What Are Humans For?

We have reached a rather strange point.

In the previous articles, it was still possible to talk about economics, work, scarcity and the right to make decisions. These are familiar systems questions: there is a function, there are resources, there are constraints.

Now we are left with a question that does not fit very comfortably into an engineering diagram.

What are humans for?

It is an especially unpleasant question to ask a human being on a Monday morning. The answer may be emotional.

We are used to answering with a profession

Ask an adult “What do you do?” and they will almost automatically name a job: engineer, doctor, entrepreneur, teacher.

Profession has become a convenient shorthand for identity. It tells us what a person can do, roughly where they sit in society, approximately what they earn, and how much of their day is occupied by things that can be entered in a calendar.

As long as human labour is essential to the economy, this description feels natural.

But if machines one day perform a large share of useful work, the link begins to look odd. Does a person’s value really fall together with demand for their economic function?

We have never applied that logic consistently

If we are honest, society has never treated usefulness as the sole measure of a person.

A newborn produces nothing. A seriously ill person may require more resources for years than they generate. An elderly relative does not have to justify their right to care with a quarterly productivity report.

We do not love them as efficient components in a family system.

That is so obvious in close relationships that it is almost surprising how quickly we forget the same principle when talking about society and the economy.

Machines need a purpose

The question “What is a human for?” is suspicious in itself. It is the sort of question we ask about an object.

What is a pump for? Moving fluid. What is a server for? Storing and processing data. What is software for? Solving a task.

A machine has a purpose assigned from outside. If the function disappears, the machine can be switched off.

Human beings did not appear because someone was designing civilisation and noticed a vacant box in the architecture.

So perhaps the demand that a human being prove their necessity already contains the mistake. A chair has to be useful. A person does not.

A chair has to be useful. A person does not.

But without necessity, meaning becomes a problem

Freedom from compulsory work sounds wonderful right up to the question: what do I do on Tuesday morning?

Work provides more than money. It gives rhythm, a social circle, a sense of movement, competition, recognition, problems to be annoyed about, and the excellent opportunity to dream about a holiday.

If a large part of that disappears, income alone will not replace it. Meaning will have to be built more deliberately.

That may prove unexpectedly harder than going to work. Freedom is inconvenient partly because it leaves too few people to blame for one’s own diary.

A society beyond compulsory work may require not less maturity, but more.

Creativity does not have to be a competition with a machine

A popular consolation is that people will turn to creativity. Then AI starts drawing and composing music, and the consolation needs another repair.

But creativity is not valuable only when a human produces the best result.

I can play the guitar worse than a machine, draw worse than an image generator and cook dinner worse than a professional robot. That does not make the activity meaningless.

We have no difficulty accepting that people run even though cars are faster. They play chess even though computers are stronger. They cook dinner even though they could order it.

Perhaps, after AI, we will have to extend the same logic to many more intellectual activities: doing something not because nobody can do it better, but because doing it is part of one’s own life.

And back to my son

I began this series for a very simple reason: I look at my young son and try to understand what I should prepare him for.

After all these arguments, the answer has become both more complicated and simpler.

I still do not know which profession he will need. I do not know how much his generation will work, or which decisions it will hand over to machines. I do not know which of today’s skills will become as ordinary as searching for information on a phone.

But I certainly do not look at a child and think: what economic function must he perform to justify his existence?

That would be a rather peculiar form of fatherhood.

Perhaps that is the answer we find oddly difficult to extend to adults.

A human being does not have to beat AI on productivity, intelligence or usefulness in order to retain a place in the world.

If technology ever forces us to remember that seriously, it may not be the worst outcome of the whole revolution.