Intercultural Dialogue on AI Governance: Preserving Meaningful Work and Core Identity in the Age of Algorithmic Opacity

Parallel session

Parallel session 2

Presentation slot

Track

Track 5: Towards a Hybrid Ethics of Technology; Bridging Ethics of Technology and Intercultural-Comparative Ethics

Presenter

Shiqi Wang is a third-year philosophy PhD candidate at The University of Manchester. She is working on research titled as ‘The Meaningfulness of work and the Impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI)’. Her project addresses the fundamental question ‘what is meaningful work?’ by developing a multidimensional framework of meaningful work centered on the development of and realization of one’s core identity. Building upon this framework, she investigates the impact of AI on meaningful work under the contemporary capitalism, focusing in particular on the opacity of AI algorithm and explainable AI (XAI). Her objective is to propose an ethical framework for the development and deployment of AI toward enhancing the meaningfulness of work and life in general.

Type of presentation

Single paper

Chair

Behnam Taebi

Room

Momentum 1

Abstract

This paper proposes an intercultural dialogue on AI governance in response to threat that AI opacity poses to meaningful work. Meaningful work is work that maintains integrity with one’s core identity that one autonomously chooses as self-defining. When individuals engage in such work, they affirm who they are, creating coherence between values and actions, contributing to the meaningfulness of lives. AI undermines this through algorithmic opacity, placing workers in a poor epistemic position to evaluate whether AI-driven decisions are responsive to their core identity or optimizing for efficiency and profit. Lacking evaluative capacity, workers become subject to AI-driven directive and unable to exercise autonomy to control working processes in a way that maintains integrity with core identity, undermining the meaningfulness of work. In response, an intercultural dialogue drawing on insights from diverse cultural backgrounds should be cultivated. The central principle is that AI should be deployed in service of human flourishing. While cross-cultural traditions such as Confucianism, Ubuntu, and liberal individualism conceptualize human flourishing differently, intercultural dialogue coverages a shared commitment: the realization of one’s meaningful life through meaningful work carries intrinsic ethical value for human flourishing, justifying AI deployment toward fulfilling individuals’ core identity through work. Operationally, this requires functional transparency: AI may assist workers in decision-making provided workers exercise their knowledge and autonomy to evaluate whether AI-driven decisions maintain integrity with core identity, even without understanding AI's technical mechanisms. What constitutes functional transparency should be negotiated through intercultural dialogue, as different cultures define it differently. When functional transparency cannot be realized and AI outputs remain wholly opaque, such AI should be abandoned regardless of its productive contributions. No productive gain overrides intrinsic value of the realization of core identity through work. This rejection is a cross-cultural ethical commitment.