AI Won’t Destroy Jobs — It Will Destroy Meaning

We are asking the wrong question about artificial intelligence. Commentators fixate on whether AI will take jobs, create new ones, or shift people into different roles. But the real crisis isn’t unemployment. It’s the erosion of meaning.

Work has always been more than a paycheck. It is identity, purpose, and a daily reminder that we contribute to something larger than ourselves. When machines start doing our jobs—not just faster, but better—we may still collect salaries, but the psychic foundation of work begins to collapse.

Consider the lawyer who once prided themselves on parsing complex contracts. AI now drafts them in seconds. The radiologist whose years of training made them invaluable now competes with an algorithm that never sleeps. Even creative professionals—writers, designers, musicians—find their outputs rivaled by generative models that can mimic style, tone, and structure with unsettling ease. The problem isn’t just displacement. It’s the hollowing out of human contribution.

Governments respond with “reskilling” programs, promising to train workers to collaborate with machines. But collaboration itself can be corrosive. If your contribution is reduced to refining prompts, editing machine drafts, or supervising outputs you don’t fully understand, is that truly work—or theater, a human mask over machine intelligence?

The deeper danger is existential. Humans can adapt to new types of labor; we have done so for millennia. What we cannot easily adapt to is purposelessness. To work without necessity is to perform without meaning. Nietzsche warned of nihilism in the absence of purpose; AI threatens to industrialize it. Optimists argue that AI will free us to pursue art, leisure, and passion projects. But passion thrives when contrasted with duty. Leisure has meaning only when counterbalanced by labor. A life of endless optimization, where machines outthink us and outproduce us, risks leaving us with free time that feels less like liberation and more like exile from relevance.

The crisis of AI is not the future of work. It is the future of worth. A society that strips human beings of the sense that their efforts matter is not merely technologically advanced—it is spiritually bankrupt. The question we should be asking is not, “What jobs will survive?” but “What meaning will remain?”