Slash youth and work badges: who can give workers in the AI era a sense of "dignity"?

[[**AI takes over complex parts of knowledge work; efficiency rises, yet professional scarcity, sense of ownership over outcomes, and organizational decision-making power are weakened, and professional identity loosens. Companies need to redistribute judgment authority; individuals should expand multiple identities; institutions should recognize contributions outside occupations.**

**Key points**

**1. AI lowers the scarcity of professional ability, and competition shifts to defining problems and making key judgments.**

**2. Directly adopting AI weakens the sense of achievement; participating in core thinking preserves ownership of outcomes.**

A 2026 study with a 269-person experiment and a 270-person survey: those who directly adopted AI had lower self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and sense of meaning; those who first wrote a draft and then had AI revise it had a stronger psychological connection.

**3. Organizations redistribute judgment authority and responsibility; companies must turn efficiency into employee growth.**

**4. Individuals and society need to recognize contributions outside occupations and reduce the binding of dignity to job positions.**

A 2024 study found that good integration of multiple social identities is associated with better psychological well-being; contributions such as caregiving and community service need substantive recognition through public services and institutions. 2026-10-24 12:36 Can slash youth and employee badges give workers in the AI era a bit of "dignity"? Quick overview by Fangleng Tu De La

This article comes from the WeChat public account: Fangleng Tu De La Shuzhai, author: Fangleng Tu De La

Imagine an analyst rushing to finish a report. Halfway through, he hands the collected materials to AI. A few minutes later, data categorization, chart suggestions, and preliminary conclusions are all on the screen. He deletes a few inaccurate statements and adds his own judgment, and work that would originally have taken a whole day is soon completed.

The result looks good, and delivery is easier than before. But if he is asked what part of this report he is most proud of, the answer may not come as easily as before. Similar hesitation is now appearing in more and more knowledge work.

On March 15, 2026, Scientific Reports published a study on AI and work experience. Participants either completed writing themselves, directly adopted AI content, or first wrote a draft and then used AI to revise it. Although they completed the same task, their feelings differed.

Why can a job define a person?

When meeting a stranger, we often first ask: "What do you do for work?" Hearing answers such as doctor, teacher, engineer, or manager, we form impressions about ability, income, responsibility, and social status. An occupation name both introduces a person's way of making a living and provides a clue for judging who he is.

But if work were only responsible for earning money, many phenomena would be hard to explain. Why do people who already have enough savings still want to keep working? Why do some people suddenly feel at a loss after retirement, even though their time is free? A colleague's remark, "We still have to come to you for this problem," is sometimes more pleasing than a bonus.

When studying unemployment, Austrian social psychologist Marie Jahoda proposed five latent functions of work: providing time structure, social contact, shared goals, social status, and regular activity. A paycheck arriving is easy to see, while these functions are hidden in daily meetings, tasks, and interpersonal relationships.

For example, when a technician attends a project meeting, besides receiving assignments, he can also know what problem the team is solving; when completing an equipment modification, besides receiving performance credit, he also gains the trust of peers. People maintain the rhythm of life through work, and also participate in society beyond the family through work.

A 2023 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology found that employed people generally had higher satisfaction on these five functions than unemployed people, with the largest between-group difference in social status. These functions are also associated with mental health.

Self-determination theory offers another layer of explanation. People want to be competent at tasks, have the right to decide how to act, and build relationships with others. A job that allows people to use their abilities and take responsibility often responds to these needs at the same time.

Work gives people two kinds of confirmation: "I am capable" and "I am needed." The former comes from the achievement of completing something, and the latter from others' recognition of one's contribution. Wages can buy the means of living, but cannot replace the experience of personally completing a task and being depended on by others.

A 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center in the United States showed that 39% of non-self-employed workers considered their occupation extremely or very important to their personal identity; among people with graduate degrees, this proportion reached 53%. Professional abilities formed through years of training also often become the basis for people's self-evaluation.

People have always needed ability and recognition, but they have not necessarily always sought them through occupations. Today's familiar professional identity is the result of modern society undergoing long changes.

After industrialization, people began to seek their place through occupations

In traditional society, a person's position was often determined jointly by family, land, religion, local community, and guilds. A skilled craftsman could be respected for his craft, but social identity was still constrained by birth, rank, and acquaintance relationships. Those relationships provided belonging and also limited personal choice.

Industrialization led more and more people to leave the countryside and enter cities and factories. Production formerly scattered across families, workshops, and communities was concentrated in enterprises, labor was divided into positions, and workers collaborated according to unified processes. For the first time, many people had the opportunity to enter a new social class through their own labor.

Labor originally organized around a complete product was split into interconnected positions and processes. A person busy with production every day might not be able to decide how to do it, nor easily see the complete result. Factories became increasingly good at arranging machines and working hours, but not necessarily good at placing people.

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With the rise of large enterprises, the modern occupational system also developed. Engineers, technicians, salespeople, and managers acquired clear job and competency requirements, and companies provided compensation, promotion, and organizational belonging. The work unit gradually took on some of the identity functions that other social relationships had once shared.

Leaving the land of one's ancestors meant that a person had the opportunity to change their fate through work, and also that one's new social position was no longer prearranged by birthplace. But entering a factory did not mean gaining a voice. Who could bear responsibility and who could make decisions still required new organizational systems to answer.

This contradiction was precisely the theme Peter Drucker focused on in his early years. In his 1942 book The Future of Industrial Man, he argued that a society able to function effectively must give its members recognized social status and social function, and that institutions holding important power must also possess legitimacy.

In Drucker's view, industrial enterprises had already become important social organizations. When a person entered a factory, they obtained work and wages, but did not necessarily have the right to participate in matters affecting them, nor necessarily earn respect by taking on responsibility. An enterprise that only asks employees to obey instructions can hardly provide complete social belonging.

Drucker therefore treated management as a social undertaking. Management must establish objectives, organize collaboration, and make use of people's strengths, so that employees know what responsibilities they bear and what impact their work results have on others. Good management can connect organizational efficiency with individual achievement.

In China, the work unit was once closely tied to housing, medical care, and social interaction. "Which work unit do you work for" was itself part of social identity. Even though labor relations today are more marketized, the company, position, professional qualifications, and work history still profoundly influence how others see a person.

Modern enterprises not only produce goods and services but also distribute responsibility, status, and social recognition. Drucker hoped that management could connect people's contributions with organizational results. But as technology changes the division of labor and the value of skills, the identities people use to prove themselves also need to find new points of support.

Mechanization once made some crafts lose their scarcity, the assembly line changed the relationship between workers and products, and computers reshaped accounting, drafting, and clerical positions. Each technological replacement is re-answering three questions: which skills are valuable, who completed the results, and who holds decision-making power in the organization.

AI's impact on identity is unfolding along this same path. It can handle more and more language, knowledge, and creative tasks, and thus brings the same changes to more professionals. What we need to look at is what has happened to these three questions today.

The first change: the scarcity of professional competence is being repriced.

An analyst's ability to organize materials and build models, cultivated over years of training, was once enough to constitute part of a professional advantage. Today, people with little experience can use AI to complete material summaries, preliminary analysis, and report frameworks. The part of the skill that was easiest to display is becoming more common.

A 2025 study in the Academy of Management Proceedings conducted 52 interviews in the creative industries. The study found that, when facing the identity threat brought by AI, creative workers did not simply reject the tool but tried to redefine their role in creation.

In the past, a designer could build a reputation on excellent production skills; now clients may value more his ability to understand needs and make aesthetic judgments. Technology has lowered some operational thresholds and also pushed professional competition toward new capability links.

Professional identity thus encounters a difficult problem: when excellent works become increasingly easy to generate, is work quality still enough to prove who is more professional? In the past one could display the work; now one must also explain who defined the problem and made the key choices. The standard for evaluating ability changes accordingly.

The second change: work results and personal sense of achievement begin to loosen.

Efficiency measures how much has been produced, while the sense of achievement also depends on what one has invested in the process. In the past, spending several days writing a report, repeatedly verifying data and adjusting arguments, was itself a process in which ability was validated; now similar results can be obtained directly, but the sense of investment and belonging may not be the same.

The 2026 study mentioned at the beginning included a preregistered experiment with 269 people and a supplementary survey with 270 people. Participants who directly adopted AI-generated content rated lower on self-efficacy, sense of ownership of results, and sense of work meaning; participants who first wrote personally and then collaborated with AI maintained a stronger psychological connection.

A 2025 study in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications interviewed 25 non-native English-speaking researchers who used ChatGPT for writing. Some expressed their research findings more confidently with the help of AI, while others, even after successfully publishing articles, were still confused about whether the papers retained their own academic voice.

With the same tool assistance, the difference lies in whether the creator participated in the core thinking and whether they understand and claim the final result. The quality of results can be improved by technology, but the experience of creating personally cannot be directly outsourced.

When a person can still decide the question, review the evidence, and make choices, the work leaves a clear personal trace; once only copying and delivery remain, the link between authorship and achievement becomes fragile. How much workload has been reduced and how much a person feels they have contributed do not necessarily change in the same direction.

The third change: decision-making power and responsibility within organizations are being redistributed.

Who decides which problem to solve, who has the authority to judge AI's answers, and who is accountable for the final result—these questions now distinguish the value of a role more than who personally executes a given step. After technology lowers the cost of tasks, organizations redistribute decision-making authority; that distribution directly affects whether employees can continue to feel needed.

Consider two employees who both use AI. One is responsible for understanding customer needs, choosing a solution, and bearing delivery responsibility; the other checks machine-generated materials and corrects formatting according to procedure. Neither has been replaced by AI, but the former can decide direction, while the latter can only follow process.

This gap enters organizational assessment and promotion. The former accumulates judgment experience and customer trust; what the latter accumulates may be only throughput. Keeping a job does not necessarily preserve the status that job once had.

Higher productivity does not automatically determine a person's occupational status. A National Bureau of Economic Research study of 5,179 customer service workers found that AI assistants raised average productivity by about 14%, and raised productivity for novices and low-skilled employees by about 34%. Tools enhance capability, but decision rights and promotion opportunities are still allocated by organizations.

The value of skills, the attribution of results, and decision-making authority over work all ultimately enter a company's job evaluation and promotion systems. The old job may still exist, but the standards that once proved a person's excellence may already have changed; people are still working, yet they need to explain anew why they are valuable.

The content of work can be quickly rewritten by technology, but the way society recognizes a person has not been updated in step. This is why identity anxiety does not have to wait until the day of unemployment to occur.

When occupational identity changes, who recognizes a person's value?

In the past, a career simultaneously provided many people with income, achievement, and social status. After AI changes some of those tasks, identity needs a new anchor. How to adjust involves at least how companies organize work, how individuals arrange their lives, and how institutions recognize different forms of contribution.

Companies need to redistribute decision-making authority and responsibility in work.

Drucker's requirements for management remain relevant in the AI era. Companies can have AI generate more reports, code, and design proposals, but whether the organization is more effective still depends on whether employees can use these outputs, whether they have decision-making authority, and whether they can take responsibility for their own contributions.

For example, with a research report, AI can help organize materials, but the researcher must define the question, judge the evidence, and bear responsibility for the conclusions. If managers pursue only output per capita and employees become reviewers of model answers, the organization may become more efficient but may also lose the ability to cultivate professional judgment.

How the saved time is used is also a management choice. If employees are assigned more repetitive tasks, the organization gains only output; if they participate in customer communication and solve complex problems, employees can continue to accumulate capability and trust in the new division of labor.

Individuals need to build more sources of real identity outside of work.

A person can be an engineer at a company, a parent at home, a volunteer in the community, and also gain achievement from reading or exercise. Different roles connect to different people, so self-worth does not have to be staked entirely on one promotion, one company, or one skill.

A diversity of identities does not require huge life changes. Caring for family members over the long term, regularly participating in community affairs, or completing a public-interest project with friends can all bring real responsibility and belonging. How many relationships a person can contribute to matters more than how many impressive titles they hold.

The term "slash youth" originally emphasized that a person can have multiple identities. As far as identity is concerned, what matters is whether one can find real contribution and belonging in different life relationships, not adding a few more occupational titles. Even with only one formal job, a person can absolutely have rich social identities.

A 2024 study in the British Journal of Social Psychology found that multiple social identities, if well integrated, are associated with better psychological well-being. Whether family, community, and interest activities can become stable relationship networks matters more than the number of identity labels.

Social institutions also need to give substantive recognition to contributions outside of occupations.

Individuals can find meaning for themselves, but social recognition requires public arrangements. People who care full-time for incapacitated elders devote a great deal of time and bear costs for their families and society; but when society measures contribution mainly through wages and job titles, this labor easily becomes invisible.

Meaningful recognition should be reflected in caregiving support, public services, and opportunities for social participation, not merely in praise for "selfless dedication." Drucker valued nonprofit organizations in his later years precisely because modern society needs organizations beyond commercial enterprises to carry public participation and social responsibility.

Recognition also concerns whether a person has the conditions to continue contributing. If people caring for incapacitated relatives receive no public service support, the "family role" may become an unbearable burden; if communities provide activity spaces and organizational channels, volunteer service is more likely to turn from individual enthusiasm into stable participation.

Individuals can increase the sources of identity, while institutions must increase the ways contribution is socially recognized. If public evaluation still revolves only around occupational rank, multiple identities will find it hard to truly provide people with stable dignity.

When work is no longer the only proof of identity

We once habitually answered "who I am" with an occupation. This habit came from a long process of modernization, and it did indeed help many people gain independence, achievement, and respect through labor. Today, as technology continues to complete tasks for people, the social needs carried by occupations will not automatically disappear.

A person may no longer prove their ability by writing code or completing drawings with their own hands, but they still want to take part in something worthwhile and be accountable for the results. Even if technology can accomplish most tasks, building trust with others and living together still require people to take part in person.

Technological progress gives society the chance to create more with less labor. At the same time, we may need to start measuring progress in another way: whether a person's dignity can stop being so tightly bound to their position, income, and job performance.

When people can both achieve something at work and be genuinely needed outside of work, the time saved by technology has a chance to become human freedom. Otherwise, as machines become more capable, people may find it harder and harder to answer why they matter. AI industry signal channel: Frontier Technology

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