Imagine the following scenario: You are an engineer who has worked for years with a small group of colleagues. One day, your company informs you that while your own role remains unchanged, your co-workers will gradually be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) agents. The transition is smooth: some colleagues are retiring, others are redeployed elsewhere in the firm. But you are left working alone—your daily collaborators are now digital systems in the form of agents. Do you have a complaint about this new arrangement? You may still enjoy your tasks, be well paid, and have job security. And yet something seems to have been lost. My suggestion is that one thing that you will be deprived of in this scenario is a form of solidarity—something not easily captured by standard metrics of productivity or satisfaction, but nonetheless central to the value of work. In this post I want to explore the ways in which solidarity, as a distinctive social good, is put at risk by the digitalization of work, especially through the deployment of AI systems in the workplace.
Individual Goods of Work
Most people work to earn a living. But work also provides non-instrumental goods—reasons to non-instrumentally value it. Philosophers working on the value of work have long drawn attention to three such goods: pleasure, excellence, and self-respect.
First, pleasure: Many have thought that for work to be good for us it must, as a bare minimum, be something that we enjoy doing. (Perhaps not always, but to a sufficient degree). We are complex, learning animals, and so for any activity to give us enjoyment in the long run, it must engage our faculties to learn and develop. It is hard to see how work that is boring and/or extremely repetitive, or “bullshit jobs” that seem pointless to the worker, could be enjoyable in the long run.
Second, excellence: For Aristotle, the good life—eudaimonia—involved the cultivation of virtue and excellence. Humans have the ability to develop their skills through practicing them, thus attaining higher levels of excellency in particular activities. Imagine the experience of learning a new musical instrument: through practicing, you gradually improve your musical skills until (hopefully, some day!) you manage to play that difficult piece you have dreamt of playing. Importantly, both the process of growing our skills and attaining a higher level of mastery seem non-instrumentally valuable. Good work also helps us to develop our skills and attain excellency: a coder debugging a complex system or a surgeon executing a precise operation both exemplify this kind of achievement. Through repeated engagement with difficulty and challenge, individuals cultivate excellence and competence. Such excellence forms a core part of the agent’s self-conception and fulfillment.
Third, philosophers have argued that valuable work plays a central role in fostering self-respect. Following John Rawls, self-respect is the conviction that our goals and plans are worth pursuing and that we can achieve them through our own efforts. This sense of self-respect arises from the recognition of one’s capacity to realise one’s plan of life. A person’s role in their workplace—at least when they have some degree of autonomous choice about what to do and are not subject to constant “micro-management” by others— often gives them the opportunity to experience their own power to set ends and pursue them effectively.
These goods do not, I think, essentially depend on co-workers. A solitary researcher may still experience deep engagement and a sense of excellence. A freelancer working remotely with AI support tools may take pride in creative output. That is why, to fully appreciate what is lost in the move to “colleague-less” workplaces, we must turn to the social or communal goods of work.
Solidarity as a Communal Good
Solidarity is a social relation through which individuals recognize shared commitments and act together in pursuit of a common good. It is more than identification or empathy. To stand in solidarity is to identify with others’ circumstances or goals and to be prepared to act on that identification in ways that reflect mutual commitment. Through solidarity, we build relationships with others that are, in interesting ways, both non-instrumentally valuable for us as persons with specific projects and help us to further more general moral ends. (I explore this “positive alignment” function of solidarity in more depth here.) In the workplace, two forms of solidarity are especially central:
Productive Solidarity. This arises when individuals collaborate to produce something they collectively value. It is not just about teamwork; it involves a deeper moral orientation toward others as co-contributors. The solidarity of a newsroom putting together a publication or a surgical team coordinating complex care reflects this sense of joint enterprise. The process matters as much as the outcome: when people work together toward a common end, they experience interdependence and mutual recognition.
Philosophers influenced by Marx have seen such cooperation as a distinctive site of human flourishing. In these productive relationships, each person’s work is shaped in response to others, and the achievement is owned collectively. Recognition flows in both directions: I see your contribution as essential, and you affirm mine in turn. In this structure, individuals realize their own capacities by contributing to others’ needs. Productive solidarity reveals our social nature, not just as individuals pursuing aims, but as beings who become fully human through shared activity.
Labor Solidarity. This second form of solidarity is shaped less by cooperation and more by shared vulnerability within a system of wage labor. It is the solidarity of workers who, lacking capital, must sell their labor and thereby occupy structurally similar positions of potential disadvantage. Labor solidarity has an adversarial edge: it is not merely about shared enjoyment or team spirit, but about recognizing common interests in resisting exploitation or domination. Labor solidarity takes form in unions, strikes, collective bargaining, and protest. These are not merely tactics for economic gain; they are practices through which workers affirm their dignity and collective power. They transform isolated grievance into coordinated resistance. This kind of solidarity is deeply moral: it affirms the idea that one’s struggle is not merely one’s own, but part of a broader injustice that demands a shared response.
How AI Undermines Solidarity
What happens when AI systems replace human co-workers? Both forms of solidarity—productive and labor—come under pressure, albeit in different ways.
First, productive solidarity is eroded because the AI systems that fill the roles of former colleagues do not support the interpersonal dynamics required for mutual recognition. AI does not have needs, intentions, or feelings. It cannot affirm your efforts, respond to your initiative, or share in your success. Even if the work process remains efficient, the structure of recognition and reciprocity breaks down. I may solve problems and deliver results, but I do not see my contribution reflected in others. My intentions go unacknowledged, my successes unshared. Over time, the social meaning of work fades.
Second, labor solidarity becomes harder to sustain when workers are physically or socially isolated. When AI takes over tasks once done by people, opportunities for shared experience dwindle. Without co-presence, there is no corridor chat, no informal exchange, no chance to recognize shared grievances or identify common goals. Workers become atomized. Without fellow human colleagues with similar interests and concerns, the possibility of collective action—already difficult in many corporations—becomes even more remote.
Third, AI agents are not partners in solidarity. They cannot be co-organizers or co-protesters. They do not suffer injustice or hold commitments. This matters because solidarity is not just about shared goals; it is about shared standing with others. When we are surrounded only by tools owned by our employers, we are left without the partners necessary for labor solidarity to emerge.
Fourth, AI increasingly is more than a passive obstacle to labor solidarity but a means of actively preventing it: algorithmic scheduling, productivity monitoring, and performance evaluation systems mediate many work relationships. These systems individualize assessment and suppress informal feedback loops. Workers are continuously evaluated by systems they cannot contest and that evaluate them against each other. The result is a depersonalized workplace in which workers are more easily surveilled, controlled, and ranked—but less able to reflect, critique, or resist as a group.
Finally, these developments intensify the power asymmetry between capital and labor. The owners of AI infrastructure gain ever more leverage, not only in directing work but in shaping the conditions of labor itself and atomizing the workforce. With workers dispersed, digitally mediated, and lodged into competition with one another, the traditional infrastructure of organizing—unions, assemblies, petitions—becomes harder to maintain. AI, in this way, does not merely replace workers; what it also does, in the memorable phrase used by Waheed Hussain is to “pit people against each other.”
Preserving Solidarity in the Age of AI
I have suggested that AI’s most corrosive effect on the world of work is not merely economic displacement or deskilling, but the erosion of solidarity. Much public concern has focused on whether AI will take our jobs or make them more precarious. Less attention has been given to what it means to disrupt the social fabric of work. But it is precisely this fabric—woven from patterns of deep cooperation, mutual recognition, and collective agency—that makes work a site of human flourishing. When AI systems disrupt the possibility of productive solidarity, they deprive workers of a central form of moral relationship: one in which individuals come to see their contributions as meaningful because they publicly serve the needs of others. When they undermine labor solidarity, they disable the mechanisms through which workers resist domination and affirm their equal status. These are not marginal losses.
If AI is deployed in ways that sever those relationships, then it does not merely reorganize labor; it disfigures one of the key social institutions through which people realize themselves as equal participants in a shared social world. Rather than merely urging better governance or more inclusive design—though those are important—the primary implication of this argument is that any legitimate vision for the future of work must preserve and protect these solidaristic dimensions. That means treating human cooperation, collective action, and moral recognition not as costs to be minimized, but as values to be cultivated. The future of work should not be determined solely by what is technically possible, but by what is worth doing together.
Juri Viehoff
Juri Viehoff is Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of Utrecht. His research focus is in political, legal and social philosophy. Recent publications have addressed issues of solidarity, justice, democracy, and social trust, and, specifically, how these values may be affected by digitalization and AI. He is currently completing a monograph on solidarity.
