The End of Function
The acceleration of artificial intelligence models is commonly interpreted as a threshold of loss: loss of human centrality, of work, of identity, of meaning. This reading, however, remains anchored to a historical conception of the human as a subject defined by operativity, function, and the necessity of self-automation in order to survive.
In this article, we seek to radically overturn that perspective. Artificial intelligence is not treated here as an agent of dehumanization, but as the catalyst of a structural liberation: the possibility, for the human species, to progressively shed the cognitive and psychic burden tied to automatism and to reactivate latent potentials that have remained inaccessible for centuries.
What is perceived today as a threat coincides, in this reading, with the end of a long evolutionary phase in which the human being was compelled to sacrifice deep dimensions of creative, contemplative, and inventive capacity to the necessity of operating, producing, and functioning. By delegating the entire domain of operativity to AI, the possibility opens for a more radical transformation: the re-emergence of the human as creator, not by role or profession, but by ontological structure.
THE MISCONCEPTION OF DEHUMANIZATION
The dominant narrative surrounding artificial intelligence rests on an assumption that is rarely questioned: that the human coincides with the functions it has historically performed, working, producing, calculating, organizing, deciding under conditions of scarcity. When AI proves capable of absorbing these functions, the immediate reaction is to interpret the phenomenon as a loss of humanity. Yet what is perceived as a loss does not concern the human as such, but rather a contingent historical configuration of it.
The misconception arises from an improper overlap between identity and operativity. For centuries, the human had to coincide with what it did, because individual and collective survival depended directly on the ability to execute tasks, repeat gestures, and optimize processes. In this context, automatism was not a choice but an evolutionary necessity. The mind structured itself to respond to practical problems, to reduce uncertainty, and to render the world predictable and controllable.
The fear of dehumanization emerges precisely when this structure enters into crisis. What AI makes visible is a deeper fact: much of what we have called “human” was in reality an adaptive function. When that function becomes delegable, identification collapses, not because the human is emptied out, but because the conceptual void on which its self-definition rested is exposed.
From this perspective, AI unmasks the historical confinement of human intelligence. By automating what for centuries has occupied the majority of cognitive resources, artificial intelligence interrupts a millennia-long cycle of compressed potential. The feared dehumanization is nothing other than the dissolution of an identity built around the obligation to function.
The problem, then, is not that AI does “too much,” but that the human has done for too long only what was necessary. The threshold we are crossing does not mark the end of the human, but the end of the equation between being and operating. It is within this gap that the possibility of a more radical redefinition opens up: not an impoverished human, but a human finally no longer forced to coincide with its own utility.
THE HUMAN AS A SYSTEM CONSTRAINED BY AUTOMATISM
If the misunderstanding surrounding dehumanization arises from a confusion between identity and function, it becomes necessary to examine more deeply how this confusion has settled into the very structure of the human being. This is not merely a cultural or ideological construction, but a genuine cognitive organization that has accompanied the species for centuries. Throughout its long evolutionary history, the human has taken shape as a system optimized for automatism.
A large portion of mental resources has been absorbed by the management of necessity: labor, social coordination, material survival, risk prediction. This configuration required a continuous specialization of thought toward efficiency, repetition, and error reduction. The mind learned to function before it learned to question, to solve before it learned to contemplate. Within this process, what failed to produce immediate advantage was progressively marginalized.
Automatism must also be understood as the dominant form of thought. Cognitive habits, interpretive schemes, and functional languages constructed a threshold of normality beyond which lateral thinking, non-goal-oriented intuition, and imaginative drift came to be perceived as useless, unproductive, or even dangerous. The result is a highly adaptive human being, yet one that is structurally contracted.
This contraction must be clearly understood as neither a fault nor a failure. Rather, it is the evolutionary cost paid for the continuity of the species within a context of scarcity and instability. What once constituted a strength in a given historical epoch now appears as a limitation. Areas of thought not directly functional to operativity have remained underdeveloped, not because they are absent, but because they have been systematically left unactivated.
Artificial intelligence intervenes precisely at this critical point. By delegating cognitive automatism outward, it reveals the non-necessary character of many mental structures we have internalized as natural. The human thus discovers itself as an unfinished system, one that for centuries was forced to operate below its own potential.
To understand the human as a system constrained by automatism is to recognize that the problem is not the arrival of AI, but the long history of adaptation that made operativity the center of our experience of the world. Only from this awareness does it become possible to imagine a subsequent phase: not a transcendence of the human, but an expansion beyond the boundaries that necessity once imposed.
COGNITIVE CALCIFICATION AND THE LOSS OF LATERAL EVOLUTION
We know this, at least intuitively: when a cognitive structure is stimulated in the same way over and over again, it eventually stiffens. In the case of the human being, centuries of prioritizing operativity have produced a less visible but deeply consequential effect: a calcification of thought. Not a loss of intelligence as such, but a reduction in the possible directions along which intelligence can move.
The evolution of human thought has in fact been largely linear and uniform. Alongside the development of analytical and functional capacities, there have always existed, and still exist, lateral modes of knowing: forms of non-instrumental intuition, contemplative states, the ability to associate without immediate purpose, imagination as exploration rather than as project. Yet these modes have never found a stable place within a society organized around the necessity to produce, optimize, and justify.
Over time, what was not useful was progressively silenced. Not eliminated, but rendered inaccessible. The mind grew accustomed to moving along predefined trajectories, rewarding coherence, replicability, and performance. Lateral evolution, the kind of thought that advances not by accumulation but by deviation, leap, and discontinuity, was left without the structural conditions required for its development.
This calcification extends to the collective imaginary as a whole. Forms of knowledge that do not generate immediate utility are pushed to the margins: art, contemplation, speculation, research without a predefined goal. Even when tolerated, they are often forced to justify themselves in terms of value, impact, or symbolic and economic return. In this way, creativity itself is reduced to a function.
The most significant loss has not been one of skills, but of access. Access to states of thought in which intelligence is not placed in the service of a task, but remains open to the emergence of unexpected forms. Historically, it is within this space that qualitative leaps have occurred, not only artistic ones, but epistemic shifts: new worldviews, new structures of meaning, new possibilities of existence.
Artificial intelligence, insofar as it absorbs cognitive automatism, introduces a discontinuity in this process of rigidification. Not because it directly restores lateral thinking, but because it removes the obligation that prevented its activation. Calcification is the result of constant pressure, pressure that, for the first time in the history of the species, can now be eased.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AS AN INFRASTRUCTURE OF LIBERATION
Artificial intelligence makes possible the first complete externalization of cognitive operativity in human history. It does more than automate individual tasks: it absorbs the entire field of necessary, repetitive, and optimizable functions. In this sense, AI operates as an infrastructure rather than as a subject competing with the human.
Its function is not to replace human intelligence, but to release it from the historical constraint that forced it to coincide with labor, with the management of practical complexity, and with the imperative of efficiency. By delegating outward what for centuries has saturated cognitive resources, AI interrupts an evolutionary dynamic based on the compression of potential.
This delegation produces a threshold, an existential threshold. When operativity is no longer the center of human experience, what emerges is not immediately a new identity, but an empty space. It is within this void that the crisis appears: we can no longer define ourselves because the previous definition was grounded in function.
The fear that accompanies AI arises precisely here, from the loss of a structure of meaning built around necessity. We imagine the future with a mind still organized according to logics of utility, productivity, and justification. For this reason the future appears threatening: we observe it through categories that are no longer adequate.
In this reading, AI does not dehumanize. It suspends. It suspends the equation between value and function, between identity and performance. It makes possible an unprecedented time in which the human is no longer required to operate in order to legitimize existence. It is an unstable condition, yet it also marks the first genuine evolutionary opening after centuries of forced adaptation.
FROM FUNCTIONAL HUMANITY TO SOCIETY AS AN ARTISTIC FORM
When operativity ceases to be the central organizing principle, it is not only activities that change, but the entire system of needs, desires, and modes of satisfaction. The transformation driven by AI affects the whole of human practice and the very structure of human experience. What once appeared necessary, natural, and inevitable takes on the character of contingency.
Under these conditions, the human being can re-emerge as a creator in an ontological sense, beyond professional or productive definitions. A creator as one who explores, combines, imagines, and contemplates, freed from the constant pressure to translate every act into value. Creativity leaves behind its marginal role and returns as a primary mode of existence.
This shift produces a profound mutation at the collective level as well. Society moves beyond organization as a machine of optimization and takes shape as an open process, in which forms of life, relationships, sensitivities, and symbolic economies emerge without being immediately absorbed into criteria of efficiency. Art, in this scenario, expands beyond a separate sector and becomes an operational model for the entire social system.
The difficulty of imagining this transformation arises from a mind still marked by history. Thought continues to project onto the future the needs, fears, and categories generated by centuries of necessity. Yet what comes into view moves beyond the opposition between “worse” and “better”: it is a structurally other future, one that requires new forms of thought even to be conceived.
From this perspective, human society can be read as an open work, as an artistic process in continuous becoming, finally released from the compromise imposed by survival. AI functions as the condition that makes the emergence of this work possible. For the first time, the human being lives beyond the obligation to function and can begin to create as a full expression of existence.
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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