There is a file I remember from my early years as a District Officer. It concerned a culvert. It ran to perhaps forty pages; it passed through six desks, and it took eleven months to approve. When it was finally cleared, I felt something I can only describe as satisfaction, and I have since been slightly embarrassed by it. One culvert. Forty pages.Eleven months.
Today, a capable AI could handle most of that file in just an afternoon. I’m not sure whether that makes me happy or a little sad.
That uneasy feeling is what I want to explore here. This isn’t really an essay about jobs.
The man and the rock
The Greeks gave us the image. Sisyphus, a king who had presumed too much, is condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a mountain. Each time he nears the summit, the stone escapes him and rolls back to the plain. He walks down. He begins again. Forever.
The punishment is clever because it doesn’t hurt—it just feels pointless. The gods knew that the harshest punishment isn’t pain, but a lack of meaning.
Camus, writing in 1942, took this myth and did something unexpected with it. He did not read Sisyphus as a cautionary tale about hubris. He read him as a portrait of us. Consider the shape of an ordinary life: we rise, we travel to work, we perform tasks, we eat, we sleep, and on Monday it begins again. Camus noticed that most people go through this for decades without asking why, and that the moment the question arrives — why this, why repeat it, to what end — it cannot easily be unasked.
His conclusion is the famous one: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
This line is quoted far more often than it is understood. Camus is not recommending cheerfulness, and he is certainly not saying that the boulder is secretly meaningful. His argument is narrower and stranger. Sisyphus cannot alter his sentence. But there is a moment, Camus says, that belongs entirely to him: the walk back down the mountain, when he is conscious, when he sees his fate clearly and does not pretend it is anything other than what it is. In that lucidity he is superior to his punishment. The gods can compel his labour; they cannot compel his despair. Meaning, on this view, is not handed down from above. It is what a conscious being does in the face of its absence.
That’s what Camus argued. From here on, these are my own thoughts, and I want to make that clear.
The robot at the mountain
Imagine that one morning Sisyphus arrives at the foot of the mountain and finds a machine already there.
It grips the rock. It pushes. It reaches the summit with an efficiency he has never managed, without pausing once to curse the gods. The stone rolls down. The machine descends, unhurried, and begins again. It will do this tonight, and next year, and after Sisyphus is dead.
Sisyphus stands at the bottom of the hill with his hands empty.
Now he’s free. The punishment is, for all practical purposes, being carried out by something else.
But now there’s a new question the old myth never had to ask: what will he do with his freedom?
We should be honest that this machine is not an intruder. We built it. The whole arc of human ingenuity has been an attempt to stop pushing rocks. The bullock gave way to the tractor, the ledger to the spreadsheet, the clerk's arithmetic to the calculator, the long calculation to the computer. Every one of these was celebrated, and rightly. I have spent a good part of my working life trying to remove drudgery from systems that had no business containing it.
What’s new now is the type of work being replaced. Older machines took over the jobs we didn’t enjoy. The new ones are starting to do the work we’re actually proud of, like diagnosing, writing, analysing, designing, and making tough decisions after a long report.
The scary part isn’t just losing jobs. It’s realising how much of our identity was built around the very tasks we always complained about.
Work is not the same thing as purpose
Let’s pause for a moment, because there’s an important difference we often overlook.
Ask a physician what her work means to her, and if she is honest, she will not say "differential diagnosis." She will say something about a patient who came in frightened and went home well. Ask a teacher, and he will not say lesson delivery. He will describe a child who understood something on a Tuesday.
The task is just the vehicle; meaning rides along with it, but they aren’t the same thing.
So: if an AI system writes the note, does the administrator lose the purpose of public service? If the model reads the scan more accurately than the radiologist, does the physician lose the purpose of healing? If an AI tutor patiently explains fractions for the ninth time without irritation, does the teacher lose the purpose of education? If machines sow, irrigate, and harvest, does the farmer lose his relationship with the land, the season, the neighbour, and the rain?
I think the honest answer is: not necessarily, but only if the person truly saw their purpose as separate from the task itself.
For many of us, that separation never existed. I’ve known people whose whole sense of self was tied to their work. Take away the work, and you haven’t set them free—you’ve left them lost. Their sense of purpose was so closely linked to the routine that when the routine disappeared, the purpose went with it, like a vine falling when its wall was gone.
That’s the risk automation reveals—not that we never had meaning, but that we might have attached it to the wrong things.
The Absurd, in plain language
Camus called this central problem the Absurd, but it’s worth explaining simply, since the word can be misleading.
The Absurd doesn’t mean life is silly or ridiculous. It’s about a relationship: on one side, people who want things to make sense and need answers; on the other, a universe that stays silent. The Absurd is the tension between our questions and the lack of answers.
Camus rejected two easy ways out. The first is despair, which he saw as giving up. The second is what he called philosophical suicide, which means grabbing onto any comforting story just to fill the silence. Instead, he asks us to remember both sides: to keep searching for meaning, to accept that it won’t come from outside, and to keep living with awareness.
Now connect that to the machines.
AI might not be causing a new crisis, but instead taking away a kind of painkiller. Our jobs were never meant to be our life’s purpose. For a few centuries, industrial society let us mix up being useful with having meaning—mainly because that confusion paid the bills and kept us busy.
If AI breaks that link, the discomfort will be real. But it will also show us something that was always there, just hidden from view.
A second absurdity
Here, I want to push past Camus and make it clear that this is an extension rather than an exposition.
Camus's absurdity was: the human being seeks meaning; the universe is silent.
The era of smart machines might bring a new kind of absurdity: people want to be useful, but machines show that usefulness doesn’t always need humans.
Modern society has quietly taught us to believe: if I’m productive, I’m valuable. We ask kids what they want to be, not who they want to be. We ask strangers about their jobs before we ask what they care about. We talk about retired or unemployed people as if something’s missing from them.
If that equation holds and machines become more productive than we are across a widening range of activities, then the equation becomes a sentence of a different kind.
But notice how obviously false the equation already is. A pocket calculator has outperformed us at arithmetic for fifty years. A crane lifts what no human back could. A chess engine has been beyond the reach of the world champion since 1997, and yet chess is more popular today than at any point in its history. None of this has made human beings worthless, and no one seriously argues it has.
Maybe general intelligence will have to be accepted in the same way, not as an attack on human dignity but as another area where we are no longer the best. Our dignity was never really about being the best at something.
Human worth that depends on comparative superiority over machinery is not dignity. It is a ranking. And rankings can always be lost.
The reversal
Notice what has happened to the myth.
Sisyphus's original problem was that he could not escape his labour. Our Sisyphus has the opposite problem: he has escaped it. The machine grinds up the slope; he stands at the bottom for an entire day, and then another, and then a life.
Which is harder?
I am not sure the answer is obvious. Necessity is tyrannical, but it is also merciful; it tells you what tomorrow is for. The man who must be at the factory at six, or in court at ten, or in the field before the heat, is not troubled by the question of what to do with his freedom, because he has none to be troubled by.
Take that away, and the question arrives with nothing to blunt it. Sartre put it harshly: existence precedes essence. We are not issued with a purpose at birth; we arrive first and become someone afterwards, through what we choose. He thought most people find this unbearable and flee into roles, expectations, and other people's scripts. He called that bad faith, and he thought it was the ordinary condition of most lives.
An economy of necessity is, among other things, an enormous machine for supplying scripts. If AI dismantles it, a very large number of people will meet their own freedom for the first time, in middle age, without preparation.
Chosen struggle
The obvious answer, that everyone will become an artist or enjoy leisure, doesn’t hold up in real life. Leisure is enjoyable because work gives it meaning. Unlimited leisure is different, and people who have had it without choosing it often don’t find it satisfying.
The more interesting answer comes from observing what people already do when they do not have to do anything.
They climb Everest, though helicopters exist. They run marathons in cities full of cars. They play chess against each other, knowing a phone in their pocket would defeat them both. They grow tomatoes that cost more than the shop's. They spend four years learning an instrument that a model can now imitate in four seconds.
None of this is efficient. All of it is chosen.
This suggests that we don’t really want life to be easy; instead, we want to choose our own challenges. Struggles we choose help define who we are. The marathon runner knows taxis exist. By running, he is making a statement about who he wants to be.
This is where Frankl becomes useful. Writing from inside a catastrophe, he located meaning in three places: in what we create, in whom we love and what we encounter, and in the stance we take towards suffering we cannot avoid. Only the first of those three runs through employment. Nietzsche pressed a related point from the other direction: that the task of a free person is to create values rather than inherit them, which is exhausting work and explains why so few attempt it.
From executor to chooser
Let me offer one more speculation, and label it as such.
In the industrial age, scarcity sat in physical capacity. In the knowledge economy, it moved into cognition; we paid for the ability to analyse, draft, decide, diagnose. If AI makes cognitive capacity abundant and cheap, scarcity will move again. The question is where.
I think scarcity will shift to judgment about goals, not just methods. Machines are getting better at answering how things can be done. They are also getting better at debating whether something should be done. I’m not saying machines will never make value judgments, and anyone who claims that is making a guess they can’t prove.
But someone must still stand behind the answer. Someone must decide what a district is for, whom a policy is meant to protect, which efficiencies we will refuse because they cost something we are unwilling to sell. Those are not only computational questions; they are questions of authorship and accountability, and in a democracy they belong to people who can be argued with and voted out.
The human role may shift from executor to chooser, from solver to questioner, from producer of outputs to author of purposes. That is not a smaller role. It is considerably more demanding, and our institutions currently select for almost none of it.
The part that should worry us
I do not want to arrive at optimism too cheaply.
Work gives people far more than income. It gives them a reason to leave the house, colleagues who notice their absence, a place where they are competent, a story to tell at weddings, and the experience — underrated until lost — of being needed by someone at nine in the morning. Every study of involuntary unemployment finds damage well beyond the financial. Communities that lose an industry do not simply become poorer; they become sadder, sicker and more divided, and they stay that way for a generation.
So a transition in which material needs were somehow met would still not solve the problem. A society that pays people and entertains them while quietly communicating that nothing they do matters hasn’t solved anything. It has merely made the wound comfortable.
The institutional question is whether we can build recognition for contribution that does not pass through a payslip: care, community, craft, teaching, civic work, the raising of children, the maintenance of ordinary decency. We have almost no machinery for this, and what we have we underfund and condescend to. Education, in particular, is still largely preparation for employment; if employment thins, we will have prepared a generation for a world that is not arriving.
None of this is solved by transfers alone. Human beings need agency and significance, not merely consumption. A pension is not a purpose.
The mountain, again
So we return to the foot of it.
The machine is still working. It reaches the summit, the stone falls, the machine goes down after it without complaint and begins again. It will still be doing this long after everyone reading this is gone.
Sisyphus watches.
And then, for the first time in the myth's history, he does not follow it down.
He might climb a different mountain. He might help someone else climb theirs. He could build something that lasts beyond his life, teach a child, or learn to love someone better over time. He might sit and think. He might even choose a completely different challenge, not because a god forced him, not because an employer pays him, not because he must for survival, but because he has looked at that challenge and decided it is worth taking on.
That last option is the important one. It is the difference between a sentence and a vocation, and the only thing distinguishing them is who chose.
The great promise of AI may not be a world without purpose. It may be a world in which we are finally required to answer the question that work allowed us to postpone: if necessity no longer tells us what our lives are for, what will we choose to live for?
Camus is more useful here than he has been in eighty years. The disappearance of compulsory rocks does not make life meaningless. It inescapably relocates the responsibility for meaning to us.
We may still have to imagine Sisyphus happy. But now, perhaps for the first time, Sisyphus gets to choose his mountain.
