For decades the typical path of a biography was predictable. Childhood led to school, school to secondary school, secondary school to university or technical training, that training to a first job, the first job to successive promotions and the journey concluded in retirement. Each stage received the meaning of the next. You studied to pass the year, you passed to advance in the course, you advanced to access the university, you studied there to get a job and you worked to sustain a career and a position. Birthdays reinforced that image of an ascending line. Society celebrated the increase in numbers as if life were climbing steps without looking at the fact that, in biological terms, the remaining time was reducing.
That staircase had a very precise function, since it organized suffering. Daily sacrifices were accepted because they were presented as an investment that opened a future door. Mysalgic theory describes this dynamic directly. This maintains that all human behavior arises from the need to avoid some type of suffering and that decisions are structured as exchanges where a minor discomfort is sacrificed to prevent a greater one or to obtain some type of relief. The theory asserts that every human choice is organized around that basic calculation of exchanging present discomfort for the promise of later relief. The pain acquired legitimacy because it was chained to a sequence of reliefs.
The great obviation acted as a permanent mechanism. As long as there was a next stage, it was possible to ignore questions about the final direction of the route. The ultimate destination of the trajectory was not looked at because all attention was occupied with the next step. Death remained behind a narrative curtain of progress and projects.
The massive emergence of AI breaks that architecture at the point where most dependence existed, in formal employment and employment-oriented education. When automatic systems perform professional office tasks, analysis, programming, accounting, writing, diagnosis and a growing number of activities that required years of training, the link between study and work is structurally weakened. The young person entering university can no longer assume that a degree guarantees an upward career path. The person of forty or fifty years old can no longer imagine that holding on to a position until retirement guarantees stability.
If automation continues, the State or the large technological platforms end up distributing basic income, access to services and a minimum consumption network that prevents material collapse and, at the same time, leaves millions of people practically free of obligations over time. In this scenario the instrument that sustained life stops working. Heidegger, the German philosopher, spoke of the broken tool to explain how consciousness awakens when an object breaks and is no longer transparent. A wrench that operates without failure goes unnoticed. Focal consciousness appears when the tool breaks and stops fulfilling its function.
The linear future acted as an invisible tool; While it existed, no one examined it and took it for granted. Extreme automation produces a different variant, an absent tool. And this isn’t about a broken key on the table, it’s about a key that’s gone.
The education-work-retirement trajectory fades and only then is its importance perceived. The person discovers that he studied less for the love of knowledge than for the need to belong to a recognizable sequence. You discover that you endured humiliation or monotony at work because of the promise of promotion or future stability. He discovers that daily suffering was accepted because it served as a bridge to a different phase.
When the later phase disappears, the suffering is laid bare. From misalgic theory this means that the exchange stops working. There is no longer a trade-off between present pain and future relief. Thus, the sacrifice loses its investment character and only the cost remains.
The result is a transformation of time. What was previously experienced as a film begins to be experienced as photography. Before, biography advanced hand in hand with institutions that marked milestones such as changing degrees, graduating, getting your first job, receiving a promotion, starting a family or paying a mortgage. Widespread automation helps turn that movement into a plateau where each day looks like the next. Income comes through transfers, housing is maintained through public policies or standardized solutions, consumption is organized on platforms that anticipate desires, and the space for dramatic decisions is reduced.
That exterior stillness reveals something that the trajectory kept out of focus. In a world with social and professional mobility, death was presented as a point at the end of a journey full of events. Where the journey loses importance, death appears as the only true change. It stops being a philosophical issue and begins to function as the only structural event. Attention can no longer be distracted by the next promotion or the next credential. The future loses content and is reduced to distance until the end.
At that point an additional consequence arises and consists of the appearance of an operational vacuum. The limit no longer acts as the closure of a crowded sequence but as the only available marker. Life sustained by automation is left without steps, without goals that organize the misalgic exchange and without institutions that assign narrative value to each stage. Time continues its march and consciousness registers that march without the mediation of a project that orders sacrifice. Direct exposure to the limit replaces the logic of ascent and turns the future into a flat territory where each decision loses the instrumental function that previously justified the effort.
With this transformation a final problem emerges, the disappearance of the structure capable of converting suffering into investment. Extreme automation not only reorganizes the economy or undoes trajectories; eliminates the mechanism that allowed time to have a recognizable direction. The end stops being a distant event and becomes the only element capable of introducing difference within a horizon that becomes uniform.
Things as they are.
Mookie Tenembaum tackles tech topics like this every week with Claudio Zuchovicki on his podcast Artificial Intelligence, Financial Perspectivesavailable on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and all platforms.
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