Mind Leaps

What’s our future with AI?

No, I am not going to begin with the cliché of comparing AI to historical technological leaps, such as the Industrial Revolution or the dot-com era, which created new jobs. You’ve heard enough of those comparisons. Yet, you are still filled with questions about our future, aren’t you? Instead, I invite you to adopt a more fundamental perspective as we explore this potentially existential crisis facing humanity.

Where do I start? Labor. What does labor mean to human society today? For many, it is a means of living and survival. Yet, the modern conception of labor—fixed working hours for wages at a defined workplace, with employment as the primary channel for distributing economic benefits—is largely a product of the Industrial Revolution. Since then, we have witnessed massive growth in the human population and the rise of corporate behemoths employing vast numbers of people. Factories introduced division of labor, where individuals didn’t need to grasp the whole production process—just their specific role, or their cog in the machine. This created room for middle layers: supervisors, schedulers, analysts. Over time, alongside substantial government expansion, many institutions have become too large and interconnected to fail. In the past 250 years, humanity has developed enormous systems wherever it has stepped, and nearly everyone has become a cog within these divided yet interconnected structures. This development has conditioned us to believe this system is necessary for survival—the only way we can live. Very few have noticed the disconnect between headcount and value the systems produce, whether government, large corporations, academia, or elsewhere. These systems, while delivering unprecedented material prosperity for many, have served as critical means to provide agency and meaning to individuals who were shaped to exist and become such systems—yet we must question whether this prosperity has come at too high a cost to genuine human meaning and agency.

In present days, what measures our value? On a micro-scale, our productivity in those specific roles—or rather, our perceived productivity. On a macro-scale, our consumption, which fuels the way we operate, work, and sustain our economic systems. This very way of group operation and group participation has undoubtedly objectified human beings, reduced our presence to efficiency, or driving efficiency. Aren’t we already in The Matrix, operating as human batteries?

Weirdly enough, you may ask, how human objectification is converted to consumption on a macro-scale? Just a few hundred years ago, humans existed primarily as producers and each labor product was bound to human relationships, craftsmanship, creativity and genuine communal need. The modern system of extreme specialization and fragmentation—where most people contribute tiny parts to vast processes they neither control nor fully understand—represents a fundamental shift in our relationship to work and to each other. This transformation carries profound implications for how we derive meaning and identity from our labor. Within the deep lake of the human subconscious, can we speculate there sits an actual yet subtle awareness that there is indeed little agency in our modern life, and consumption has begun to play as a compensation mechanism to fill that hollowness we once didn’t have? By consumption, I refer specifically to excessive hedonism driven by materials, resource hoarding, and wealth symbolism. I have long wondered why younger generations globally show similar patterns of identity crises despite drastically different cultural backgrounds. Perhaps this is the answer: regardless of culture, humanity has been entrenched in this existential crisis long enough for the fundamental question to surface—do we matter?

Now, what about AI? To be clear, I don’t oppose technological advancement; in fact, I very much enjoy being a part of it. However, technology alone doesn’t directly address the structural issues in our society. What does AI mean for our work and the way we live? Many have hoped AI won’t replace human labor, yet if we view human labor through the lens of efficiency and productivity, few strong arguments hold for why humans couldn’t be replaced if AI can achieve or symbolize productivity better—and in many ways, it already does. AI agents are explicitly designed with capabilities to replace human roles. As many scholars suggest, technological advancements might fundamentally alter how we live—and this change is occurring faster than ever before.

The potential for rapid labor displacement has prompted many to propose various solutions, such as universal basic income (UBI)—a system where governments provide all citizens with a regular stipend regardless of employment status—and data dividends, which would compensate individuals for the use of their personal data by the Techs. However, none of these methods are aimed at solving the fundamental problem of human objectification; rather, they dangerously perpetuate it. This reflects a narrow imagination focused on preserving our current economic structures with minimal adjustments instead of fundamentally reorganizing work and resource distribution, potentially incorporating historical alternatives.

I am not attempting to propose a solution here, but I do want to challenge ourselves to think if we can take the agency back into our own hands. There have been many efforts diverting AI safety attention solely to speculative existential risks, which forces us to overlook the much more imminent existential crisis within humanity itself. The debate around AI and humanity’s future remains unresolved because we’re essentially trying to reimagine fundamental aspects of how society functions—something not required on this scale since perhaps the Industrial Revolution. Unlike previous transitions where solutions gradually emerged over generations, AI’s rapid advancement may dramatically compress our adaptation period.

Entrenched interests, complex interdependencies, and the sheer scale of global systems will certainly resist transformation. Yet, this is precisely why we cannot rely on policy makers or the select few who control billions of dollars in their hands and have significant conflicts of interest to address this issue. The very complexity of our challenge demands that we–as individuals and communities–imagine our purpose again and take the execution of it into our own hands. Our future depends not on technological solutions or policy tweaks, but on us to reclaim our humanity from the systems that have objectified it.