How the Business and Humanities Schism Shapes AI Implementation, Entrepreneurship and Justice Experiences

This paper considers how competing worldviews, rooted in an underlying schism between business and humanities understanding of economics, increasingly shape AI advancements, their use, and the implications for the experiences of justice in society. The schism emerged during the mid-19th century as classical economics (originating around Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations) developed into the utility-based, ahistorical Marginalist Revolution, which prioritized efficiency and quantitative models (now dominant in business and management education), and the dialectical-based, historical Marxist Revolution (underlying the assumptions of theorists in the Humanities and many social sciences). These reflect deeper ideological tensions: a focus on objective optimization and AI-driven decision-making versus a commitment to subjective autonomy and the preservation of human agency. We discuss “justice experiences†, a wide range of events ranging from actions in the judicial/legal system to personal and social impressions of, and expressions for, what is just. While AI promises to reduce costs and accelerate resolutions across civil disputes, criminal cases, and broader social justice concerns, automation risks deepening economic and legal inequalities. Further, the issue of alienation from the production of justice suggests another bifurcation: those who have lower incomes and few assets might only be provided with AI-generated resolutions, with traditional lawyers and court proceedings available only to the wealthiest. Beyond supply, this may increase demand for justice experiences, potentially widening the gap between what justice people receive and what they believe they deserve, and lead to exacerbating, and not reducing, social justice issues.