This paper clarifies the concept of self-determined work as a structurally necessary condition of reality-binding in the context of advanced artificial intelligence. Building on the concept of work-integrated relational agency, which was developed in earlier works as a critique of functionalized labor, it is shown that self-determination was never meant as a normative ideal or ethical preference, but as a prerequisite for work to retain its relation to reality and its capacity for innovation.The central thesis is that work is not to be understood as activity, task fulfillment, or economic function, but as a form of irreversible, world-binding action in which human Eigenzeit is not delegable. Artificial intelligence does not function here as the cause of the problem, but as a structural test case that makes visible which aspects of work can be functionally replaced—and which, in principle, cannot. While AI can formally simulate decisions, interactions, and innovation processes, it is structurally incapable of performing work-integrated relational agency, since it lacks Eigenzeit, responsibility-binding, and an irreversible relation to the world.The paper introduces the concept of Eigenzeit as a category previously missing from the debate on work and shows that self-determined work is necessary because only it can effectively bind Eigenzeit to the world. By contrast, heteronomous work reproduces functioning processes but loses its enactment of reality and increasingly generates simulation instead of innovation. The paper thus provides an ontological clarification of the concept of work under conditions of artificial simulation, without resorting to moral, psychological, or labor-market-based argumentations. Against this background, self-determined work is identified as an ontological stability condition of human world-capability in the age of AI—not as an option, but as a structural necessity.