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As the new year begins I want to share a more positive perspective on post-AGI future or even further ahead on a world of near-full automation. Amid widespread fears of job loss and humans becoming economically unnecessary, a future in which AI systems create most value may instead push us to rediscover what it means to be human.
This thought emerged over the past few months while I was preparing PhD applications. Application periods always inevitably turn practical decisions into existential ones. As I kept asking myself what I wanted to do and what I truly cared about, I noticed how often my sense of meaning collapsed into a single idea: value creation, producing something impactful. It felt less like an expression of who I was, and more like a standard I believed others expected of me. Meaning becomes tied to output—a belief I had absorbed without ever stopping to examine it.
That realization points to something structural. In the societies many of us live in, human worth is routinely proxied by productivity. We pay people to signal worth, praise productivity as virtue, and struggle to articulate why those who do not or cannot produce are still fully valuable. This logic is so embedded that even when we critique it politically, many of us still live by it psychologically. “What do you do?” becomes a proxy for “Why do you matter?”
But what happens when value creation is no longer dominated by humans but rather by AI systems? In economic terms, AI increasingly looks like a general-purpose input: producing text, code, designs, scientific hypotheses, even art at scale. Much of the current anxiety around automation is a direct response to this: if humans are no longer needed to produce value, what happens to meaning? But this question already assumes that human worth must be earned through production in the first place.
A different possibility is that as AI systems make productivity increasingly abundant, it loses its authority as a measure of human worth. When output can be generated at scale by machines, it no longer functions as a meaningful proxy for value. Paradoxically, this shift could make society more human-centered than ever rather than less. The qualities that differentiate humans from artificial agents, the fact of being someone rather than something may become more scarce and cherished. Recently, I learned about a startup in Switzerland that issues certificates for human-created artworks, explicitly labeling them as such in a landscape saturated with generative models. To me, this looks like an early cultural response to such a mindset shift, when production becomes cheap, origin and meaning become precious, preserving human presence as values in themselves.
From this perspective, AI does not merely threaten existing labor structures; it exposes the moral assumptions embedded within them. It forces us to ask whether it ever made sense to judge humans primarily by their contribution to collective output. It invites a reevaluation of social worth that many philosophers and social theorists have long argued for, but that scarcity made difficult to implement. In a world where machines handle much of what we once called “value creation,” the question becomes not how humans can compete, but why they ever had to.
None of this guarantees a good outcome. Post-AGI futures still depend on governance, safety, and political choices, and many paths remain dangerous. Productivity might still remain central even if humans are excluded from it. But as the new year begins, I find it meaningful to hold onto this possibility that abundance and automation might not erase meaning, but shift it away from production, and back toward the fact of being human itself. If that happens, even partially, the future may be less alien than we fear.
Happy New Year.
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