Why being replaced by a machine could be the beginning of your liberation

We carry around a belief we almost never question: that we are worth what we produce. We work, we deliver, we optimize, and at the end of the day we measure our own value by the number of tasks we managed to complete. It’s a silent equation, but it governs almost everything. And it might be wrong from the very first line.

We live surrounded by a new fear. Artificial intelligence arrived promising to do our work, and with it came the panic: what if I get replaced? Transhumanism goes further and dreams of replacing the human itself, of upgrading us as if we were outdated software. At the center of that project sits an assumption that needs to be said out loud: that being human is a problem to be solved. I believe the opposite. Our humanity is a gift — perhaps the only one we received without asking — and it deserves to be celebrated and protected at any cost.

But here’s the turn very few have the courage to make. If your work can be done by an agent, by an algorithm, by a machine, there’s a good chance it was never really human in the first place.

The Bullshit Jobs

The anthropologist David Graeber called this “bullshit jobs.” In his 2018 book, and in an earlier 2013 essay, he described an absurd reality: millions of people stuck in jobs they themselves, in secret, consider useless. Jobs that exist only to fill out reports, tick boxes, watch other people, make it look like something important is happening. Graeber exposed a perverse inversion: the more useless the work, the more it tends to be paid; and the more essential to life — caring, teaching, feeding, cleaning — the less we recognize it and the less we pay for it.

So if a machine takes over your work and nothing real is lost, then maybe what was lost was already empty. And realizing this is not humiliating. It’s liberating. The question stops being “how do I compete with the machine” and becomes “what’s left of me when it does the rest.”

The Burnout Society

The Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han described our time as the burnout society. We left an era in which someone external ordered us to work and entered one in which we exploit ourselves — no boss, no whip, just the promise that we can always be more productive, more optimized, a better version of ourselves. The result is not freedom; it’s exhaustion. Depression, burnout, anxiety, the feeling of never being enough.

Han talks about an excess of positivity: nothing forbids us, everything demands of us. And inside that logic the machine isn’t our enemy — it’s our mirror. It does what we were already forcing ourselves to do, as if we were machines.

A Cursed Belief

How did we get here? I suspect all of it is born of a belief — a cursed belief. Walter Benjamin, in a 1921 fragment, wrote that capitalism is a religion. Not a religion that liberates, but a cult without redemption, that only produces debt and guilt, no holidays, no rest, no forgiveness. It’s no accident that in German the word “Schuld” means both at once: debt and guilt. Max Weber had already shown how work became an almost sacred calling, a proof of salvation.

Today the financialization of the world has taken this to the limit. Everything has become an asset, everything has to yield, even time, even attention, even affection. The economy stopped being a tool in service of life and became a faith that enslaves, a deity that demands sacrifice and is never satisfied.

The Future They’re Selling Us

And the future they’re offering is just the continuation of that faith. A perfectly optimized, efficient, automated world, where everything works and nothing touches. A world without the slow work of raising a child, without the smell of the earth, without the silence of someone praying, without the nearness of the sacred. A world where nature is a resource, the body is an interface, and the other becomes data.

I don’t want that future. Not because I’m afraid of progress, but because it has forgotten what progress was for.

The Beauty of Being Replaceable

And this is exactly where the beauty is. If the machine is going to take over what was repeatable, calculable, automatable, then it is — without meaning to — giving us back what was always ours. Raising children. Caring for those who need us. Serving. Being present. Planting, cooking, embracing, listening. These are not lesser tasks that got left over. They are the highest values that exist, and none of them fit inside an agent.

Ivan Illich, back in the seventies and eighties, was already defending a convivial society, made of relationships rather than production, and gave a name to the invisible work that sustains everything and that nobody pays for. It’s precisely that work the machine won’t steal, because it never wanted it. It doesn’t yield. It just matters.

So maybe the invitation of this time is not to chase the machine, trying to be as efficient as it is, in a race we’ll lose and that, deep down, we shouldn’t even want to win. The invitation is the opposite. It’s to let go of what was never human, so we can embrace with everything we have what only we can do.

Protecting our humanity is not competing with artificial intelligence. It’s remembering that there is an older intelligence — the intelligence of love, of care, of presence, of reverence before life — and that no machine is going to learn it.

Being replaceable, in the end, might be the best news you ever receive. It means you’re finally free to do what actually matters.

References

  • David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). Original essay: “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant,” Strike! Magazine, 2013.
  • Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, 2010).
  • Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion” (Kapitalismus als Religion, fragment from 1921).
  • Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905).
  • Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (1981) and Tools for Conviviality (1973).