How Alienation in Capitalism is Transformed by AI 2025

How Alienation in Capitalism is Transformed by AI 2025

In a world where artificial intelligence is responsible for decision making, evaluation, assignment, and even supervision, human thought and judgment will be pushed to the outside. While corporate implementation surveys show increased efficiency, there are strong concerns about the impact on worker discretion and welfare. Not only in platform labor, but also in the general corporate sector, algorithmic management may take away creativity and the ability to improvise, and the more AI penetrates into high-risk areas, the more transparency and accountability are required. In Europe, AI laws are in place to prohibit unacceptable uses, such as social scoring, and to institutionally ensure human decision-making authority. Estimates of job loss are varied, but there is growing concern about widening disparities and loss of roles.

Marx spoke of alienation, a state in which one's true self is separated from one's work, in which outcomes, processes, and meaning are removed from oneself; alienation in the AI age not only robs one of mastery, pride, and touch, but also erodes the very foundation of self-understanding through the invisibility of evaluation and purpose. Moreover, the reality that the shadow labor that supports generative AI is underpaid and in opaque conditions demonstrates the unequal distribution of marginalization within society. Internationally, there are warnings that internal tasks will be restructured rather than jobs disappearing in their entirety, and marginalization will be anchored in institutional structures if we fail to participate in the restructuring of the meaning of labor.

The more intelligence escapes outward and decision-making is rendered invisible, the easier it is for people to lose sight of their own existence value. In an age in which the form of control shifts from humans to optimized algorithms, what is justice and who is responsible? If we proceed without reexamining the fundamentals of this question, human beings will be driven into a corner where they will no longer be needed. Facing the transformation of alienation head-on, workers themselves must be involved in the redesign and reclaim their skills and stories. This attempt may be the final stepping stone to sustain the AI era as the age of humans.