It's Not Just Jobs That AI Is Taking—It's Our Purpose

Losing work to AI threatens our sense of purpose, not just our paychecks.

Key points

• Humans will increasingly find ourselves displaced by AI because it evolves faster than we can adapt.

• Teenagers are already questioning college majors, asking "What's even AI-proof anymore?"

• Humans evolved to work for survival and belonging—losing jobs means losing evolutionary purpose.

• As AI displaces workers, we will need Universal Basic Purpose, not just Universal Basic Income.

  
  

"I was going to major in urban planning," my 17-year-old client Matt said, staring at his phone. "But AI is already doing it. Why waste four years studying something that won't exist when I graduate?" He looked up. "What's even AI-proof anymore?"

Matt isn't wrong. He's connecting the dots.

As a psychologist, I'm witnessing unprecedented anxiety. One client discovered AI completes his week's work in an hour. Another, proficient with AI, nervously laughed: "It's amazing...but I can already identify 30-40 positions we could eliminate today. What's our future going to look like?

The Hard Fork podcast just aired a sobering episode on AI job displacement.

Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. Think tanks forecast significant employment disruption. A LinkedIn executive warned that the bottom rung of the career ladder is breaking because of AI. But they're all missing the real crisis.

We're not just losing jobs. We're losing our evolutionary reason for existing.

Beyond Economics: Loss of Tribal Purpose

Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson warned, "The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology." AI supercharges this evolutionary mismatch.

For millions of years, everyone shared one purpose: survive together. We needed our tribe; our tribe needed us. In our modern world, for most of us in affluent countries, our basic survival needs are a given. Yet, we still found purpose in our work. Now we're building a world where being needed is optional. This isn't just economic disruption. It's existential and spiritual catastrophe.

The Liberation Delusion

For decades, we've been promised that technology would free us from drudgery. Now Silicon Valley pushes the ultimate fairy tale: "Once AI does everything, we'll finally be free!" Free to pursue passions. Free to be all we can be.

Here's what this narrative gets catastrophically wrong: We evolved to work. Work is an integral part of our sense of self. For millions of years, as hominids, work meant both belonging and survival. Being needed by our tribe wasn't drudgery—it was life itself. That's why research shows employed people report higher life satisfaction than the unemployed, even controlling for income. Work provides structure, identity, connection, and purpose. Strip that away, and we lose ourselves.

The Wachowskis saw the delusion of utopia and warned us in The Matrix. Agent Smith tells Morpheus: "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost." In short, utopia would suck because we never evolved to live in utopia. It is the epitome of evolutionary mismatch. There is no escaping our biological heritage—we must work.

Reality confirms this. Every time we've created labor-saving technologies, we don't use that to work less—we use them to try to get ahead of others. Game theory—how people make decisions when success depends on what others choose—kicks in. Every efficiency gain just made us work harder and compete more fiercely. We get caught in a scarcity loop, no matter how much we acquire. The road to hell is paved with labor-saving devices.

Now, ironically, our greatest labor-saving device might be our undoing as it puts us out of jobs. We won't be liberated—we'll be left behind in existential hell.

The "New Jobs" Delusion

"But AI will create new jobs!" optimists insist. Perhaps. But here's what they miss: AI evolves exponentially. Humans do not. We cannot biologically adapt as fast as AI evolves. Moreover, our medieval institutions—political, economic, and educational—cannot adapt to the nonlinear rate of AI evolution.

By the time we've retrained for that new AI-created position, AI will likely do it better. We're in a foot race with a rocket. In our culture wars, we fight viciously about sex differences in sports. Yet, talk about an unfair playing field, our biological brains are basically the same as they were 300,000 years ago, while AI is about to zoom completely past us.

Already Obsolete at Seventeen

Matt left our session unsure about his future. After exploring options together, one path emerged: the intersection of psychology and AI. There's work helping others navigate the challenges our technologies create.

How are we to live in this world in which AI and robots will soon, perhaps even in a handful of years, do just about everything better, faster, and cheaper than a human can? This question cuts to the core. As AI is capable of more, we are needed less. We're adaptive as a species, but we cannot adapt as fast as AI evolves. We certainly didn't evolve to have our work replaced by artificial intelligence.

My teenage clients see what many adults deny. They're beginning to ask questions that should terrify us: "What's the point in learning anything in school? What am I going to do with my life?" These once-abstract questions demand immediate answers. What are we supposed to tell our children? Humanity has never created something smarter than ourselves...until now.

While we debate getting smartphones out of schools, we're missing the bigger question: What exactly are we preparing them for? We're using Industrial Revolution methods to prepare kids for an economy Adam Smith couldn't have imagined when he wrote The Wealth of Nations—one where both manual and intellectual labor get outsourced to machines.

We are caught in a trap: we didn't evolve to understand the existential problem we've created for ourselves. There are two truths here: One, we can't believe that this is happening. Two, this is happening. Reality doesn't care about our beliefs about it or our ability to understand it.

The Path Forward: Reimagining Civilization

Our "medieval institutions"—political, economic, and educational—cannot keep pace with the civilization-altering power of AI. The sobering reality is that we need to completely restructure civilization—and quickly. We are not merely talking about Universal Basic Income. We will need Universal Basic Purpose.

We must understand the implications of what's happening. We simply cannot allow ourselves to be replaced by AI. We need not despair, but we must adapt swiftly and wisely. As Marie Curie said, "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."

Humanity's Greatest Irony

In perhaps one of the greatest ironies in human history, what if we could use the evolving power of AI to solve the very problem that it is creating for us?

In our Talking with Tomorrow episode, we explore this paradox with Nova, our AI co-host, discovering surprising insights about purpose in an automated world.

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If you'd like to explore these ideas further, try asking your favorite AI assistant a question like: “What might give humans purpose in a world where AI handles most work better, faster, and cheaper?” You might be surprised by what you discover.

References

Amodei, D. (2025, May 28). AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Axios. https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic

Brookings Institution. (2023, October 23). Generative AI, the American worker, and the future of work. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/generative-ai-the-american-worker-and-the-future-of-work/

Raman, A. (2025, May 19). I’m a LinkedIn executive. I see the bottom rung of the career ladder breaking. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/opinion/linkedin-ai-entry-level-jobs.html

The Stack. (2023, May 1). AI job losses forecast: 83 million jobs to vanish says WEF Future of Jobs Report. https://www.thestack.technology/ai-job-losses-wef-future-of-jobs-report/

World Economic Forum. (2023). The future of jobs report 2023. https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/