AI, Utility, and the Need for a World Worth Living In

Why the Current Conversation Feels So Small

The reason nobody is offering a truly satisfying answer to the AI crisis is that the crisis is much, much bigger than the solutions being suggested.

Most of the conversation feels like table tennis. One side says universal basic income. The other says retraining. One side says regulation. The other says innovation. One side says shorter working weeks. The other says new jobs will appear. Back and forth it goes, as if the problem is just a matter of finding the right policy adjustment. Tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock.

But that is why nothing makes the lightbulb come on. The problem is too large for small answers. AI is not merely threatening jobs. It is threatening the way people understand their own usefulness.

So, I am going to suggest something radical that’s not even all that original. But first, let’s understand the real problem.

The Real Wound Is Utility

That is the real wound.

People do not only need income. They need to feel that their capacities matter. They need to feel that something they can do is needed by others. They need to feel that their effort has a place in the world. A person can try to survive without meaningful contribution, but they cannot easily live well without it.

This is why the usual answers feel inadequate. Universal basic income may help people survive while they sit on a park bench feeling hollow. Retraining may help some people move into new work that they then hate while watching AI get better at also replacing that job. Shorter working weeks may reduce pressure while you wonder when the one-day week will turn into a no-day week. Regulation may slow some forms of harm, but that’s always going to be like trying to sweep the tide back. In the end, none of these will fully answer the deeper question: what am I for, if machines can now do what I used to do?

An artist does not only fear losing commissions. A writer does not only fear losing clients. A designer, coder, teacher, musician, analyst, administrator, or craftsperson does not only fear losing income. They may fear losing social meaning. They may fear becoming surplus to requirements. They may fear that the world no longer needs what they are.

That fear is not irrational. It follows directly from the framework we currently live inside.

The Framework Was Already Broken

Let’s take a step closer to what we’re going to have to do to solve this looming crisis.

Modern society teaches people to understand their value through productivity, competition, income, status, and individual achievement. You are valuable if you can sell something. You are valuable if the market rewards you. You are valuable if you can outperform others. You are valuable if you can turn yourself into a useful economic unit.

AI exposes the poverty of that framework.

If your worth depends on producing outputs, then any machine that can produce those outputs faster, cheaper, and at greater scale appears to reduce your worth. If your value depends on market usefulness, then technological progress can start to feel like personal erasure.

So the AI crisis is not only technological. It is philosophical. It forces us to ask whether the way we attribute value to human beings was ever good enough in the first place.

I do not think it was. Or rather, it was to some extent, but no longer is.

Capitalism reduces value to market value. Individualism leaves each person trying to manufacture meaning alone. Together, they create a world in which people are constantly required to prove their worth, compete for recognition, and justify their existence through productivity. That’s OK while you’re still winning and lack sufficient compassion for those struggling, but not so OK when AI no longer gives you the option to win.

That world was always geared to making people anxious, lonely, exhausted, and insecure. AI has not created the underlying emptiness. It has simply made a lot more people realise they are on a chopping board and the blade is coming down.

The Question Needs to Change

This is why the question needs to change.

Most discussions about AI ask: how do we distribute money when machines do more of the work? That question matters, but it is not deep enough. The deeper question is: what becomes scarce when machines can produce more and more of what humans used to produce?

If AI can generate images, articles, music, code, lesson plans, reports, designs, adverts, analysis, and endless content, then many outputs become less scarce. But that does not mean everything important becomes abundant.

In fact, the opposite seems to be happening.

The things that are becoming scarce are meaning, trust, belonging, attention, dignity, judgement, beauty, emotional stability, shared reality, and the feeling of being seen. A world flooded with synthetic output doesn’t lack content. It lacks orientation. It lacks reasons to care. It lacks real human presence. It lacks community.

That means we need a different framework of understanding. Not just a new policy. Not just a fairer distribution model. We need a new account of what life is really about, what purpose human beings serve, how value is attributed, and what kind of world we are trying to build together.

The reason why so few discussions are about this is that it is extremely difficult to figure out how to do this. It requires a transition akin to moving from a flat-earth model to a spherical one. That’s no small matter.

From Material Scarcity to Well-being Scarcity

The old economy asks: what goods and services are scarce, and how do we allocate them?

A more human economy would ask: what forms of human flourishing are scarce, and how do we produce, protect, and distribute them?

That shift changes everything.

Take the example of an artist whose commercial work is devalued by AI. In the old economy, the artist is a producer of visual commodities. If the commodity becomes cheap, the artist appears less useful and eventually becomes redundant. But what if that is the wrong way to understand the artist’s value?

The artist may help children develop visual confidence. They may help older people preserve memory. They may help communities recover identity. They may help people process grief. They may create beauty in dead institutional spaces. They may teach attention in a distracted world. They may help people feel seen.

The image may be less scarce. But the human capacity behind art may be more important than ever.

The Human World Becomes the Work

The same is true for teachers, carers, musicians, writers, gardeners, mentors, philosophers, coaches, mediators, craftspeople, and community builders. These people are not merely producing outputs. They are helping maintain the human world.

And once machines can produce endless outputs, maintaining the human world becomes central.

AI can generate things that look meaningful. It can produce a poem, an image, a song, a lesson plan, a comforting reply, or a personal message. Some of it may be useful. Some of it may even be beautiful. But meaning does not live only in the object. Meaning comes from relationship, context, memory, intention, struggle, recognition, and shared life.

A birthday card from your child matters differently from a perfect AI-generated message. A song written by someone who lived through pain matters differently from a simulation of pain. A community mural matters differently from an image generated in seconds.

The difference is not always technical. It is relational.

Human beings do not only need outputs. We need one another. We need shared projects. We need to know that our lives affect other lives. We need visible mutual dependence. That is what individualism has weakened, and that is what any serious response to AI must restore.

Let’s do a reality check here: you might read this, roll your eyes, and declare that it won’t work. It’s not practical. It’s Kumbaja idealistic. I agree. In the present framework, the present economic structure, and our present addiction to individualism, this will not work. We need more.

The Economy Must Serve Life

The core shift is simple (and not simple). A material-scarcity economy says: produce more goods, and well-being may follow. A well-being-scarcity economy says: produce well-being directly, and use material abundance to support it.

That is the inversion.

The purpose of society should not be to keep markets expanding while people become more isolated, anxious, humiliated, and replaceable. The purpose of society should be to create a world in which people can live meaningful, connected, dignified, emotionally stable, and useful lives.

That means the economy must become subordinate to life. Not the other way round.

What This Would Require

So what would this involve?

First, material sufficiency has to become the floor. Food, housing, healthcare, education, transport, energy, and digital access should not depend entirely on whether the market currently finds someone useful. If automation produces abundance, that abundance should free people from the terror of uselessness, not intensify it.

Second, we need to map well-being deficits. Loneliness, anxiety, youth despair, elder isolation, humiliation, loss of trust, lack of agency, cultural disconnection, and meaninglessness are not just private emotional issues. They are social scarcities. They show where communal life has broken down.

Third, we need to match human capacities to human needs. Instead of asking only, “What job can you get?”, we should also ask, “What capacities do you carry, and where are those capacities needed?” Some people carry patience. Some carry imagination. Some carry practical skill. Some carry wisdom. Some carry humour. Some carry care. Some carry the ability to organise, teach, heal, beautify, remember, mentor, or build trust.

These capacities matter. They are not secondary to the economy. They are part of what the economy should exist to support.

Fourth, people need contribution rights. A humane society should not merely give people income after displacement. It should help them find meaningful forms of contribution, because the right to survive is not enough. People also need the right to matter.

But these things cannot be put in place on shifting sand. They need a solid foundation. They need a radical new shared framework of understanding human worth: one strong enough to say that people are not valuable because they are employable, profitable, or efficient. They are valuable because they are human. The economy should be organised around that fact, not the other way round.

Why Capitalism and Individualism Cannot Solve This

This is why the AI conversation cannot remain trapped inside the assumptions that created the crisis. Capitalism tells us that value is whatever the market rewards. But markets do not reliably reward what human beings need most. They often reward extraction, manipulation, addiction, distraction, artificial scarcity, and status anxiety.

Individualism tells us that each person must create their own meaning, prove their own worth, and secure their own place. But human beings are not isolated self-projects. We are relational beings. We become ourselves through others.

So the solution cannot be capitalism with a few compensations attached. Nor can it be endless individual reinvention while machines absorb more and more of the roles people once used to understand themselves.

We need something more radical. We need to dismantle the idea that society exists to serve markets, and rebuild around the truth that markets should serve life. We need to dismantle the fantasy of the isolated individual and restore the reality of communal belonging. We need to build a world worth living in, and that means making society primarily about people, relationships, contribution, and community.

The reason this is difficult to take seriously is that our flat-earth understanding does not yet allow us to see this reality and its potential. We need a complete reframing of meaning, purpose, worth and belonging that will allow us to step across the boundary of our current perception of the world and our part in it.

I have proposed such a reframing in my new book: Flowmonics – Rebuilding Meaning, Purpose and Worth on Secular Foundations: https://mybook.to/nzlqnO

The Real Answer to AI

AI may force us to see something we should have recognised long ago: human value was never reducible to output.

A person’s worth is not the same as their productivity. Their usefulness is not exhausted by what they can sell. Their purpose cannot be measured only by market demand.

When machines make outputs abundant, the scarce resource becomes the human capacity to live well together.

So the answer to AI is not simply to pay people after machines replace them. It is to rebuild society around the forms of human value that machines cannot truly satisfy: meaning, belonging, trust, care, beauty, purpose, and shared life.

If we get this wrong, AI could produce a mass crisis of uselessness.

But if we get it right, it could force a long-overdue moral evolution.

It could be the moment we stop building society around markets, things, and isolated individuals, and start building it around people, community, and a life worth living.