Devaluation - How AI dismantles the self-conception of work and why the current crisis is psychological

A few days ago, Prof. Holger Schmidt shared an intriguing study with new figures on the impact of AI on job segments.
As I read it, it became clear to me that it's not so much about the numbers. It’s about psychology.
To me, the study shows a tectonic shift in the collective self-image of work. In the future, 81 percent of skills in software development are fully AI-transformable. In caregiving, only 4 percent.
It sounds like technology, but it’s psychology. Because what's breaking here is not the profession—but the self-esteem that was tied to it.

Our identity arises through function: "I am what I do." But if what you do can soon be done better by machines, the question remains: Who am I then? The result is a stealthy psychological erosion. People whose activities are highly automatable experience a loss of meaning. A new form of cognitive dissonance arises: between a sense of competence and interchangeability. The higher the AI proportion, the greater the identity crisis.

Interestingly, this doesn’t only affect traditional knowledge work. Creative, communicative, and leadership tasks (long considered irreplaceable) are also slipping into the realm of hybrid or assisted transformation. Humans become overseers of machines. Control replaces design. This creates a paradoxical form of alienation: you are still part of the process, but no longer its center.

The psychological consequence is a new hierarchy of significance. Care, education, and craftsmanship suddenly gain emotional charge because they embody human resonance; something algorithms cannot imitate. Simultaneously, highly-skilled knowledge workers lose their aura. They become interfaces; controlling, delegating, accompanying.
In doing so, our understanding of work itself changes: from a place of self-realisation to a place of system integration. Meaning is no longer derived from performance but from the ability to supervise, interpret, and correct machines. This is not liberation, but a subtle form of psychological decentering.

This is the true transformation: not technological, but existential. We are experiencing the transition from a working society to an observing society, where humans act less and watch more as the machine acts. The future of work will not be determined by AI, but by the question of how much psychological significance humans can retain in the new system.

The greatest danger of the AI revolution is not unemployment, but meaninglessness. If people do not redefine themselves, then the real crisis will not be economic but psychological: a devaluation of the self.