Human Flourishing in the Age of Digital Capitalism: Ai, Automation and Alienation

With a distinctive theoretical framework combining classical ethics and Marxian critique, the essays in this volume ask how the forms of artificial intelligence and technologies of automation in digital capitalism affect human flourishing, and what meaningful work looks like under these conditions.

As technology advances, how do we decide what activities should be automated? Is the end of work through automation actually desirable? If a good life is the life of activity employing our rational, imaginative, and creative powers, what does it mean to say that future societies will be post-work societies? Rather than simply embracing the possibilities of automation to eliminate work, the essays in this collection consider that meaningful work is integral to the good life. Human Flourishing in the Age of Digital Capitalism puts forward a coherent framework at the intersection of Aristotelian and Marxist accounts of technology and automation, evaluating the process of technological development from the point of view of dominant power relations, and judging concrete embodiments of technology and automation in the light of human flourishing.

The volume contains eight essays from scholars in the UK, Europe and USA, specializing in the philosophical and ethical dimensions of technology and political theory. Contributions cover topics including algorithmic management, the concept of good work, the resonances between Marx and Aristotle on the question of technology, technoutopians’ fundamentally alienated understanding of artificial intelligence, Marx’s utopianism, and the nature of technology. This timely and novel intervention in the automation debate will appeal to those in philosophy, politics, literary and cultural studies interested in new technologies both from the perspective of normative ethics and the critique of political economy.

Andrius Bielskis is Professor of Political Theory at Mykolas Romeris University, and Professor of Philosophy at Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania.