What Is Work For: Insights from Arendt, Marx, and Weil for the Age of AI

Author: Phoenix Rivera

Field of Study: Economics

Program Affiliation: Source Project Research Program

Faculty Mentors: Will Glovinsky

Easel: 73

Timeslot: Afternoon

Abstract: As artificial intelligence threatens to transform the labor market at an unprecedented pace, policymakers are debating possibilities for income replacement and job retraining. Beneath the finances, a question presents itself: what happens to the cultural, psychological, and moral frameworks that people have built around work itself? Drawing on political philosophy, labor economics, speculative fiction, and sociological research, this project examines how work has historically functioned as a source of identity, purpose, and social belonging beyond its purely economic role. It begins by reviewing accounts of work and meaning found in Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, and Simone Weil, and then places these accounts alongside contemporary scholarship on automation, universal basic income (UBI), and labor market polarization. This study argues that the crisis AI poses is not just crisis of employment but a crisis of meaning, and that existing policy responses remain inadequate precisely because they treat a cultural wound as a financial one.