But along with this, without any declarations, something else happened. Labor has ceased to be just a source of income; it has become the moral foundation of a person's existence in society. A working person is worthy, a non-working person is suspicious. A profession has become, as it were, an individual's identity in society.

For nearly two and a half centuries, this contract held. And now, this year, in these weeks, it is beginning to crumble and collapse. Not because someone decided so, not because someone is unilaterally terminating it. But because the basic condition on which it was founded—the conditional irreplaceability of a person as a productive unit of the market—is disappearing… for now still imperceptible to the majority, but methodically, and this flywheel is only beginning its turn… one .skill-file at a time.

After all, just 5 years ago, what was the vision of the professional community? That AI should primarily help replace low-skilled labor, from janitors to taxi drivers. But what actually happened? AI struck society in the solar plexus, and now the most intellectual professions will be among the first to be replaced. A lawyer who writes and analyzes contracts is replaceable. A radiologist who reads images is replaceable. Some analyst, translator, historian, coder… all can head off to premature retirement, or retrain as bricklayers and electricians, though I think that won't last long. All these and several unmentioned professions are already being performed faster, cheaper, and in most cases more accurately. NOW!

And here is the question I want to ask, not about technology, but about us, about everyone living on this planet right now.

If labor ceases to be the basis of income, what becomes the basis? If your market utility is no longer guaranteed by the mere fact of your skills, then what is your value in the labor market? What remains of a person if you turn off their working social function?

Among those I follow in the AI world, the most thoughtful are already trying to build new philosophical constructs, to rethink themselves in a coordinate system where the market function is no longer the answer. Each of us, in due time, will have to ask ourselves not “how to become irreplaceable,” because this race in new conditions is unwinnable, but “what is my value that is not determined by the market.” That is a different question. Fundamentally different!!

The main question now is not whether civilization will cope—it has coped with worse. The question is who each of us will become entering this new contract. I'm afraid, with old documents, the path to the new world is closed.

And here is what I would like to say in conclusion. Not as consolation—consolation is not enough here—but as something I truly believe in and think will happen exactly this way.

Remember how this post began? With adaptation. With how a person, living next to abnormality, gradually stops noticing it. But adaptation has another side, one that is less often talked about, the same mechanism that dulls surprise. When the familiar coordinate system finally collapses, something much more primordial than any professional skill awakens in a person. The ability to start drawing a new map, right on the go, despite the darkness around. This is what does not fit into any .skill-file, what cannot be encoded.

Humanity has lived for millennia by the same Old Testament rules of survival: an eye for an eye, resource for resource, status through dominance, value through usefulness to the system. These instincts were neither good nor bad; they were the only possible ones in a world of scarcity, where for food, land, and influence one literally had to fight.

But what happens to this logic in a world where material scarcity, with reasonable organization, ceases to be inevitable? Where intellectual labor is no longer a scarce resource? Where the old instincts of competition for function simply lose all meaning?

These rules cannot but change, not because people will suddenly become kinder, but because the very architecture of the world that generated and sustained them is disappearing.