The Wilderness Fear of the AI Era: How Do We Exist When We Are No Longer "Producers"?

When Cloudflare announced layoffs, the CEO used a particular word — he said the company was cutting those who only acted as "Measurers."

From Worker to Producer, then to Measurer. Modern society has been pushing humans further and further down — to a point where even "making" is no longer required, only the fragmented act of "calibrating."

As AI agents and automation frameworks evolve rapidly, many are pushing back. On the surface, people are resisting large models, data centers, tech giants. But what really drives the fear is something else: a vacuum of meaning.

The bedrock logic of the industrial age is the division of labor. To fit into this enormous machine, each of us was forced into "fragmentation." You don't need to be a whole person. You only need to be the title on your résumé, a gear on the assembly line, an efficient Producer.

For a long time, we got used to living as fragments, used to the identity template of "what you do = who you are." Now, AI is steadily dissolving the foundation that has supported our Identity. When we are no longer needed to fill that instrumentalized slot, an existential crisis follows — the old anchors no longer hold, and the new ones haven't been set. Who am I? Where am I going?

Rather than calling this a crisis of obsolescence, we might call it an opportunity. We can't retreat to a pastoral idyll, but we can use this stripping-away to step out of the Universe and, in a spiral upward, rebuild a Cosmos for a new era.

AI presents a paradox: it dissolves the fixed identities we held within the industrial system, but in doing so it also releases us from the fragmented state of the assembly line. Facing this irreversible shift, the work of reconstructing wholeness can begin by confronting three questions:

1. Facing the self: Stop all "performative" authenticity. Abandon the "Authenticity" packaged by consumerism. Affirm the self that carries no social label, the self that does not need to be seen.
2. Facing others: Rebuild non-instrumental connection. In a world that no longer needs you as a Producer, others are no longer collaboration tools or resource nodes. We can build deep intimate relationships, feel companionship without purpose, and create time that does not exist for output or exchange.
3. Facing the world: Poetry, painting, architecture — these are not merely aesthetic forms but a kind of cognition and expression that transcends the aesthetic. Through them we can feel the world. Or we can cultivate the discipline of "build the body, build the mind." Not for the sake of output, but to set our own inner coordinates in an age where meaning has lost its weight.

The "Renaissance" of the AI era — perhaps it lets us reclaim agency as a "whole human being."

Ernste Stunde
Rainer Maria Rilke

Wer jetzt weint irgendwo in der Welt,
ohne Grund weint in der Welt,
weint über mich.

Wer jetzt lacht irgendwo in der Nacht,
ohne Grund lacht in der Nacht,
lacht mich aus.

Wer jetzt geht irgendwo in der Welt,
ohne Grund geht in der Welt,
geht zu mir.

Wer jetzt stirbt irgendwo in der Welt,
ohne Grund stirbt in der Welt:
sieht mich an.