AI-driven Automation as a Pre-condition for Eudaimonia

The automation of work, understood as the process by which human labour is replaced by machines, is also a cause for scholarly concern across different disciplines. For some scholars, the large-scale deployment of AI in the workplace amounts to a'Fourth Industrial Revolution' or a'Second Machine Age', threatening to render human work--nay, humankind in its entirety--obsolete [3],[6]. Even despite the potential introduction of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), which could in principle guarantee citizens' livelihood, it is argued that policymakers would still need to safeguard work, since it bears intrinsic value that transcends the instrumental value of a paycheck [8]. AI-driven automation is, hence, largely framed as a threat to be counteracted by law. Nonetheless, the axiological superiority of work as an intrinsically valuable activity and the insistence on its preservation, even if humans' sustenance could be otherwise secured, should not be taken for granted.