Automation and the End of Human Necessity: Artificial Intelligence and the ontological unemployment

This paper examines artificial intelligence as the historical culmination of humanity’s long-standing drive toward automation. Rather than interpreting AI merely as a technological innovation, the study argues that it represents a civilizational turning point in which human labor, creativity, and cognitive activity progressively lose their functional necessity. Drawing on classical and contemporary philosophy, political economy, cognitive science, and philosophy of technology, the article defends the thesis that human development has always aimed at minimizing effort and outsourcing survival conditions to external systems. Artificial intelligence extends this process to intellectual and cultural domains, challenging traditional notions of human exceptionalism grounded in creativity, rationality, and productive activity. The paper critiques the claim that AI lacks genuine creativity by showing that human imagination itself operates through recombination of prior experiences, thereby dissolving the metaphysical distinction between human and artificial creation. It further argues that unlimited algorithmic cultural production leads to the banalization of art and the erosion of cultural scarcity, undermining the social role historically attributed to artists and intellectuals. Finally, the study proposes a posthuman scenario in which human existence persists without necessity: biological life becomes oriented toward hedonic experience while knowledge, culture, and social infrastructure are increasingly maintained by autonomous systems. Artificial intelligence thus emerges not as humanity’s antagonist but as the realization of its deepest technological aspiration—the automation of existence itself.