AI Is Not a Labor Crisis. It Is a Meaning Crisis.

People are worried about all sorts of things when it comes to AI… killer robots / AGI deciding to dispose of humanity (on purpose or by accident), a modern Tower of Babel where AI makes it impossible to know truth or coordinate, etc…

But what people are not paying enough attention to is AI threat to human meaning itself — the stories we tell ourselves about why to get out of bed, suffer, strive, build, and continue. It may do so at a level no prior technology ever has…

Meaning is not some luxury layer on top of life. It is the critical input. It is the cost of our greatest gift: imagination. Because we can imagine futures, we cannot live without a reason to inhabit one.

We can weather shifts in labor markets, fight killer robots, and possibly navigate the destruction of shared reality / language — but kill human meaning and you eventually kill human civilization...