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. We often assume that housing, healthcare, security, and stability are simply features of modern life. Yet access to them remains overwhelmingly conditional on sustained economic participation. As technology has steadily reduced the amount of human labour required to produce material abundance, one might expect the cost of participating in society to have fallen as well. Instead, the price has remained remarkably unchanged. This essay explores why modern civilisation continues to organise access to life around economic usefulness, even as the economic conditions that once made such an arrangement necessary have fundamentally changed.