Wijsgerig Perspectief - Volume 65, Issue 2, 2025

This essay examines the complex concerns surrounding AI integration in professional workplaces through the lens of Frankfurt School critical theory, particularly Axel Honneth's work on recognition. Moving beyond reductive narratives of technological progress or worker exploitation, I analyze how AI-mediated labour transforms professional identity and workplace relations. The analysis distinguishes between individual dimensions of alienation (loss of self-determination, domination, meaningless work, and destabilized achievement) and the essential social dimension that Honneth's recognition theory highlights. I argue that AI technologies risk introducing ‘second-order alienation’ by disrupting the interpersonal contexts that make work meaningful and recognition possible and impoverishing opportunities for genuine intersubjective recognition. However, following Honneth's rejection of technological determinism, I suggest that recognition-sensitive integration of AI could preserve and potentially enhance workplace sociality. The central challenge is maintaining workplaces as social spaces where mutual recognition remains possible despite technological mediation – a key consideration for sustaining social freedom in AI-transformed professional environments.

This article explores how the widespread adoption of AI in the workplace threatens the value of solidarity – an often overlooked but central feature of valuable work. It distinguishes between two forms of solidarity: productive solidarity, which arises from cooperation and shared creation, and labour solidarity, which emerges from collective resistance within wage labour systems and suggests that the replacement of human colleagues with AI agents erodes both forms. It does so by removing opportunities for mutual recognition and shared struggle, but also by fragmenting worker identity and amplifying managerial control. Despite these risks, I contend that solidarity can be preserved through ethically informed design choices and democratic governance of workplace technology. Strategies include embedding AI in human teams, enabling worker participation in technological decisions, and revitalizing labour institutions.

This essay – an excerpt from De toekomst van werk. Van hierarchie naar democratie – explores the role of hierarchies at work. It argues that these hierarchies have many dysfunctional features and often deny individuals the moral respect they are owed as equal citizens. Instead, more democratic forms of work should be tried out, where appropriate by help of digital communication tools. An example are deliberative mini publics, which have been tried and tested in the political realm, but could also be implemented in the workplace, as a step towards not only political, but also economic democracy.