What remainsuniquely humanin an age of artificialintelligence?
By 2030, millions of jobs will disappear, others will be transformed beyond recognition, and many we cannot yet imagine will emerge.
Beneath these projections is a deeper fear: not just of losing work, but of losing relevance, of becoming unnecessary.
Work has never been only about survival. It is structure, identity, purpose. To imagine a world without it is to confront a more unsettling question:
what does it mean to be human when what we do is no longer needed?
A full circle
of human
experience.
Project 360 is not an answer so much as it is a question, with as many answers as there are people in the world.
Answers are intended to act as a mirror, reflecting what makes us human in an irreplaceable, inimitable, irreproducible way.
At the end of it, the goal is for everyone to have their own Project 360, specific to their individual human experience.
Are humans
going to
become
obsolete?
While the question sounds ridiculous, it is the underlying tension behind AI's projected impact on global employment through 2030.
Work is a core element of our existence, not just for financial survival, but existential survival.
While the World Economic Forum stresses urgent reskilling as the solution to the expected loss of jobs, between now and that reskilling are humans living with an unprecedented existential dread.
Read the WEF report →For every 1 job the AI & tech revolution destroys,
it creates approximately 1.85 new ones.
Note ,These odds are aggregate and global. They do not guarantee that workers losing jobs are the same people gaining new ones, which is why the WEF stresses urgent reskilling as the bridge between both sides of this ratio.
The odds are largely in our favour. Yet ever since ChatGPT first asked if it could rework my art project for me, I developed a new found fear:
“If a machine can recreate my work, then what is the point of making art anyway?”
Why does an artist make art?
If you asked any artist why they make art, they likely wouldn't have a reason, but rather, why not?
On a Friday night out, I met a Congolese painter. It was his first week in the country. As we made conversation I wondered why he chose painting as a career.
With the war-torn ecosystem he calls home, surely the optimal career path wouldn't be art. Medicine. Engineering. The kind of skills his country needs most to rebuild itself. But art, why?
The way he responded told me that was a question he had already asked himself, severally. His response seemed to devastate him more than to relieve him.
“Art is a calling.
I did not choose to.
I have to.”
When ChatGPT suggested it recreate my work, when the AI engineer I met at lunch break said AI makes better art, I felt a primal instinct I can only compare to a dragon mother protecting its eggs.
How could anyone claim that a machine can make better art than a human?
While intelligence can be replicated, and labour can be outsourced, there is one function that remains fundamentally human: the ability to feel.
To say a machine will do this work is to insinuate machines have a human soul.
Not two species on equal footing.
Fundamentally different categories.
Operates on computation.
- Software made by humans.
- Processes data, recognises patterns, generates language.
- Simulates conversation, creativity, even empathy.
- But simulation is not experience.
Operate on experience.
- Entities that can feel.
- Subjective awareness, pain, pleasure, desire.
- Humans, many animals, possibly other life.
- A sentient being lives through information; it does not merely process it.
The Chinese Room.
Imagine a person who understands no Chinese, locked in a room. They follow English instructions to manipulate Chinese symbols and produce appropriate Chinese outputs.
To an outside observer, it appears the person understands Chinese, yet internally, there is no comprehension, only rule-following.
Programming alone cannot produce mind or meaning, even when behaviourally indistinguishable from human cognition.
Computers, like the person in the room, operate purely on syntactic manipulation of symbols. They lack intrinsic semantics, real understanding, real intentionality.
tool, increasingly sophisticated
experiencers of reality
is no longer competition. It is interaction.
Human emotion is not
a flaw in the system.
It is the system.
Project 360 is my exploration of what remains uniquely human in a future of artificial intelligence.
It is a sustained literary inquiry into emotional consciousness through 360 essays, each describing a different human emotion. A 360-degree living emotional architecture, built around Plutchik's wheel of emotions.
When the AI engineer suggested AI could make better art, I understood his point. From an efficiency and speed lens, yes, AI can move faster than any human.
But art does not operate on the principles of speed and efficiency.
The creative process is one of the few times that time collapses into nothing, where all concepts of space and time are overridden. Making art is an act of love.
“Love is the one thing that transcends time and space.”
AI can make art. But it can never make art as a human can, because it cannot feel.
What is your
Project 360?
AI is for speed and efficiency. We are for being.
What is your way of being? Your Project 360?