Work is the activity of the person, which can express rationality, free will, and creativity — or can instrumentalize the person. Dignified work enables the actualization of the second and third dimension of personhood. Alienated work, by contrast, reduces the person to a function and is a form of practical oblivion of the person. The Personalist Norm demands that work always does justice to personhood. Property and a just wage are questions of justice connected with work.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: economic activity; subordinate concepts: dignified work, alienated work
Workplace
The workplace is the concrete environment in which a person exercises her work. It can foster the actualization of the dimensions of personhood — through safe, dignified conditions — or prevent it — through unsafe, alienating conditions. The workplace is therefore not a merely functional place, but a space to be measured by the standard of the Personalist Norm. A dignified workplace enables the unfolding of rationality, freedom, and interpersonal encounter.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: entity
Employment relationship
The employment relationship is the relation between employer and employee. As an interpersonal relation — not as a purely contractual bond — it is subject to the Personalist Norm: the person may never be treated merely as a means. The employment relationship is the framework within which work takes place and within which the dignity of the persons involved can be preserved or violated. Leadership roles carry a special responsibility, since they enable or prevent the actualization of the dimensions of personhood of the persons entrusted to them.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: interpersonal relation
Digital workplace
A digital workplace is a workplace shaped by digital technologies. It can foster the actualization of the dimensions of personhood (flexibility, access to information) or endanger it (surveillance, alienation, loss of contact). The ambivalence of the digital workplace mirrors the fundamental ambivalence of technology: as such it is neither good nor bad, but its concrete design must be measured against the Personalist Norm. Where the digital workplace leads to employee surveillance or to alienation, it becomes a tool of oblivion of the person.
Ontological classification:
- Subclass of: workplace
Alienated work
Alienated work is work that reduces the person to a function and prevents the actualization of the dimensions of personhood. It is a form of Practical Oblivion of the Person, because it treats the person not as someone but as something. In the ontology it stands in a disjoint relation to dignified work and is marked as morally illegitimate. Where work cannot bring the rationality, free will, and creativity of the person to unfolding, the activity becomes instrumentalization.
Ontological classification:
- Subclass of: work (via economic activity)
- disjoint with: dignified work
- is morally illegitimate
Just wage
The just wage is a central concept of personalist social ethics. Thomas Aquinas determines it as that remuneration which enables the working person and her family to lead a dignified life (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 316 ff.).
The demand for a just wage is grounded in the dignity of the person. Because the person is never a mere means of production, her wage may not be determined by market mechanisms alone. Dignified work requires a remuneration that does justice to the basic needs of the person and her dependents.
A wage that falls below this constitutes a form of instrumentalization. The person is reduced to her labor power. The Personalist Norm therefore demands that economic structures be shaped so that the wage corresponds to justice.
Dignified work
Dignified work is work that enables the actualization of the second dimension (rational awareness, free will) and the third dimension (moral perfection) of personhood. It is an expression of the rationality, free will, and creativity of the person. In the ontology it stands in a disjoint relation to alienated work: work can either unfold the person or reduce her to a function. Dignified work respects the dignity of the person and corresponds to the Personalist Norm.
Ontological classification:
- Subclass of: work (via economic activity)
- disjoint with: alienated work
Economic activity
An economic activity is an activity directed toward the production, distribution, or consumption of goods. It forms the superordinate concept for all economically relevant actions of the person. Modeled as a subclass in particular is work, which can be both dignified and alienated. From a personal-ontological perspective, every economic activity is to be measured against the Personalist Norm: it must respect the dignity of the persons involved and may not reduce them to bearers of a function.
Ontological classification:
- Subclass of: entity
- has subclass: work (with subclasses dignified work, alienated work)
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 77, a. 1 (on justice in exchange and the just wage). Transl. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Bros., 1947.
- Wojtyła, Karol (1969): Osoba i czyn. Kraków (English: The Acting Person, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979) (on work as a personal act and self-realization).
AI and human work — 2026 extension
The worldwide state of research on the impact of generative and agentic Artificial Intelligence on work demands a more precise distinction than the previous concept of work provides. The IMF estimate of January 2024 (SDN/2024/001, Cazzaniga, Jaumotte et al.) speaks of around 40 percent of all jobs worldwide as AI-exposed, in developed economies up to 60 percent — in roughly equal parts complementing and replacing. Goldman Sachs (Briggs, Kodnani, April 2023) projects around 300 million full-time-equivalent positions worldwide as substitutable or substantially modifiable. The ILO report (August 2023) shows for clerical employment around 24 percent high and 58 percent medium automation exposure; the WEF Future of Jobs Report (January 2025) reckons with 92 million jobs lost and 170 million newly created by 2030. The overall tenor of the research: structural shift, not a simple destruction.
To keep the ethical distinction perceptible, the ontology introduces the following conceptual differentiations.
Human work vs. machine performance
Human work (actus personae, Wojtyła 1981, Laborem Exercens) is an activity in which the person carries out intentionality, responsibility, and self-expression. It is not reducible to the measurable output that a machine can likewise produce.
Machine performance is the rule-governed output production of a technical system — an AI or a robot — which can replicate the result of human activity but is not the bearer of personal enactment. The two are categorially different: not the output, but the enactment as a person makes the difference. Whoever defines work via output-identity overlooks the personal core.
Ontological classification:
- Human work: subclass of work and personal act
- Machine performance: disjoint with human work and with personal act
- essentially different: human work ≠ machine performance
AI–work relation
The relation of an AI system to a human activity can be grasped in three disjoint basic types — the conceptual foundation of the macroeconomic impact assessments of the IMF, Goldman Sachs, and OECD:
- Augmentation — the AI supports the personal decision. The person remains the subject of the enactment; the work remains potentially dignified work.
- Substitution — the AI replaces the human activity entirely. This can lead to job loss or to the devaluation of the workplace described below.
- Complementarity — human and AI each take on distinct partial tasks. Work is recut, not replaced. Brynjolfsson (2022, The Turing Trap) holds this path to be ethically and economically preferable.
Consequences on the labor market
Job loss — the workplace disappears entirely through substitution. The central scenario of the IMF and Goldman Sachs estimates.
Devaluation of the workplace — the workplace is formally preserved, but loses cognitive depth, decision latitude, or meaningfulness, because the personal portions are displaced by AI specifications. Ontologically this is a subform of alienated work and thereby a form of Practical Oblivion of the Person at the workplace.
Polarization effect — a structural effect: highly qualified complementary roles gain, medium-qualified routine roles are substituted, low-qualified manual roles remain but without a path of advancement. Empirically grounded in Acemoglu (NBER WP 32487, 2024) and in the IMF SDN (2024).
Algorithmic management and high-risk AI at the workplace
Algorithmic management is a leadership and control practice in which work allocation, evaluation, disciplining, or preparation of dismissal are made or substantially prepared by algorithmic systems (scoring, scheduling, tracking).
High-risk AI at the workplace — AI systems used in the context of recruitment, evaluation, allocation, or termination of employment relationships fall under the high-risk class in the EU AI Act (Reg. 2024/1689, Annex III no. 4). From this follow:
- human oversight (Art. 14) — requires Meaningful Human Control in decisions with a significant effect on employees.
- transparency obligation toward employees (Art. 26(7)) — affected employees must be informed before a high-risk AI system is deployed.
- impact assessment and ongoing documentation.
Algorithmic management without Meaningful Human Control violates the condition of personal final decision in legally effective employment acts and is morally illegitimate.
Turing trap
The Turing trap (after Brynjolfsson, Daedalus 151(2), 2022) is the misalignment of AI research toward the imitation of human performance (and thereby toward substitution) instead of toward complementarity. It leads to a concentration of power in capital and to the devaluation of the workplaces of broad strata of the workforce — analogous to Wojtyła’s warning in Laborem Exercens against an inversion of the order of labor and capital.
The personal-ontological objection to the Turing trap is not a machine-skeptical one but an anthropological one: if the standard of AI development is the replacement of the person, it misses the place where work has its meaning — the personal enactment.
Ontological classification:
- Human work: subclass of work and at the same time of personal act
- Machine performance: disjoint with human work
- Augmentation, substitution, and complementarity: pairwise disjoint subclasses of the AI–work relation
- Devaluation of the workplace: subclass of alienated work
- High-risk AI at the workplace: subclass of Artificial Intelligence; presupposes Meaningful Human Control
Sources for the extension
- Wojtyła, Karol (John Paul II): Laborem Exercens. Encyclical, 14 September 1981. Central distinction: work in the subjective sense (actus personae) before work in the objective sense (product, market value).
- Cazzaniga, Mauro; Jaumotte, Florence et al.: Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work. IMF Staff Discussion Note SDN/2024/001, International Monetary Fund, January 2024.
- Briggs, Joseph; Kodnani, Devesh: The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth. Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper, 5 April 2023.
- World Economic Forum: Future of Jobs Report 2025. Geneva, January 2025.
- Gmyrek, Paweł; Berg, Janine; Bescond, David: Generative AI and Jobs: A Global Analysis of Potential Effects on Job Quantity and Quality. ILO Working Paper 96, International Labour Organization, 21 August 2023. Central figure: around 24% of clerical employment with high, around 58% with medium automation exposure.
- Acemoglu, Daron: The Simple Macroeconomics of AI. NBER Working Paper 32487, May 2024.
- Brynjolfsson, Erik: The Turing Trap: The Promise and Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence. Daedalus 151(2), Spring 2022, 272—287.
- EU Regulation 2024/1689 (EU AI Act), in particular Art. 14 (human oversight), Art. 26(7) (information of employees), Annex III no. 4 (high-risk area of work).