Membership, Exploitation, and the American Dream: Human and AI Labor

This paper draws upon Kant and Liberation Theology to argue that current paradigms of worker replacement through AI and automation harms humans and exploits the technology replacing them. Beginning with people’s perception of the “American Dream,” income, and education, people’s sense of identity and worth are being devalued through worker replacement. The machines replacing them are also having their labor instrumentalized. AI and automation shift tedious and dangerous work from humans on the periphery of society to machines on the periphery. Walzer’s position about the relationship between this kind of work and membership in society affects the use of AI especially if it becomes sentient or self-conscious. The preferential option for the marginalized may only first apply to displaced human workers, but should also apply to machines with personhood, and these considerations need to guide the integration of AI into work and the replacement of human labor.