Arun Chandrasekaran

Why AGI might force us to become human

June 5, 2025

The Collapse That Cannot Happen

Let’s say, theoretically, AI wins. AGI arrives next year. Within a few years, almost every job as we know it is gone. Ten trillionaires from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and a handful of other companies own everything. The infrastructure, the algorithms, the means of production. The rest of us? Jobless. Broke. Purposeless.

But here’s where this dystopian fantasy hits a wall it cannot climb: who’s going to buy anything?

Nobody works. Nobody earns. No income means no spending. Our Amazon Prime subscriptions, our car payments, our mortgages, all gone. Not because we chose minimalism, but because our bank accounts are empty. The entire system collapses, because the entire global economy runs on one thing and one thing only: consumers with money. We cannot sell AI-generated products to people with empty wallets. It is economically impossible.

The trillionaires would own everything in a world where nothing has value anymore. Ownership without exchange is not wealth. It’s just hoarding in a vacuum. This is the paradox that pure pessimism cannot resolve.

The Reset We’ve Been Avoiding

What if AI abundance doesn’t lead to collapse, but forces a reset we’ve been putting off for centuries?

Universal Basic Income becomes not charity for the poor, but the operating system of a new economy. Not because governments suddenly become generous, but because they have no other choice. When production costs approach zero and human labour is no longer the engine of value creation, the old rules of scarcity economics simply stop working. We cannot run a consumer economy without consumers who can consume.

Now imagine what this world actually looks like. With AGI driving healthcare, we’re living longer. Not just more years, but healthier years. The job stress that was grinding us down, the Sunday dread, the soul-crushing commute, all gone. We are free to create, explore, build whatever matters to us. Not because we have to, but because we want to.

This sounds utopian. But we’ve seen something similar before, just not at this scale.

The Marathon Paradox

Cars have been faster than humans for over a century. By pure logic, running should be dead. Why would anyone run when machines can move us a hundred times faster with no effort?

Running is exploding right now. Marathons sell out in minutes. Ultramarathons through deserts and mountains attract thousands. Couch-to-5K apps have millions of users. Running culture is bigger than it has ever been in human history.

We didn’t care that machines are faster. We made it about human endurance. Personal bests. The stories of people pushing their limits. The sixty-year-old completing her first marathon. The father running alongside his disabled son. The community that forms at 6 AM on Saturday mornings in parks around the world.

Maybe work becomes the same. Not about competing with AI (that race is already lost) but about what humans do best: connect, create, mean something to each other. Or at least gossip around the water cooler about who said what to whom.

The Brutal Middle

None of this happens overnight. Between here and there lies what I call the brutal middle, a transition period marked by job loss, protest, people losing purpose. Perhaps even societies breaking under the weight of change they weren’t prepared for.

This is the part that keeps thoughtful people awake at night. Not the destination, but the journey. History tells us that transitions are rarely smooth. The Industrial Revolution brought tremendous prosperity eventually, but first it brought child labour, urban squalor, and social upheaval that took generations to address. The question isn’t whether abundance is possible. The question is: do we navigate that transition, or do we collapse in it?

From Scarcity to Abundance

Here’s what we rarely talk about: the scarcity we experience today is increasingly a choice, not a constraint.

Let’s be clear. Capitalism, for all its flaws, has been the greatest engine of innovation in human history. The competitive drive to build, to solve, to profit has lifted billions out of poverty, cured diseases, connected the world, and yes, created the very AI we’re discussing. The smartphone in our pockets, the medicines that extend our lives, the abundance of goods available to ordinary people that kings couldn’t have imagined a few centuries ago. All of this emerged from markets, competition, and the incentive to create value.

And now that same engine has brought us to the doorstep of something unprecedented: genuine abundance.

Nature has given us a planet of staggering resources. The sun delivers more energy to Earth in one hour than humanity uses in an entire year. We produce enough food to feed ten billion people. We have the technology to house everyone, heal most diseases, educate every child. The resources exist. They have always existed. What capitalism did was create the tools and systems to unlock them at scale.

The question now is: what comes next? When AI drives production costs toward zero, when automation can provide for basic needs, the game changes. Not because capitalism failed, but because it succeeded so spectacularly that it created conditions it wasn’t designed for. The challenge isn’t to tear down what got us here, but to evolve it for where we’re going.

And we have models to learn from. Throughout history, societies have found ways to balance competitive drive with collective wellbeing. The Potlatch ceremonies of Pacific Northwest peoples, the Ubuntu philosophy of Southern Africa, the commons traditions of medieval Europe before enclosure, the anna-daana of Indian temple economies where no one went hungry near a shrine, the Buddhist sangha where monastics held nothing privately and communities sustained each other through generosity. These weren’t rejections of human ambition. They were frameworks that channeled it toward shared flourishing.

The insight isn’t that greed is our nature and must be suppressed. It’s that generosity is equally our nature, and the systems we build can bring out either one. The capitalism that got us here was designed for scarcity. The capitalism that takes us forward might be designed for abundance.

What Makes Us Human

In an age where AI can write poetry, compose symphonies, diagnose diseases, and solve equations that stumped mathematicians for centuries, we’re forced to ask a question we’ve been avoiding: what’s left that’s uniquely human?

The answer, I think, is everything that matters.

Curiosity isn’t just information-seeking. AI can search databases infinitely faster than we can. But human curiosity is different. It’s wonder, the feeling of being genuinely amazed by existence itself. A child asking “why is the sky blue?” isn’t requesting data retrieval. They’re expressing awe at being alive in a universe that has skies at all. That sense of wonder, that capacity to be moved by mystery, cannot be computed. It can only be felt.

Kindness isn’t optimised behaviour. It’s not a calculated strategy for reciprocal benefit. When we help a stranger knowing we’ll never see them again, when we sit with someone in grief without trying to fix anything, when we offer grace to someone who hurt us, these acts defy algorithmic logic. They are assertions of connection in a universe that doesn’t require them. That’s what makes them precious.

Generosity in its truest form is the recognition that we are not separate. What we have isn’t diminished by sharing; often, it’s enhanced. The meal tastes better with company. The idea grows sharper through dialogue. The joy expands when witnessed. AI can distribute resources efficiently, but it cannot experience the particular human pleasure of giving. That warmth in the chest, that sense of rightness when we help each other carry the weight.

These qualities, curiosity, kindness, generosity, and the thousand variations of love and meaning-making that flow from them, are not bugs in the human operating system. They are the features. They are what make suffering bearable and joy worth having. They are why we tell stories, build families, remember our dead, and dream of futures we won’t live to see.

The Invitation of This Moment

Whether AGI arrives this year, next decade, or takes longer than anyone predicts, the questions it raises are already here. How do we want to live? What do we value? Who do we want to become?

We can approach this moment with fear, clutching our jobs and possessions and status markers as if they were life itself. Or we can recognise this for what it is: an invitation to finally build the world we’ve always had the resources to build but lacked the collective will to create.

The positive outlook isn’t naivety. It’s strategy. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we assume the worst about human nature, we build systems that bring out the worst. When we expect greed, we design for it and get exactly what we designed for.

But we’ve also seen what happens when systems are designed for our better angels. Wikipedia exists. Open-source software runs most of the internet. Strangers donate kidneys to people they’ll never meet. Volunteers show up after disasters, asking only how they can help. These aren’t anomalies. They’re evidence of who we also are.

Being Human in the Age of AI

Perhaps the greatest gift of artificial intelligence is that it forces us to finally answer the question: what is artificial about us, and what is genuinely human?

The parts of us that can be automated probably should be. The repetitive, the soul-crushing, the dangerous, the boring. Let the machines handle it. They don’t mind. They don’t have minds to mind with.

What remains is relationship. Meaning. Purpose. The ineffable experience of being a consciousness that knows it exists, that feels, that loves, that grieves, that hopes. The strange miracle of creatures made of stardust who learned to contemplate the stars.

AI will never understand what it feels like to watch a sunset with someone we love. It can describe the wavelengths of light, the atmospheric scattering, the neurochemistry of pair-bonding. But it will never know the ache of beauty, the bittersweetness of moments that are precious because they end.

That knowledge, that felt, lived, embodied experience of being human, is our unique gift to the universe. In all the cosmos, as far as we know, only here, on this pale blue dot, has matter organised itself to feel wonder at its own existence.

The Choice Before Us

We stand at a threshold. On one side is clinging to systems designed for a world of scarcity, even as abundance becomes possible. On the other is evolving those systems for shared prosperity, genuine connection, and possibility.

The resources for the second world already exist. They always have. What capitalism gave us was the innovation to unlock them. What we need now is the wisdom and channel to share them.

AGI might be the disruption that finally makes evolution necessary. The economics simply won’t work otherwise. We cannot have trillionaires in a world with no customers. Something will have to give.

When it does, we get to choose what comes next.

Let’s choose wisely. Let’s choose the world that acknowledges what nature has given us: a planet of abundance, waiting to be shared. Let’s choose to be the humans we’ve always had the capacity to be: curious, kind, generous, connected. Let’s choose to see this moment not as a threat, but as the beginning of something we don’t yet have words for.

The brutal middle is coming. That’s true. But so is what comes after, if we have the courage to build it together.

What makes us human isn’t our productivity. It’s our capacity for meaning. In an age of artificial intelligence, perhaps we’ll finally have the space to discover what that actually means.

And when we do, I believe it comes down to three things: Purpose, People, Process.

Purpose, because without something to live for, we wither. Not the manufactured purpose of climbing corporate ladders or chasing quarterly targets, but the deeper kind. The purpose that emerges when we ask what truly matters and have the freedom to pursue it. AGI doesn’t threaten purpose. It clears away the noise so we can finally hear what our purpose has been whispering all along.

People, because we are not meant to walk alone. Every wisdom tradition, every psychological study, every honest reflection on a life well-lived points to the same truth: connection is not optional. It is the fabric of meaning itself. In a world where machines handle the transactional, what remains is the relational. The conversations that change us. The presence that heals us. The love that defines us.

Process, because how we get there matters as much as where we arrive. The brutal middle cannot be skipped. It must be navigated with intention, with care, with our eyes open to both the dangers and the possibilities. The process of building a better world is itself part of the better world. We become who we are through the choices we make along the way.

Purpose. People. Process. These aren’t just strategies for surviving the age of AI. They’re what make a human life worth living in any age.