Rethinking love, work, and autonomy in the age of artificial intelligence.

Our era is made of mutations, profound and often invisible. I believe it is time to deconstruct the inner prisons that prevent us from embracing change. Between technological revolution and social emancipation, a reflection on our capacities for inner movement.

The invisible metamorphosis of our world

I have this persistent feeling that our world is changing at high speed, quietly. A tremendous amount is happening, but this transformation remains largely imperceptible. Investments in artificial intelligence are absolutely massive, staggering sums are mobilized, entire laboratories work day and night to redefine the contours of the possible. Yet, nothing seems to show through in our immediate daily life, we have the impression that it doesn’t change. People simply walk in the street, go about their business, as if nothing were happening.

This invisibility reminds me of the science fiction film They Live (1988) by John Carpenter, in which extraterrestrials infiltrate human society, controlling minds via subliminal messages. Only special glasses reveal their presence and their manipulations. Similarly, today, a total but imperceptible change is taking place, that only those who pay careful attention can discern. We are living what philosopher Bernard Stiegler called a “disruption,” that is, a transformation so rapid that it doesn’t give individuals and societies time to adapt, to develop the necessary knowledge to apprehend it in a virtuous way.

The issue is not only technological. It involves a profound anthropological mutation that questions our ways of life, our social relations, our relationship to work, and even more fundamentally, our conception of love and autonomy. Faced with this acceleration, it seems to me that we must develop new skills, not technical ones, but existential ones: the capacity to reinvent our way of envisioning life, in depth, before we are forced to obey what we would not have chosen.

The recent invention of the romantic couple and its impasses

The question of love in our contemporary societies reveals a true historical confusion. We have merged the social organization of the couple, initially designed for reasons of descent and economic survival, with the subject of love. This fusion is surprisingly recent in human history. It is only from the romanticism of the 19^th century that love progressively becomes the legitimate basis of marriage in the West. This evolution, though progressive in appearance, has perpetuated inequalities by linking love to persistent patriarchal structures.

Before this period, people did not ask themselves the question in these terms. They married for social, economic reasons, for the survival of communities, to weave alliances between families. Love was another subject, often dissociated from marriage, and unfortunately far too forbidden to women who did not have the freedom to choose their emotional attachments. It wasn’t necessarily better, far from it, but it was structurally different.

This historical confusion between love and social organization has profound consequences today. It creates what philosopher Eva Illouz calls the “emotional contradictions of late capitalism”: we expect the couple to respond simultaneously to economic, emotional, sexual, parental needs, without ever questioning the compatibility of these different functions. This overload of expectations makes the equation almost impossible to solve, particularly for women.

Economic dependence as invisible prison

Behind this social organization lies a brutal reality: the role assigned to women in caring for children and the home, which goes hand in hand with structural economic dependence. As Silvia Federici analyzed in Caliban and the Witch (2014), capitalism was built on the appropriation of women’s unpaid reproductive work. This considerable mental and temporal burden prevents real economic autonomy.

Dependence is not only vis-à-vis an individual partner, but vis-à-vis the very structure of the couple as an economic unit. If a woman “ruins” everything, for example by emancipating herself at the emotional level outside her couple, to use a revealing expression, the consequences are not only emotional but material: life difficulties, precarity, sometimes impossible situations. The risk becomes too great to serenely consider any questioning. This is what sociologist Christine Delphy calls “the main enemy”: not men as individuals, but the patriarchal economic system that organizes this dependence.

This reasoning works, however, within the framework of a certain conception of employment, hierarchical systems, the cost of housing, social and gendered inequalities. We envision ourselves, in relation to employment and income, with the concept of “selling one’s time,” linked to the relationship of wage subordination rather than to the exchange value of what we produce. This vision, inherited from the industrial era, is becoming obsolete, and this is very good news if we make it an instrument of emancipation.

From work-employment to work-transformation

The horizon that is emerging, perhaps within five years, announces an unprecedented collapse of the value of human time in history. Artificial intelligence and automation will make entire swaths of employment as we know it obsolete. But this perspective, however dizzying it may be, paradoxically opens new possibilities for emancipation.

It becomes urgent to reinvent the forms of work, and no longer of employment, which is disappearing. Work, in its very etymology (which does not come from the Latin tripalium, the instrument of torture, but from the root of travel in English, the journey, transformation), evokes displacement, metamorphosis. As André Gorz emphasized in Metamorphoses of Work (1988), we must move from a society of work-employment to a society of work-opus, where human activity regains its creative meaning.

The essential skills to remain inscribed in tomorrow’s social space are no longer technical but profoundly human: creativity, empathy, the capacity to accompany transformations. These are precisely the qualities that the current system devalues, particularly when they are carried by women. Feminist economist Nancy Fraser speaks of a “crisis of social reproduction”: care activities, education, accompaniment, essential to social life, are systematically undervalued in our economic system.

Capacities for inner movement as new wealth

Faced with these upheavals, I am paradoxically not worried about capacities for adaptation and autonomy, even in atypical situations. The problem of precarization in case of separation is absolutely terrible for women, this is an undeniable reality. But it is also a representation of the world, integrated by each and everyone, screwed into our heads by culture and education, which founds our inner prisons.

The world is changing, and what makes us capable of embracing its movement are our capacities for inner movement. This is what makes all the difference. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This phrase, often quoted, takes on new meaning in the era of technological mutations: we are not born adapted to the world that is coming, we become so through our capacity for inner transformation.

Walking in the street today, I was reflecting on my own practice of work. I work no less by exchanging, dialoguing, thinking, than by answering emails or producing tangible objects. I work, in the sense that I build myself, I transform myself inwardly, and this is precisely what will have impacts on my future reality, personal, professional, social, financial. This vision may seem idealistic, but it has always been verified in my experience. Philosopher Gilbert Simondon spoke of “individuation”: we are not fixed beings but processes in constant transformation, which impact the exterior.

Toward a new ecology of existence

The convergence between the technological revolution and the necessary emancipation of women is not fortuitous. Both phenomena call for the same transformation: getting out of the patterns of domination and dependence inherited from the industrial era. Anthropologist David Graeber, in Bullshit Jobs (2018), shows how many current jobs are devoid of meaning, maintained only to perpetuate power structures.

What is at stake today goes far beyond the individual question. It involves collectively rethinking our modes of existence, our ways of loving, working, creating connection. Materialist feminists like Maria Mies have shown that the exploitation of women and the exploitation of nature proceed from the same extractivist logic. Getting out of this logic requires developing what Donna Haraway calls “strange kinships”: new forms of solidarity and interdependence that no longer rest on domination.

The urgency is therefore not only to adapt to technological changes, but to orient them toward an emancipatory transformation. This involves developing these fundamental skills: creativity to imagine other possibilities, empathy to weave new solidarities, and above all, this capacity for inner movement that allows us to reinvent ourselves constantly. It is on this condition that we will be able to transform the current mutations into opportunities for liberation rather than into new forms of alienation.