« Artificial Intelligence & Transformations of Work »

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to a system which displays goal-oriented problem-solving, situational adaptation, experiential learning, and decision-making with at least a minimum level of autonomy (European Commission, 2018; Liao, 2020). These characteristics of so-called intelligent behavior have previously been associated with the cognitive functions of living beings but are now generated through machine learning. Today, AI designates a relatively heterogeneous set of objects that are the subjects of as many discourses: scientific discipline, super-intelligence, socio-technical or socio-economic system (Benbouzid et al., 2022).

AI can process, analyze, and classify vast quantities of data more quickly than humans, and excels at finding patterns and making accurate predictions (Autor, 2015; Podolny, 2015). Increasingly, AI also achieves tasks which were previously assumed to require human creativity: producing articles on sports games and weather events, interpreting medical tests, and generating books and images (Miroschnichenko, 2018; Topalovic et al., 2019; Bensinger, 2023). 

AI’s application across different domains leads us to ask: what must be done with AI at work? Its efficiency, reliability, and speed have led to diverging perspectives. Techno-pessimism claims that humans will be replaced, leading to a loss of employment and increasing inequality, while a techno-optimistic position sees the cooperation of AI and humans as emancipative, allowing humans to focus on meaningful, creative tasks (Vicsek, 2021). Regardless of the perspective, AI has implications for the value of work and conditions of work in the future. Through this conference, we aim to provide a social philosophy of AI and work, grounded in an ethical framework. Focusing on three axes of research, we’ll consider the history of the technological replacement debate, the conditions of work with AI, and the transformations of fairness and justice to highlight AI’s specificities. We aim to address developing questions within an emerging literature on AI’s impact on work (Deranty and Corbin, 2022).