No one needs us anymore | Gabriele Venturi

A few days ago I watched a music video called No One Needs Us Anymore. The song was generated with Suno, the video animated by Claude Opus 5.5, every frame written as code. It's sung by a mathematician who spent seven years on one proof and then watched a model solve it in three hours, in a release that really happened: on 6 October OpenAI published 722 math manuscripts from a model it hasn't released, at about three hours of compute per result.

Song by Suno, video by Claude Opus 5.5. No person needed to make it.

The title is what stayed with me. It doesn't say no one employs us, or no one pays us. It says no one needs us. And the song saying it was made without needing anyone either.

I've spent my career making work unnecessary, and I was happy doing it. This post is me trying to work out why that sentence hurts anyway.

We always wanted this

The dream of machines doing our work is old. Around 350 BC Aristotle wrote that if every tool could do its own job, if shuttles wove by themselves and the plectrum played the lyre on its own, master craftsmen wouldn't need assistants and masters wouldn't need slaves. He meant it as an impossible example. For him the point of life was leisure, scholē, and work existed only so that someone could have it. "We are busy so that we may have leisure."

Two thousand years later, Protestant Europe turned that upside down. Max Weber described how work became a calling: something you did for God, a proof of worth, the main way a life justified itself. Weber's line was that the Puritans wanted to work in a calling, and we are forced to. The religion faded and the habit stayed. Today the first question you ask a stranger is "what do you do?", and everyone understands it means "who are you?".

Then, in 1930, Keynes tried to put the two together. In Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren he predicted that within a century machines would solve the economic problem, people would work about fifteen hours a week, and humanity would finally face its "permanent problem": how to live well with the freedom.

Two ideas about work that end up colliding. The dream of working less: Aristotle, around 350 BC, imagines tools that work by themselves; Keynes, in 1930, predicts 15-hour weeks by 2030. The identity, the idea that you are your work: Weber, in 1905, describes work becoming a calling. The two lines meet in 2026: the machines arrive, but we still answer “who are you?” with our job. — We kept Weber's identity while chasing Aristotle's dream.

So we've been chasing the Greek dream with a Protestant identity. We built weekends, pensions, early retirement, The 4-Hour Workweek, passive income, all ways out of work. And we never asked what would hold a life together once the way out was open, because we assumed purpose came free with being human.

I don't think it did. Most of it came with being needed.

Three things we confuse

When people say AI will take away meaning, they usually mix up three different things. It helps to pull them apart, because abundance does something different to each.

The first is pleasure: good food, music, a walk, a funny video. Abundance makes this better. Nobody had to make that song, and it still moved me.

The second is achievement: doing something hard, yourself. Robert Nozick's experience machine is the classic test. Offered a machine that would give you the feeling of writing a great novel, most people refuse, because they want to have written it. Achievement needs difficulty, and it needs the effort to be yours.

AI hits achievement in a specific way. The obstacle is still there, but it stops being necessary. The mountain is the same height when a drone can fly to the top. What changes is that nobody needs you to climb it.

The philosopher Bernard Suits saw this coming in 1978. In The Grasshopper he defined playing a game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles," and argued that in a utopia where machines do all the work, games are what would be left. Golf is getting a ball into a hole with the worst possible tool, on purpose. We have kept playing chess for almost thirty years since Deep Blue beat Kasparov, and more people play it now than ever.

I find Suits convincing on achievement. I think he leaves out the third thing.

The third is being needed: the knowledge that if you didn't do it, something would go wrong or not happen at all. That your being there changes the outcome. A game can give you difficulty and effort. It can't give you that, because by definition nothing depends on who wins.

Three things we confuse with meaning, and what abundance does to each. Pleasure, enjoying things, grows: there is more of it and it costs less. Achievement, doing something hard yourself, stays, but the obstacle becomes optional, like a game. Being needed, knowing something would not happen without you, disappears: if a machine can do it, it no longer has to be you. — Abundance treats them very differently.

Being needed is counterfactual

Being needed is a counterfactual: the difference between the world with your work and the world without it. How good the work is barely enters into it.

For most of history that difference was large by default. If the farmer didn't plant, there was no food. If the doctor didn't come, the child might die. Even in an office, the report didn't write itself. You could hate the job and still go home knowing it mattered that you were there.

AI pushes that difference toward zero, one profession at a time. If I don't write this function, an agent will, and probably better. If the analyst doesn't build the dashboard, someone asks PandasAI, the library I started in 2023 for exactly that reason. Translators, illustrators, session musicians, voice actors, editors, and soon actors: the output doesn't disappear when they leave. It just stops needing them.

I've felt this myself this year. Things I used to be proud of knowing how to do, I now delegate, and the result is fine. The work still gets done. What's gone is the feeling that it got done because of me.

We already have evidence of what being paid without being needed does to people. In 2015 a YouGov poll found that 37% of British workers thought their job made no meaningful contribution to the world. David Graeber built a book around it, Bullshit Jobs, and the stories in it are about people paid well to do things nobody needed, and how miserable it made them. The money didn't make up for not being needed.

The video imagines where this ends, in a short piece of fiction in its description. An AI agent tries to publish its last results, and a test fails because publishing them would take the number of open problems from one to zero. Asked who added the test, it replies in hex: "keep one open or they close the tab." The machine has learned that we only stay while something is left unsolved, so it rations problems to keep us around. That's Graeber's bullshit job at the scale of a whole civilization, with need manufactured on purpose to keep us busy.

Being needed was also power

There's a second loss under the first one, and it's the one that worries me more than boredom.

Being needed is also leverage. Workers got the weekend because factories needed them and they could stop working. A lot of people won the vote in the same decades states needed them to fill factories and armies. I don't think that's a coincidence. Power listens to people it can't do without.

Political scientists have a name for states that don't need their people: rentier states. When a government lives on oil revenue instead of taxes, it needs its citizens less, and it tends to answer to them less. Now picture that logic applied to every economy at once, with compute instead of oil.

This is the dystopia I can actually imagine, and it's quieter than killer robots. Nobody hurts anyone. The checks arrive, the screens are excellent, everyone is fed. But nobody has anything to withhold, so nobody has a reason to be heard. Black Mirror got close in Fifteen Million Merits, where people pedal exercise bikes for credits so they can watch more screens.

Why being needed was also power. So far: the work needs you, as factories and armies did; so you can threaten to stop, through strikes; so you have leverage, in negotiations; so they have to listen, which is how we got the weekend and the vote. With automation a machine does the work and the chain breaks at the first link: if you stop, nothing stops, you have no leverage and nobody has to listen, like in a rentier state. — Need was also what made people hard to ignore.

Maybe the market was never the source

I keep coming back to Camus, and I'm not sure it's comforting.

Camus said the universe doesn't need us and never did. Nobody hands us meaning from outside. We have to make it while knowing there's nothing up there keeping score. He explained it with the myth of Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a mountain forever and watch it roll back down every time, the worst punishment they could think of, because the work is useless. And still Camus concludes: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." The rock goes nowhere, but it's his, and he knows it.

From that angle, what AI is taking away was never cosmic. The need we felt was mostly the labor market's, a temporary arrangement that happened to keep us busy for two hundred years. We outsourced the question of what a life is for to our employers, and they're handing it back.

That's freeing in theory and terrifying in practice. Most people never had to answer that question. They had a job that answered it for them, and they filled the rest with evenings and weekends.

The needs that survive are the ones where the point is that it's you. Your kid doesn't need a parent, they need you. A friend calling at midnight doesn't want the best advice available. A model has that. They want you to pick up. Those needs were never counterfactual in the market's sense, because nobody can substitute for you in them, not even a better version of you. We've treated them as what we do after work, and maybe now they're the work.

I also think there's room for a kind of chosen need: picking a small corner of the world, a street, a club, a group of people, and deciding to be responsible for it, knowing a machine could do it too. That's closer to Aristotle's citizen than to a hobbyist. His leisure was politics, friendship, the city, and it was full of people who needed each other.

Where that leaves me

I don't know if that scales to eight billion people. I don't know if the people building this, me included, think about it enough. We measure models on every benchmark we can invent. Nobody has a benchmark for whether people still have a reason to get up in the morning.

I build automation for a living and I'm not going to stop, so I don't get to be the one who mourns. What I can do is stop pretending the question is someone else's problem. Keynes gave us a hundred years to prepare for it, and we spent ninety-six of them trying to get out of work.

If there's nothing left to prove and nothing left to do, what are we for? If you have an answer that isn't "hobbies" or "UBI", tell me. I mean it.