A Dialectical Perspective on Technological Alienation in the AI Era: Ethics, Trust, and Human-Centered Design

As artificial intelligence technologies deeply integrate into production and social systems, they simultaneously trigger ethical crises including labor alienation, cognitive degradation, and emotional detachment. This study builds upon Marxist alienation theory and Engels' proposition that "labor created humanity" to examine the dual nature of technological alienation in the AI era. We propose a theoretical framework of "technological alienation—trust crisis—synergistic reconstruction" from a human factors engineering perspective. Through comparative analysis of industrial manufacturing and service sector cases, we identify transparency design, dynamic authority allocation, and cross-cultural adaptation as critical mechanisms for balancing instrumental and value rationality. We further propose a human-centered AI development paradigm encompassing technical, organizational, and policy dimensions. Our findings suggest that while technological alienation cannot be eliminated, it can be dynamically managed through dialectical reconciliation. This research contributes theoretical foundations for ethical governance in human-AI collaboration and practical guidelines for human-centered technology design.