Generative AI and the evolution of employees’ work.

At a time when many observers are concerned about the effects of artificial intelligence on employment and the labor market, two researchers — Marion Beauvalet (Paris-Dauphine University–PSL) and Lucie Rondon du Noyer (International Research Center on Environment and Development, CIRED) — warned, in an op-ed published in Le Monde on February 18, 2025, about the risks that the large-scale adoption of generative AI could pose to the quality of employees’ work. According to the authors, the real issue lies less in the prospect of a “mass replacement of workers by thinking machines” than in the way coexistence between employees and generative AI applications will be organized within firms and institutions. In other words — as the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes of May 2 and July 13, 2023 had already revealed — the key question concerns the quality of the new jobs reshaped by AI compared with the old ones, at a moment when intellectual and creative professions appear to be among the most affected. What will happen to the expertise of professions whose very appeal and motivation rest on the acquisition and exercise of such skills? The question is not new, as the two authors rightly recall: it had already been raised by thinkers such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels during the mechanization of human labor and the production of goods and services in the first industrial revolution.

If the future of work and employment in the age of artificial intelligence — whether “weak” or “strong” — constitutes one of today’s major research fields, it must also be examined through the lens of knowledge and skill transfers. These transformations could eventually result not only in the erosion of certain cognitive capacities, such as reasoning, problem-solving, or mastery of language, but also in significant effects on job interest and motivation — issues that have been central to management theory since its emergence at the beginning of the twentieth century. It seems, once again, that we are never entirely done with Marx.