Humans Beyond Function

Redesigning Access to Life When Machines Do the Work

Kemi C. Amusan

Essay II

The Cost That Didn’t Move

The Fracturing of Human Identity in the Age of Machines

Imagine, for a moment, attempting to calculate the cost of participating in civilisation itself. Not the biological cost of staying alive, but the price of belonging to ordinary social life. The cost of having a place to sleep, food to eat, healthcare when you become ill, companionship that survives adulthood, and the quiet confidence that tomorrow resembles today closely enough for you to make plans. We rarely think of these as costs because they have become the background conditions of modern existence. Yet the payment required for them is immense. It is measured not only in hours worked but in the gradual surrender of the organising logic of one’s life. For many people, mornings belong first to the demands of work before they belong to themselves. Decisions about where to live, when to move, and which opportunities to pursue are often shaped less by personal preference than by where economic opportunity happens to gather. Even our ambitions can become calibrated around what the market happens to reward, while our health is increasingly treated not simply as a good in itself but as the condition that makes continued participation in economic life possible. The price of admission, then, is not simply labour. It is the slow alignment of an entire life around the requirements of an economic system that increasingly presents its priorities not as choices but as inevitabilities.

This arrangement begins long before we are capable of consenting to it. A child arrives at school carrying forms of curiosity that no institution taught them. They ask questions that wander without purpose. They invent games whose value exists entirely in the experience of playing them. They imagine worlds that answer to no external demand. The institution receives that child with a different set of priorities. Can this child remain seated? Can this child follow instructions? Can this child complete tasks according to an externally determined schedule? Can this child tolerate evaluation without rebellion? These are necessary questions for an institution designed to prepare people for participation in another institution. They aren’t necessarily malicious. Yet they reveal that education has never been concerned solely with the transmission of knowledge. Before an institution can teach what a child knows, it must also cultivate the habits that allow the child to function within institutional life. The acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of compliance become intertwined from the very beginning.

Ivan Illich recognised this decades ago when he argued that compulsory schooling was less concerned with education than with producing a particular kind of citizen: credentialed, compliant, accustomed to institutional authority, and prepared for economic insertion. Paulo Freire described the same logic from another direction, observing that education increasingly resembled a banking system in which knowledge was deposited into students so that it could later be withdrawn as productive capacity. Whether one accepts every element of their critique is almost secondary. It is difficult to deny that economic usefulness occupies an extraordinary amount of our educational imagination.

The pattern does not end with school. It merely becomes more sophisticated. Adolescence introduces the language of careers. Universities refine the language into employability. Early adulthood transforms it into professional identity. Throughout each stage, the underlying question remains strikingly consistent. What will you contribute? What skills are valuable? What problems can you solve? How economically useful can you become?

Questions concerning the shape of a life itself become strangely private. What kind of person do you hope to become? What relationships make existence meaningful? What forms of beauty, craft, contemplation, or service call to you independently of whether they can be monetised? These questions survive, but they survive mostly at the margins, reserved for evenings, weekends, holidays, and eventually, if fortune allows, retirement or the occasional safety talks at work where we pretend to relegate the KPI discussions. We tell ourselves that life will begin once the work is finished, without noticing that the work has quietly become the organising principle around which life itself has been arranged.

Though in all honesty, we must acknowledge the fact that Civilisation did not organise itself around productivity because it despised beauty or leisure. It organised itself around productivity because necessity left few alternatives. Under those conditions, functioning was not merely desirable. It was indispensable. The bargain made historical sense.

What is remarkable is that civilisation continued to honour this bargain long after the conditions that made it necessary began to change. Every major technological transformation has reduced the amount of human labour required to produce the goods and services on which material life depends. Steam did it. Electrification did it. Mechanisation did it. Computing accelerated it. Artificial intelligence now promises to reduce cognitive labour with the same relentless force that previous technologies reduced physical labour. In principle, each advance should have expanded the space between what society requires from us and what we are free to do with the rest of our lives. Yet the gains from productivity have not translated into a comparable reduction in the demands placed on the individual. And thank God, because how else would we ever afford the gains of productivity? Especially since the threshold for full participation in society has remained stubbornly high. Access to housing, healthcare, education, security, and social belonging continues to depend overwhelmingly on sustained participation in paid work, even as the amount of labour required to produce material abundance has steadily declined. Technological progress transformed our productive capacity far more dramatically than it transformed the conditions under which people are permitted to share in its benefits. But that argument belongs to Essay I.

This essay is about a different cost: the cost of building human identity around economic function. Even as the economy increasingly requires less human labour to produce material abundance, we continue to organise our identities around employment because we were trained to equate economic usefulness with human worth. We continue to exchange much of our waking lives for the right to participate securely in the economic system.

This should hardly surprise us. We were prepared for exactly this arrangement. From our earliest years, education taught us to locate our value in usefulness to institutions. Knowledge and compliance developed together, because both were necessary for participation in a civilisation built on productive contribution.

So, when the system we were trained for begins to change, it makes sense that many people experience more than financial uncertainty. Thus, redundancy becomes not just about the loss of income, but an existential wound disrupting routine, status, purpose, belonging. Or what else are we supposed to do with ourselves when the very system around which we learned to organise our identities no longer requires us in the same way?

The wound runs this deep because it was never just about jobs. It was about which parts of a life were ever allowed to count. Hannah Arendt’s distinction between labour, work, and action names what’s actually been lost. Labour, she argued, sustains biological existence. Work creates durable things that outlast us and contribute to a shared world. Action is the realm of politics, creativity, and relationships through which meaning emerges between people. These were once distinct ways of engaging with the world, each valuable on its own terms.

Increasingly, however, work and action are expected to justify themselves according to the standards of labour. Relationships are valued for the opportunities they create. Leisure becomes recovery. Education becomes employability. Curiosity becomes innovation. Even rest is granted legitimacy only because it produces a more efficient worker on Monday morning. Activities that once possessed value in themselves are now expected to demonstrate their contribution to productive function. Nothing is permitted simply to exist for its own sake. Everything must justify itself by improving function.

That is the cost Rifkin never measured. The economy became increasingly sophisticated at generating output without seriously confronting the question of how its benefits should reshape the conditions of ordinary human life.

We were never given a self to fall back on. For generations, worth was not something you possessed and then happened to express through labour. It was something labour manufactured for you, following your programming. Continuously, one useful day at a time. So, when the system stops requiring your usefulness, it does not simply take away your income. It takes away the engine that had been quietly producing your sense of self. What is left is not a person temporarily out of work. It is a person who no longer knows what they are, because they were never taught to be anything except… needed.