Meaning After the Machine

By: Rob Gonzales

For centuries, we have defined meaning through our ability to create, to think, and to achieve.

Plato imagined eternal ideals, truths that existed beyond us and waited to be understood. Existentialists pushed back, arguing that meaning is not discovered but made, and that we define ourselves through choice, action, and responsibility. Across philosophies, the common thread was human effort. What we do has long been inseparable from who we are.

But now we live in the age of artificial intelligence.

Machines write, compose, diagnose, calculate, and create. They perform tasks once reserved for expertise, talent, or years of training. When intelligence becomes reproducible and creativity becomes scalable, a quiet question surfaces beneath both excitement and anxiety:

If our work no longer distinguishes us, what does?

This question is often framed as a threat, a loss of purpose, relevance, or identity. But it may be something else entirely. It may be an invitation.

Perhaps meaning was never meant to live solely in output, productivity, or achievement. Perhaps it has always lived elsewhere, in connection, in curiosity, in how we relate to one another and to the world we are shaping. If machines take on more of the doing, we may finally be forced to reckon with the being.

This is not the end of meaning. It is a moment of redefinition.

A chance to imagine purpose beyond tasks.
Beyond efficiency.
Beyond comparison.

What comes next may not be something we automate or optimize, but something we discover together, in spaces machines cannot yet occupy: care, judgment, imagination, and the shared act of asking better questions.

And maybe that is the most human work left to do.