AI and the Displacement of Ordinary Occupations: A Normative Analysis of Labour Alienation, Dignity, and Social Justice

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, a significant trend of substitution has emerged for ordinary occupations characterised by repetitiveness, rule-based tasks, and low-to-medium skill requirements, under existing capital logics and institutional arrangements. Diverging from mainstream narratives that frame this process as a technological inevitability or an efficiency improvement, this study adopts a normative philosophical critique to analyse the deepening of labour alienation, the erosion of labour dignity, and the imbalance of social justice resulting from AI-driven occupational displacement. The article argues that AI substitution is not a neutral technological process but a socio-technical phenomenon embedded within specific industrial structures and power relations. Drawing on Marx’s theory of labour alienation, existentialist philosophy of technology, and the “capabilities approach,” this study critiques technological determinism and the myth of “technological neutrality,” emphasising that the core issue lies not in whether technology replaces humans but in how technology is shaped by social governance and value frameworks. Based on this analysis, the article proposes a normative reconstruction centred on human dignity and social justice, aiming to provide theoretical guidance for technological ethics and institutional responses in the age of AI.