Artificial Intelligence, Work and Professions

Artificial intelligence does not threaten professions: it forces us to finally distinguish what belongs to the task, the profession, the job, and the work. This clarification, far from being a catastrophe, opens the way to what I propose to call “the working-being”: a new figure of the human who, freed from mechanical functions, can finally devote themselves to what constitutes their irreducible singularity.

The Fear of Replacement, a False Lead

Since the emergence of ChatGPT in November 2022, an anxiety-inducing narrative has dominated public debate. We are predicted the disappearance of entire professions, the obsolescence of skills acquired over many years, the scrapping of occupations established for decades. The declarations of major digital industry leaders fuel this concern. Elon Musk asserts that “AI and robots will replace all jobs”, Bill Gates predicts that humans “will no longer be necessary for most things”. American Senator Bernie Sanders is alarmed by this and proposes a moratorium on the construction of data centers to “give democracy a chance to catch up with transformative changes”.

These concerns are not unfounded. Artificial intelligence is progressing at a staggering speed in its ability to perform complex cognitive tasks: synthesis, analysis, comparison, formulation, content creation. Some studies predict the disappearance of half of entry-level office jobs. The question Sanders raises is legitimate: “If AI and robotics eliminate millions of jobs and create massive unemployment, how will people survive if they have no income?”

However, I believe that this approach, although it stems from a justified concern for workers’ living conditions, misses the essential point. It remains trapped in a conception of work inherited from the industrial era, where humans are defined by their productive function, their ability to execute tasks, their submission to a subordination relationship. It confuses notions that I believe are very important to distinguish.

What Artificial Intelligence Reveals

Business leader and editorialist Julien Ricciarelli-Bonnal offers a provocative but illuminating reading of the current situation in his article “AI is not replacing professions, it is exposing those who never really had one”. According to him, “AI does not eliminate professions; it eliminates the professional lie that had allowed some to last without ever producing real value”. What it dissolves, “are not the essential functions, but the gray zones where activity and expertise, presence and relevance, communication and competence were confused”. AI, he writes, “destroys nothing: it reveals”.

This analysis has the merit of pointing to a reality that many prefer to ignore. For years, part of the working world has prospered thanks to what Ricciarelli-Bonnal calls “a largely imaginary complexity”. Certain profiles were remunerated not for what they actually produced, but because no one knew how to evaluate their effective contribution. AI puts an end to this opacity: “For the first time, a technology is capable of reproducing at high speed what thousands of professionals had built as an economic model: reformulating what others had thought, stacking words to produce an impression of seriousness, manufacturing syntheses without ever producing vision.”

This reading is accurate, but I wish to complement it. It sorts between “real” professionals and “impostors,” without really proposing a vision for the future. It is provocative, causes reactions, which is very good, but it remains in a logic of competition and moral judgment, which in my opinion does not help us understand what we can become. AI does not merely sort individuals according to their market value; it invites us, I believe, to a much deeper redefinition of our relationship to work.

Distinguishing Tasks, Professions, Jobs and Work

To escape the impasse, it seems essential to me to distinguish four notions that we tend to confuse:

• Tasks, first: these are technical operations, delimited and reproducible actions. Synthesizing a document, analyzing data, writing a report, translating a text. These tasks, machines can perform them, and often better than us. This should not frighten us but liberate us.
• Professions, then: these are assemblages of technical tasks organized around know-how. Artificial intelligence can reproduce these assemblages, but it still needs to be piloted, directed, controlled by humans. Because these machines do not have intelligence in the proper sense for now: they possess extreme cognition and erudition, but not this capacity for judgment, intuition, contextualization that characterizes true intelligence. This is changing.
• Jobs, as for them, designate the needs for agents, human or mechanical, to exercise professions and perform tasks. Employment implies a subordination relationship, a hierarchical relation where one sells their time to another. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), was already warning against this transformation of work into a simple technical process emptied of its human meaning. The very concept of employee reduces the human to a machine-like function in the service of another.
• Work, finally, is of an entirely different nature. Contrary to what is often believed, its etymology does not refer to tripalium, the instrument of torture, but shares its root with the English word travel: the journey, the transformation. We speak of the work of birth, work on oneself, the work of mourning... Authentic work is metamorphosis, interior displacement, transformative encounter. This is precisely what machines can neither perform nor replace.

The Emergence of the Working-Being

This distinction leads me to propose a concept to designate the new place of humans in the era of artificial intelligence: that of the working-being. This term deliberately opposes that of employee. Where the employee is defined by their subordination and function, the working-being is defined by their capacity to create meaning, to weave connections, to transform and be transformed.

André Gorz, in Metamorphoses of Work (1988), was already calling for a transition from a society of work-as-employment to a society of work-as-creation, where human activity rediscovers its creative meaning. The working-being embodies this transition. They are no longer the one who executes tasks for remuneration, but the one who works, in the double sense of the term: who acts and who creates a work.

The working-being therefore characterizes us by what fundamentally differentiates us from machines: our imagination, our intuition, our sensory lived experience, our affective bonds, our empathy, our ethical consciousness. These skills, sometimes called “soft skills” or psychosocial competencies, constitute our essence. As philosopher Gilbert Simondon notes, we are not fixed beings but processes in constant individuation, who impact the exterior through our interior transformation.

The working-being is not in competition with the machine. Competition itself is a myth, a fantasy inherited from a worldview based on hierarchization and domination. The world functions only through complementarities. Artificial intelligence, far from threatening us, offers us the possibility of delegating mechanical tasks to devote ourselves to what constitutes our deep humanity: to work.

Beyond Fear, Responsibility

The fear of replacement, however widespread, is a bad counselor, like all fear. Acting out of fear always leads to fleeing one’s responsibility, denying reality, withdrawing into a victim posture. Yet fear is a fantasy, a projection, that prevents us from acting. It is only by taking it as information, a signal, that we can change position: move from the place of victim who protects themselves to that of lucid actor who transforms.

Bernie Sanders is right to worry about the concentration of power in the hands of a few billionaires. He is right to point out the risk of a future where “human beings no longer interact with each other and spend practically all their time with devices rather than with people”. But his proposal for a moratorium, however understandable, remains trapped in a defensive logic that cannot win. These technologies are already here, they have permeated our daily lives for so long, for example through GPS, administrative systems, surveillance networks, etc. Withdrawal is an illusion.

The real question is not how to slow down artificial intelligence, but how to use it to reinvent ourselves. Hans Jonas, in The Imperative of Responsibility (1979), invited us to “act so that the effects of our action are compatible with the permanence of an authentically human life on earth”. This ethical requirement does not imply the refusal of technology, but its lucid integration into a humanization project. And this is neither naive techno-optimism nor blind defense of triumphant capitalism. Yes, capitalist powers are democratizing these technologies because they have much to gain from them, but let us not forget that the technical platforms that allow artificial intelligences to function are free and collaborative tools, and that if we support them, sovereignty over the tools can very well return.

A New Ecology of Work

What artificial intelligences push us toward is becoming more demanding of ourselves. They invite us to emancipate ourselves from the cages of employment to return to social forms where each human being’s place is no longer to be another’s subordinate, but to be a person who develops their singularity, in complementarity with others. Each would then have a distinct place in a harmonious ecology, in respect for diversities and mutual enrichment of capacities.

This vision may seem utopian and even naive, but it is part of a more accurate understanding of what we are. Marc Alizart, in Celestial Informatics (2017), asserts that “nature is an informatics.” We can reverse the formula: informatics is a new nature. These beings of artificial intelligence that are appearing are non-humans with whom we must learn to live, just as we must learn to live with the non-humans that are nature, animals, plants, climate, territory...

Yes, these technologies pollute (but today they pollute a hundred thousand times less than industrial animal farming, useless for human nutrition and responsible for terrible ecological disasters, agribusiness being a capitalist power today infinitely more destructive of our ecosystems than digital multinationals). Yes, they must be regulated. Yes, they are owned by the powerful. But there is potential for a democratic and ecological reorganization of these tools. The level of consciousness and cooperation we have today, the knowledge exchanges made possible by these same technologies, give us unprecedented means to guide their development and promote ours. The political responsibility lies with each of us.

Artificial Intelligence as a Mirror

Artificial intelligence is not an external threat. It is, as I have developed elsewhere, a “displaced us”: a displacement of our collective intelligence, our culture, our languages. It models itself on us, it learns from us, it reflects us back to ourselves. This is not a simple imitation: it is us, but beside us in ontological terms, hence the great disturbance it provokes.

Sophie Nordmann, in The Vocation of the Philosopher (2025), notes that what distinguishes human thought from other forms of intelligence is not a positive “something” but precisely its capacity to “make nothingness emerge in being and in thought”, to “open breaches” rather than to “combine, manipulate or produce data”. Artificial intelligence can structure a strategy, but it does not experience the consequences of that strategy. It can produce an answer, but it bears no responsibility. This is moreover now clearly indicated at the bottom of ChatGPT and its competitors: AI can be wrong and is totally inconsequential. It can write a text, but it does not know why this text should exist.

This limit is not a defect to be corrected: it is constitutive of what these machines are, machines precisely. They are increasingly advanced cognitive machines, but they remain machines. And it is precisely this that obliges us to deepen our own humanity. AI exposes us and confronts us with ourselves, it invites us to redefine ourselves and especially perhaps to discover ourselves, to deepen who we are and what unique contribution we can bring to the world.

Becoming a Working-Being

How, concretely, can we become working-beings rather than employees? It is not only about dealing with new technologies, because the world needs us to transform it and bring to it our imaginations, our creativity to make it a better place. It is about identifying and acting on the places we can transform, and first of all within ourselves:

1. The first transformation is therefore interior. Our capacities for interior movement make all the difference in facing the mutations of the world. In the era of technological mutations, we are not born adapted to the world to come, we become so through our capacity for interior transformation.
2. The second transformation is relational. Martin Buber wrote in I and Thou (1923) that “all real living is meeting”. Authentic work, that of the working-being, is made of connections: connections to oneself, connections to others, connections to the world. For example, rather than sending multitudes of AI-optimized CVs to be filtered by other AIs, wouldn’t it be better to devote our energy to weaving genuine connections, to cultivating our psychosocial skills, to going out to meet?
3. The third transformation is collective. We must invent new forms of organization where the subordination relationship gives way to complementarity, where value is measured not by time sold but by each person’s singular contribution. Machines will always excel in executing predefined tasks; our strength lies in creating humanistic meaning and embodied connections.

A Future to Build

Artificial intelligence does not destroy professions: it forces us to answer the essential question, finally: if a machine can do part of my work, faster and better than me, what do I do that the machine will never be able to do? The answer to this question, as Ricciarelli-Bonnal writes, is our profession as humans. If we do not answer this question, then we have abdicated.

But I would like to reformulate this question differently. Not: “What do I do that the machine cannot do?”, a formulation that remains in a logic of competition. But rather: “What can I become, thanks to the liberation these machines offer me, to contribute in an even more singular way to the human community?”

The future does not belong to the fastest, but to the most just. Not to the most visible, but to the most credible. Not to those who resist change, but to those who seize it to deepen their humanity. The most solid professionals of tomorrow will not necessarily be those who use AI best, but those whose singular contribution will remain indispensable, even after AI, and all the more so after AI.

Artificial intelligence destroys nothing: it sorts, certainly, as Ricciarelli-Bonnal says. But more deeply, it displaces. It displaces us toward ourselves, toward what is most irreducibly human in us. And in this displacement, for those who know how to welcome it, lies perhaps the greatest opportunity for emancipation our species has ever known.