The Re-Placed Worker

The re-placed worker is a category introduced in this volume to name the specific condition of the AI-affected knowledge worker — distinct from the classic displaced worker of industrial automation whose task was eliminated and whose livelihood disappeared. The re-placed worker has not lost her job. She has been moved to a different location in the landscape of productive activity, a location that may not have existed before and that requires capacities she has not fully developed. She is employed differently, and the difference is experienced as a compound of awe and loss — the exhilaration of expanded capability and the vertigo of watching skills that defined her career become optional. The compound experience makes her collective interest far more difficult to articulate than the straightforward demand of the displaced factory worker, and therefore far more difficult to organize around.