AI and the Displacement of Ordinary Occupations: A Normative Analysis of Labour Alienation, Dignity, and Social Justice

Shaoxin Zheng

doi:10.62177/chst.v3i1.1062

Authors

Shaoxin Zheng Guangzhou College of Commerce https://orcid.org/0009-0003-1898-4191

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.62177/chst.v3i1.1062

Keywords:

Artificial Intelligence, Ordinary Occupations, Technological Substitution, Labor Alienation, Social Justice, Philosophical Critique

Abstract

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, a significant trend of substitution has emerged for ordinary occupations characterised by repetitiveness, rule-based tasks, and low-to-medium skill requirements, under existing capital logics and institutional arrangements. Diverging from mainstream narratives that frame this process as a technological inevitability or an efficiency improvement, this study adopts a normative philosophical critique to analyse the deepening of labour alienation, the erosion of labour dignity, and the imbalance of social justice resulting from AI-driven occupational displacement. The article argues that AI substitution is not a neutral technological process but a socio-technical phenomenon embedded within specific industrial structures and power relations. Drawing on Marx’s theory of labour alienation, existentialist philosophy of technology, and the “capabilities approach,” this study critiques technological determinism and the myth of “technological neutrality,” emphasising that the core issue lies not in whether technology replaces humans but in how technology is shaped by social governance and value frameworks. Based on this analysis, the article proposes a normative reconstruction centred on human dignity and social justice, aiming to provide theoretical guidance for technological ethics and institutional responses in the age of AI.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Shaoxin Zheng, Guangzhou College of Commerce

School of Management

References

International Data Corporation. (2023). IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Artificial Intelligence andAutomation 2024 Predictions. IDC FutureScape: Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the IT Industry and the Way Businesses Operate IDC FutureScape: Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the IT Industry and the Way Businesses Operate.

International Data Corporation. (2023). GenAI Solutions Market to Hit $143B in 2027. IDC: GenAI Solutions Market to Hit $143B in 2027 | TV Tech.

McKinsey Global Institute. (2017). Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation. MGI-Jobs-Lost-Jobs-Gained-Executive-summary-December-6-2017.pdf.

Goldman Sachs. (2023). The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth (Briggs/Kodnani). The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth (Briggs/Kodnani).

Habermas, J. (1985). The theory of communicative action: Volume 1: Reason and the rationalization of society (Vol. 1). Beacon press.

Jia, M. (2022). On the problem of labor emancipation in the context of artificial intelligence. Academic Exchange, (05), 18–27.

Xing, B. (2024). Introduction to the critique of artificial intelligence: On subjectivity in the AI era. Hubei Social Sciences, (03), 21–31. https://doi.org/10.13660/j.cnki.42-1112/c.016262

Russell, S., & Norvig, P. (2021). Artificial Intelligence: a modern approach, 4th US ed. aima: сайт. URL: https://aima. cs. berkeley. edu/(дата обращения: 26.02. 2023).

LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. nature, 521(7553), 436-444.

He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., & Sun, J. (2016). Deep residual learning for image recognition. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 770-778).

Devlin, J., Chang, M. W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019, June). Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Proceedings of the 2019 conference of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics: human language technologies, volume 1 (long and short papers) (pp. 4171-4186).

Mnih, V., Kavukcuoglu, K., Silver, D., Rusu, A. A., Veness, J., Bellemare, M. G., ... & Hassabis, D. (2015). Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning. nature, 518(7540), 529-533.

Kong, W., & Tan, T. (2022). The impact of artificial intelligence on employment in China and corresponding countermeasures. Theoretical Exploration, (03), 179–184. https://doi.org/10.16354/j.cnki.23-1013/d.2022.03.022

Zhu, A. (2022). Pathways for labor law development in China in the era of artificial intelligence. Open Journal of Legal Science, 10, 971.

Zhao, H., Wang, L., & Cao, Z. (2023). Occupational substitution effects of artificial intelligence and occupational structure evolution: Micro evidence based on CGSS data. Journal of Hainan University (Humanities and Social Sciences), 41(06), 129–138. https://doi.org/10.15886/j.cnki.hnus.202206.0159

Li, X., Yu, Z., Xia, J., & Tang, S. (2021). Employment effects of artificial intelligence applications in manufacturing enterprises: An empirical test based on 101 listed companies. China Soft Science, (S1), 277–286.

Luo, L., & Chen, M. (2022). Labor structure transformation: AI development process and prospects — A literature review perspective. Social Science Dynamics, (10), 52–61.

Standing, G. (2021). The corruption of capitalism: Why rentiers thrive and work does not pay. Biteback Publishing.

Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. John Wiley & Sons.

Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2018). The race between man and machine: Implications of technology for growth, factor shares, and employment. American economic review, 108(6), 1488-1542.

Arntz, M., Gregory, T., & Zierahn, U. (2016). The risk of automation for jobs in OECD countries: A comparative analysis.

Bessen, J. (2019). Automation and jobs: When technology boosts employment. Economic Policy, 34(100), 589-626.

Brown, T., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J. D., Dhariwal, P., ... & Amodei, D. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in neural information processing systems, 33, 1877-1901.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power, edn. PublicAffairs, New York.

Marx, K. (1844). The economic and philosophical manuscripts.

Crawford, K. (2021). The atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press.

Öztaş, Y. E., & Arda, B. (2025). Re-evaluating creative labor in the age of artificial intelligence: a qualitative case study of creative workers’ perspectives on technological transformation in creative industries. AI & SOCIETY, 40(5), 4119-4130.

Wood, A. J., Graham, M., Lehdonvirta, V., & Hjorth, I. (2019). Good gig, bad gig: autonomy and algorithmic control in the global gig economy. Work, employment and society, 33(1), 56-75.

Rosenblat, A. (2018). Uberland: How algorithms are rewriting the rules of work. Univ of California Press.

Fuchs, C. (2021). Social media: A critical introduction.

Heidegger, M. (1954). The question concerning technology. Technology and values: Essential readings, 99, 113.

Han, B. C. (2015). The burnout society. Stanford University Press.

Fisher, M. (2022). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? John Hunt Publishing.

Heidegger, M. (2025). Discourse on thinking. Hannah Arendt Marginalia - All. 218. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hapl_marginalia_all/218.

Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. Oxford University Press.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating capabilities: The human development approach. Harvard University Press.

Parijs, P.V., & Vanderborght, Y. (2017). Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Harvard University Press.

McKinsey & Company. (2023). The state of automation in 2023: A McKinsey global survey. McKinsey Global Institute. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai-in-2023-generative-ais-breakout-year.

Winner, L. (2021). The whale and the reactor: A search for limits in an age of high technology. University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1986)

Susskind, D. (2021). A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond. Theology and Science, 20, 133 - 134.

Lai, S. S., & Flensburg, S. (2023). Gateways: Comparing Digital Communication Systems in Nordic Welfare States. Nordicom, University of Gothenburg. https://doi.org/10.48335/9789188855848.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power, edn. PublicAffairs, New York.

Bogen, M., & Rieke, A. (2018). Help wanted: An examination of hiring algorithms, equity, and bias. Upturn, December, 7.

Chanda, A.K. (2024). HUMAN JUDGMENT IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR BUSINESS DECISION-MAKING: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY. International Journal of Innovation Management.

Crawford, K. (2021). The atlas of AI: Power, politics, and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence. Yale University Press.

Shestakofsky, B. (2020). Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 49, 294 - 296.

Polynczuk-Alenius, K. (2019). Algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. Information, Communication & Society, 22, 2030 - 2032.

Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology (W. Lovitt, Trans.). In

The question concerning technology and other essays (pp. 3-35). Harper & Row.

(Original work published 1953)

Floridi, L., et al. (2025). Vulnerability as a design ethics for digital humanism. In The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence for the Sustainable Development Goals (pp. 1-15). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-11108-1_40.

Linda Aulbach. (2024). Artificial Intelligence, ethics and empathy: How empathic AI applications impact humanity (pp. 83-98). Open Book Publishers. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0423.05.

Chou, X. (2025). How Aan Artificial Intelligence Achieve Labor Emancipation？ : Taking An Analysis Based on Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Yixin Publisher.

Steinmetz, G. (2009). The New Aesthetic-Political Avant-Garde: Linda Zerilli's Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Sociological Theory, 27, 85 - 89.