Human Resilience in the AI Era -- What Machines Can't Replace

Abstract:AI is changing work and decision making faster than many institutions can adapt their operating practices. We argue that this adaptation gap makes human resilience a core capability for the AI era. We define resilience as the capacity to absorb disruption while preserving effective action and human agency around core purposes. The framework operates at three interacting levels. Psychological resilience keeps a person goal-directed under stress. Social resilience makes trusted support and correction available across a group. Organizational resilience turns detected problems into learning and recovery. We connect established resilience and technostress research with direct AI-in-the-loop experiments. General resilience is trainable, while AI-specific causal evidence is still emerging. Direct AI studies show that assistance can raise productivity and spread expertise. Other experiments show improved expressed empathy and more calibrated reliance. We translate these findings into a practical agenda for AI education, workplace design, governance, and evaluation. The central proposal is socio-technical: structural safeguards define the operating boundary, while resilient people and institutions provide adaptive capacity when conditions change.

Computers and Society (cs.CY); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2510.25218 [cs.CY]

(or arXiv:2510.25218v2 [cs.CY] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.25218 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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