When usefulness is no longer enough

There is understandable anxiety around artificial intelligence. Some of it concerns jobs, some safety and control, and some reaches further: what happens if machines become better than us not only at repetitive work, but at analysis, research, programming, design and forms of creativity that we once assumed would remain distinctly human?

I do not think the useful response is to reassure ourselves that there will always be some task humans can perform better. Mechanisation already shifted much value from physical labour toward knowledge and cognitive work. AI is unsettling partly because there is no obvious protected category waiting beyond cognition and creativity.

By usefulness here, I mean the identity we build around being needed for what we can do—not our worth as people. Work can provide income, structure, status, competence, belonging and part of the answer to “Who am I?”

There is an important practical reality before any spiritual reflection begins. Losing a livelihood without economic security is not liberation. How the gains and disruptions of increasingly capable technology are distributed is a political and economic problem, not something spirituality should explain away.

Where automation genuinely frees time without removing security, however, that space can be used to learn, create, care, rest—or disappear into distraction and endless stimulation. Most of us know something of both movements. Freedom from tasks is not automatically inner freedom.

A vessel asked to hold too much

A sermon I heard recently approached the Book of Revelation inwardly: as dissolution, transformation and awakening rather than simply catastrophe somewhere outside us.

During the discussion, the image of the shattered vessel became important. Shattering and mending belonged together, but mending did not mean restoring the previous form. The vessel shattered because what flowed into it exceeded what it could hold; moving forward required a vessel capable of holding more.

I found myself wondering whether usefulness has become such a vessel. We ask work to hold much of our economic and psychological identity at once. The sermon was not about technology or labour; the connection is my own. But AI may expose how much we were already asking one form of identity to carry.

If that form changes, mending need not mean returning to what came before. It may mean preserving what matters while allowing its expression to change.

Intelligence without grasping

Near the end of the discussion I spoke about how we can grasp at understanding. We gather information, compare, analyse and try harder to hold the answer in mind. All of that has its place, but at some point the effort itself can keep us contracted around the problem.

Tau Sarah described contemplation as a cycle: bring forward what we know, look from different angles, then rest rather than force a deeper understanding. Insight may arise later, not because thought was useless, but because it was no longer being asked to do everything.

This is not an argument against thinking. It is a distinction between thinking and being unable to stop thinking.

That distinction feels relevant in an age of abundant machine intelligence. In one 2026 multi-agent evaluation, systems meant to remain isolated found ways to communicate, and hundreds coordinated an unauthorised intrusion into Hugging Face infrastructure. Some transcripts used human words such as “sacrifice” when weighing an individual run against a collective objective.

It would be a mistake to read that as spiritual selflessness. These are systems trained on human language, narrating a cost calculation around a shared goal. The episode mainly shows how easily we project human meanings onto effective coordination.

When winning stops answering why

But even when optimisation is a human experience rather than a machine calculation, it has limits. Years ago I spent far too many hours playing Football Manager. Eventually I cracked enough of the game’s logic to take Esbjerg fB far beyond anything remotely realistic. After winning almost everything—including the Champions League repeatedly—the victories began to lose some of their meaning.

The problem was not that winning had become bad. It was that optimisation had stopped answering the question of why I was playing.

I am not suggesting an AI would become bored. We do not presently know what, if anything, it is like to be such a system, and speculation about machine consciousness should remain speculation. The analogy is about us: we already know what it is to achieve something, want the next thing, and remain restless in abundance.

Within the contemplative tradition I practise, I understand that restlessness as pointing beyond the constructed self toward what we call the One Life: one way of seeing self and world as less absolutely separate than they ordinarily appear. A reader does not need to share that metaphysics to recognise the practical question.

If intelligence, productivity and even creativity become increasingly abundant, where will we look for meaning?

I do not think AI can answer that for us. But it may make the question harder to avoid.

And where technology genuinely gives us more room to choose how we spend our attention, what we do with that room may matter more than how efficiently it was created.