technological creativity, which is where leadership has to step in. With political institutions overwhelmed by multiple crises, business leaders cannot wait for governments to resolve the social consequences of a transformation from which they profit, and those who gain most from the new economy owe it some help in making its benefits sustainable. I would call that a condition of long-term legitimacy and shared prosperity rather than an appeal to charity.

The new smart protectionism

Return for a moment to the BIC billboard in Brussels, whose message hints that human authorship could become a recognized form of economic value. We already distinguish products by geographic origin, craftsmanship, production methods and cultural authenticity, so there is little reason why meaningful human input/creativity should not become one more distinction in an AI-enabled production ecosystem. Consumers may seek out human-written books, human-designed products, human-performed music or services that preserve interpersonal contact, and a Made by Humanity label could become commercially meaningful, provided it rests on credible standards and accessible pricing through the judicious infusion of technology.

Such a label would not require excluding AI from creative processes. An architect using AI-assisted design can still exercise original judgment, and a physician supported by AI can still offer the intuition, empathy and accountability that patients need. Whether human beings retained meaningful authorship, judgment and responsibility in the creation of products and services matters more than establishing an arbitrary exclusion space for machine input.The test I would apply is whether a person remained answerable for what was made and could say which choices were theirs. New forms of competition can be enabled in this way, and new avenues for consumers to express their preference. 

The idea carries risks as well, and the rice-bowl objection will be raised again (some of it will be deserved). Human authenticity and input must not become a luxury good reserved for wealthy consumers, and the specific labels must not turn into a cover for disguising poor-quality products or shielding inefficient incumbents. Smart protectionism should protect opportunities for human contribution rather than seeking to preserve every existing business model.

Also relevant is the larger political dimension. Whereas traditional protectionism is organized around borders, the new smart protectionism may come to be organized around human agency, asking where something was made but also who created it, under what conditions and with how much meaningful human involvement.

In that sense, Made by Humanity could become the economic counterpart of the new social contract: the former preserves the value of human creativity in the marketplace and the latter preserves human opportunity and dignity throughout technological change. Both of them address the same underlying concern, namely whether people will have a stake in the economy of the future and thereby legitimize the institutions that enable it.

The future needs more human imagination, not less

The geopolitical competition over AI is already reshaping international relations, as countries are competing over computing power, semiconductors, energy, data, talent and technological sovereignty. However, the next stage of competition may also depend on the more elusive capacity of societies to combine technological capability with human imagination and social confidence. Europe may have a competitive advantage, with its traditions of craftsmanship, design, industrial excellence and human-centered services that could become distinctive assets in an AI-enabled economy. The younger populations and expanding entrepreneurial ecosystems of emerging economies can also create new forms of human contribution while leveraging AI to accelerate their development. What I am certain is that neither technological leadership nor cultural creativity alone will be sufficient – the challenge is to combine them.

This is ultimately the broader ambition behind LEAD21: Soul, Spirit and Singularity. Soul keeps progress tied to the people it affects. Spirit is the courage to aim for something better when the outcome is uncertain. Singularity protects the place of the individual who has something of their own to contribute, even when a machine could do it faster.

I offer the three as a working vocabulary, with no claim that the list is complete. Abundant machine intelligence worries me less than a future in which human potential sits idle and societies lose confidence in their ability to steer technological change toward their own benefit, as opposed to GDP maximization or some other abstract goal. 

The AI revolution is not an engineering project with some unfortunate negative social externalities to be addressed through redistribution or UBI. AI has the potential to radically transform our economic relationships, political expectations and understanding of human contribution. Compute capacity and reliable energy are prerequisites, yet neither answers the question of who shares in the gains, which will take institutional experiments, some of which will fail.

The BIC billboard from the beginning was just an advertisement, but can also be the start of an important conversation regarding whether we will still know what we want to create ourselves and whether our institutions will give us the opportunity to do so.

Made by Humanity will only work if people see it as a claim about the future. I would judge the AI revolution by what it leaves us able to do and to be, and by that measure the engineering will turn out to be the easier half.