AI and the Purpose of Life: This Time the Angsty Class Can Write
rao2z · x · 2026-09-09
A long-form essay on whether AI—especially recent math breakthroughs—is destroying humanity's purpose:
- Every technological revolution destroyed purpose for some group; weavers felt the same loss at the dawn of industrialization.
- What's different is the victim class: the intellectual class, which never experienced purpose-loss before and is uniquely articulate about its angst.
- Mathematicians may be conflating personal loss of purpose with humanity's; civilization survived cheap machine-made cloth and will survive humans no longer being the only ones doing math.
- The angst is generation-bounded: children of displaced weavers found purpose native to the new world, and our kids won't experience the changed world as loss.
Conclusion: the destruction of purpose is real but bounded by generation, underwriting optimism that humanity finds "a new equation" after the dip.
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