What Are Humans For?

“What a piece of work is a man,… the paragon of animals!”

The rapid gains this past year in generative AI have reawakened anxieties over mass job losses — anxieties that have flared up recurrently over the entirety of the computer age. From the beginning of industrialization, of course, automation has posed threats to some people’s livelihoods. But the disruptions caused by the mechanization of muscle were confined to the lower orders of society, and were more than matched (eventually) by the expansion of opportunities for higher pay in other sectors. When the advent of computers showed that the automation of thinking was now becoming possible, however, elites awakened to the fact that progress might soon be coming for them. Moreover, if machines became not only stronger and faster than us, but smarter as well, what opportunities would be left for any of us to offset all the displacement? Thus arose the “automation crisis” of the 1950s and 60s. Machines are “the precise equivalent of slave labor,” intoned cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener ominously, and “any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.”

We can look back and tut-tut those overblown fears, chalking them up to the “lump of labor” fallacy. Yet while it might be true that human wants and desires are indefinitely extensible, and thus that there is always productive work to be done, it could still be the case that the work is worth so little that it doesn’t pay to do it. Under those conditions, mass technological unemployment is a real possibility.

We know this is true because it’s happened before. There is a class of once-highly valuable workers that has been rendered substantially obsolete because of automation: horses. After the invention of cars, trucks, and tractors, it was of course still possible to use horse-drawn conveyances instead. The problem was, the horses couldn’t earn enough to pay for their feeding and upkeep. Accordingly, the employment of horses shrank dramatically — as did their total numbers.

For humans, the relevant threshold is the “social minimum” — the floor for income and living standards that social institutions provide for people regardless of their ability to work. In the preindustrial past, of course, such a thing hardly existed, as famines occurred regularly and hunger was a familiar companion. But in rich industrialized societies today, a floor is maintained — and the height of the floor rises over time as the society grows richer. When the value of a person’s work falls below that floor, participation in the labor market no longer makes economic sense.

The combination of automation and rising per capita incomes has now reached the point that attachment to the labor market is weakening. The labor force participation rate for “prime age” men (aged 25-54) has been slowly but steadily sliding downward for decades — from 97 percent in 1960 down to 89 percent today. Most of this decline is occurring in the low end of the labor market and reflects the poor opportunities facing less-skilled workers. We don’t typically refer to this drop in labor force participation as technological unemployment, but that is what it amounts to.

Accordingly, I take seriously the prospect that AI could eventually render significant chunks of the population functionally unemployable. Things could go very differently, of course. It’s possible that AI can be used to dramatically boost ordinary workers’ productivity and thus prove a boon to both their compensation and levels of engagement. But my bet is for current trends to continue: even as AI showers us with benefits and creates all kinds of new jobs to do, its overall net effect will be to further erode commitment to paid employment, especially at the low end of the labor market.

The ultimate challenge brought into focus by AI, though, goes beyond the future of the labor market. It goes to the question posed as the title of this essay: what are humans really for, anyway? If machines have liberated us to the point that we are free to do whatever we want, how should we use that freedom? If any productive task we might care to perform can be accomplished better, more quickly, and more easily by machines, what tasks do we continue to reserve for ourselves anyway?

A central element of business strategy revolves around what is known as the make-or-buy decision: if you’re making widgets, which components and inputs do you decide to produce for yourself, and which do you source through contracting in the marketplace? The relevant costs and benefits that need to be compared are not always easy to tease out. Choosing to manufacture a given input in-house may impose extra costs in the short run, but in the process create new capabilities for the firm that can be exploited for profit down the line. In such situations, opting to prefer building long-term capabilities over enjoying short-term convenience can end up being the key to corporate success.

The prospect of artificial general intelligence confronts humanity with a series of existential make-or-buy decisions. And the crux of the issue in all of those decisions is the tradeoff between convenience and capability. For everything that we hand over to the machines to do for us, we will tell ourselves that by doing so we have freed up time for what’s really important. But much of what’s really important in life requires the patient and laborious development of capabilities to accomplish and enjoy. As I pointed out in a recent essay, the flipside of specialization is the atrophy of everything outside that narrow specialty. To “live wisely and agreeably and well,” we cannot always choose effortless convenience – that way lies WALL-E-fication. Flourishing is an active virtue, and thus we cannot focus exclusively on freeing up time. We have to focus as well on spending time and expending effort — but on what?

It's important to note, though, that these make-or-buy decisions started confronting us — and we started to stumble in making them — long before ChatGPT arrived on the scene. In a delightfully perceptive recent essay for The Economist, Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi point out people have been outsourcing work to inscrutable artificial intelligences for some time now — we know them better as the market and the state. They start off by discussing the internet meme that compares the new generative AI large language models to a “shoggoth” — H. P. Lovecraft’s “amorphous monster bubbling with tentacles and eyes.” The comparison aptly evokes our trepidation in heading down the road toward creating something more powerful than ourselves; “Lovecraft’s shoggoths,” Farrell and Shalizi note, “were artificial servants that rebelled against their creators.” But then they go on to say:

But what such worries fail to acknowledge is that we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications.

The story of modernity is at its center the story of the development of life at superhuman scale, the weaving of humanity into vast webs of interdependence coordinated and regulated by the impersonal institutions — or, more provocatively, the superhuman intelligence — of market and state systems. What Adam Smith called the “great society,” what F. A. Hayek called the “extended order,” summoned the immense powers we now wield and heaped up the great wealth we now enjoy by integrating millions of strangers into far-flung and highly intricate networks of specialization and exchange.

This “great enrichment,” as Deirde McCloskey calls it, has mixed burdens with its blessings. To enjoy the benefits that these impersonal institutions offer, we have had to adapt ourselves to their sometimes-inhuman logic, subjecting ourselves to the diktats of the clock, the boss, shifts in consumer preferences, macroeconomic fluctuations, established agency procedures, legislative machinations, and changes in the political climate.

And as I discussed in an earlier essay, we have now pursued the logic of specialization and outsourcing to the point where we have allowed vital capabilities necessary for flourishing to atrophy. Our sustaining personal relationships are unraveling; our bodies are bloated; our attention is shriveling; and our experiences are increasingly of mediated simulacra rather than the real thing.

So well before the recent surge in AI progress, the question of what are humans for has grown increasingly urgent. Both consumerism and the welfare state prosper by making a beguiling appeal: outsource responsibilities to the market and the state to make time for what really matters. And like the frog lounging in a pot on a slow boil, our vitality has been slowing slipping away without our really noticing it.

Now, however, all the buzz about AI confronts us with the shock of dramatic transformation — not the gradual, imperceptible offloading of our responsibilities, but sudden confrontation with the possibility that all our responsibilities could be stripped from us. We are face to face with the permanent problem in its starkest formulation: what do you do when you don’t have to do anything?

The question leads us to think about the nature of human flourishing at the collective level. As I have discussed earlier, at the individual level there is enormous variety in the specific activities that lead to lives of meaning and purpose and fulfillment. But when we back up and look at what it means for an entire society to be flourishing, or our entire species, we will see that all that variety resolves into a few basic themes. When we ask what are humans for, we are asking what constitutes the broad outline of humans’ highest and best destiny.

Answers to a question this profound cannot be settled definitively one way or another. Rather, they are statements of faith that reflect our deepest values and aspirations. All I can do here is lay my cards on the table and give my reasons for holding them.

Let’s start with what fundamentally distinguishes us from our machine creations, however hyper-competent they may someday be. We human beings are alive, biological organisms who must use our senses, emotions, and cognition to survive. Moreover, we are only one species in a vast and teeming biosphere, out of which we evolved and on which we depend for our existence.

For humans to flourish as a species, then, at the most basic level they need to be flourishing biologically. Humans have already used their unique gifts to settle every conceivable terrestrial environment and to increase their numbers over a thousandfold since the end of the Stone Age. To my mind, we cannot abandon this adventure and be true to what is best within us. It is an article of faith for me that human life — the miracle of human consciousness and self-awareness and cultural capacity — is the most precious thing in the universe. There is accordingly no higher calling than producing more of these miracles.

We are, however, not the only living miracle on this planet — far from it. Our relationship with the rest of the biosphere, though, is unique. For some time now, we have been the apex species, capable of affecting for good or ill the future of every other species on Earth. Until very recently, our impact on the rest of creation has been largely destructive, but we have now amassed the knowledge and powers to act differently. We currently influence the global climate; we need to learn quickly to control it and maintain the highly favorable (for humans, that is) Holocene equilibrium. We have the power to destroy whole ecosystems, but we have had some recent successes in maintaining and rebuilding others, and we are learning to create new ones and recreate old ones.

Our relationship with the living world is thus up to us. We can maintain the world as a lush and vibrant garden, or we can make a desert of it. There is no doubt in my mind which path better accords with human flourishing. Biophilia comes naturally to us: we bring animals into our home and treat them as beloved family members. And the truth is that we are all part of the great kingdom of living creatures, evolved from common ancestors; the truth is that we are all family. Our highest and best destiny, I therefore believe, is to make the flourishing of the biosphere a condition of our own. It is an old idea, but I don’t think it can be improved upon: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

But how do we obey the injunction to be fruitful and multiply while still exercising wise and benevolent dominion over the rest of life? There are already 8 billion of us, and it seems clear to me that the Earth’s carrying capacity for flourishing human communities has limits. To my mind, the obvious resolution of this conflict is to ensure that humanity’s destiny — and the destiny of Earth-based life — is not confined to its home planet. I cannot think of a more sublime story than this: we are that tiny part of the universe that has awakened to life and subjective experience, and beyond that to self-awareness, and from that privileged position we assume the responsibility to begin the awakening of the rest of the universe, by spreading humanity and life as far as we can.

Flourishing is ultimately a matter of realizing potential — of living in accordance with one’s nature so that the fullness of that nature is expressed. The vision of human destiny I have sketched so far flows from our unique nature as living creatures. We can sharpen that vision by recognizing that, as biological organisms of the same species, we share the same distinctive nature — that is, we share common traits that together inform our species’ potential.

Two traits in particular bear mentioning here, as the tension between them goes a long way toward explaining the twists and turns of the human condition. First of all, we are hyper-social creatures with profound and nonnegotiable needs for interpersonal intimacy and group belonging — and with a cultural capacity that gives us unmatched ability to cooperate with each other to achieve common goals. At the same time, we are aggressive, competitive, and curious, traits which frequently put us at odds with each other and with our social groupings and which underlie both our greatest achievements and our foulest crimes. Kant referred to this dual nature as humanity’s “unsocial sociability”: the “propensity to enter into society, bound together with a mutual opposition which constantly threatens to break up the society.” We live in the tension between our need for others and our individual willfulness.

At the existential level, our dual nature dictates that we pursue flourishing by submitting ourselves to a great imperative: in E.M. Forster’s words, “Only connect!” We exist as individual cells of awareness and self-awareness, knowing we are here for but an instant before we die alone. The workings of our minds, why we do what we do, start off as total mysteries, but they can reveal themselves over time if we do the necessary introspective work. Other people, no matter how close, are always destined to be strangers to some degree, but over time, if we do the work, they can become more fully visible to us as we become more visible to them. Our relationship with the broader world starts in the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of untutored sensory data, but over time — if we do the work — the confusion yields to ever deeper and richer understanding. Always, the work of humans is to connect — with ourselves, with others, with the world around us — in the never fully realizable attempt to address our radical incompleteness.

From our dual nature come what I have already identified as the two defining features of a flourishing society: inclusiveness and dynamism. What are humans for? First and foremost, they are for making and taking care of other human beings and enjoying their company. We may someday employ intelligent assistants to help us in these tasks, but we can never lose sight of the fact that vital connections to other flesh-and-blood people are at the heart of what makes life worth living. Furthermore, humans are for exploring and seeking to understand the world — and the larger universe — around them, and then using that understanding to serve human purposes. Here again, intelligent machines can help us; indeed, they very well may succeed in improving our understanding far beyond what our unaided minds were ever capable of. But the point, from our perspective at any rate, is to deepen and enrich human experience. And so, putting the two aspects of our dual nature together, we can conclude that humans are for endlessly exploring their relationships with each other and with the outer world. They are for establishing and enjoying human communities in every kind of habitable physical environment, terrestrial or otherwise, in forms as various as our inexhaustible cultural fertility will allow.

In the end, of course, the only way to know humanity’s actual destiny is to play the movie and find out what happens. But we, the actors in this movie, are also its writers and directors. Our destiny is ultimately up to us, and therefore we should make the most of that responsibility. We should aim high.

On that note, let me close with the final passage from the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, the book in which he introduces the concept of the “open society”:

Mankind lies groaning, half crushed under the weight of its own progress. Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they merely want to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.