The Lie of the Useful - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Lie of the Useful

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

Artificial intelligence is taking our jobs. But that isn’t the problem. This episode explores what lies beneath the fear of automation—not economic disruption, but the quiet exposure of a system that never truly valued us beyond our usefulness. When the machines arrive, it is not just work that disappears. It is the illusion that dignity was ever built into the code.

This is not a technological crisis. It is a philosophical unmasking. For generations, usefulness was mistaken for virtue, and exhaustion for proof of worth. But AI does not believe in effort. It does not reward loyalty. It simply reveals that the system we trusted was never designed to care. And in that exposure, something else emerges: a deeper silence, a chance to see what might remain when function is no longer the measure of being.

What happens when usefulness ends, and we are still here?

Why Listen?

• Understand the philosophical implications of AI beyond economics

• Explore how usefulness became a moral metric in capitalist systems

• Examine the emotional and existential impact of automation

• Hear a quiet argument for reclaiming value outside of function

Further Reading

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• The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

• The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

• Technics and Time by Bernard Stiegler

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Abstract

The Lie of the Useful interrogates the philosophical and emotional aftermath of artificial intelligence displacing human labor—not as a technological catastrophe, but as a revelatory act. This essay contends that usefulness has functioned as a moralized placeholder for identity within late capitalist structures, offering not just economic utility but existential coherence. As AI renders human labor increasingly obsolete, what is exposed is not merely technological change, but the brittle architecture of a system that never granted worth outside of output. Drawing on embedded insights from Heidegger, Arendt, Han, and Stiegler, the essay unfolds as a slow disintegration of inherited certainties—arguing that usefulness was never neutral, but conditional. From this collapse arises a difficult possibility: that value, dignity, and meaning might survive the end of function.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.

Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.