Is artificial intelligence a threat to meaningful work and living? Technological unemployment and the existential challenges of a transitional era

Abstract

Is artificial intelligence a threat to meaningful work and living? In both popular and academic press, concerns are often expressed that AI threatens not only people’s livelihoods but also the meaning they derive from their work. A common response to these worries stresses that the goods derived from work can be found elsewhere, often in better activities, suggesting that the proliferation of AI-powered automation does not threaten the meaningfulness of people’s lives. This argument, however, fails to consider the embeddedness and thickness of meaning in human lives. Even if there are rich non-work sources of meaning, this does not entail that there is not a significant and multi-faceted loss of meaning, one that cannot be compensated for or offset elsewhere. I will argue that thick subjectivist theories of meaning in life and meaningful work—those theories that emphasize that meaning-conferring activities are historically formed—enable us to appreciate how some losses cannot be made up, even if there are in principle ample alternative sources of meaning to be found elsewhere.