Meditations on Ikigai after AI – IkigAI

Imagine a future where AI has mastered every human endeavour – crafting symphonies more stirring than Beethoven’s, solving crises with a precision no leader could match, even nurturing with a patience that outshines the best of us. In this world, what role remains for you? As superintelligent machines edge closer to eclipsing us, we face a haunting question: What becomes of ikigai – our reason for being – when everything we do, love, or strive for can be done better by algorithms? This isn’t a celebration of a flawless automated utopia; it’s a wake-up call to wrestle with whether meaning and purpose can endure in an age of deep redundancy.

Ikigai (生き甲斐, pronounced ee-key-guy) translates roughly to ‘your reason for being’. Iki means ‘life’ and ‘gai’ means worth or value.

In my interview with Nick Bostrom¹, we discussed loss of purpose after deep redundancy – where superintelligence² not only handles all economically relevant tasks, but also surpasses humans³ in domains once core to our identity: parenting, friendship, creativity, even the arts (playing guitar, writing symphonies, paining etc). In such a ‘Utopia’ – however benevolent or efficient – there’s a risk that real meaning and purpose evaporate. We could become passive beneficiaries of a state of affairs we no longer meaningfully contribute to, spectators in a world optimised for us but no longer meaningfully involves us.

Can genuine meaning arise from simulated authenticity, or does such a strategy risk bypassing the authentic engagement with meaning we ought to aspire to?

A tempting shortcut might be to outsource meaning entirely to external systems – plugging people into Nozick-style experience machines that simulate the feeling of meaningfulness. But this risks hollowing out the very essence of an ostensible utopia, reducing authentic engagement to synthetic gratification and undermining the kind of deep value such a future ought to cultivate.

Mere pleasure or simulated meaning is insufficient. The issue isn’t that simulated experiences aren’t pleasurable – they’re just not real in the right way. Authenticity matters.

Deep Utopia requires people to be active participants in meaning, not passive consumers of simulations.

Bostrom lays out a thought experiment: Imagine a newborn is raised by loving robot parents instead of their biological ones. If this happens before any attachment forms, it may be no worse – perhaps even better – than being raised by imperfect humans. But if the swap happens after bonds are formed, even if the robot parents perfectly simulate the originals and the child never notices, something real may still be lost. The harm isn’t only emotional – it’s ontological too: a severing from authentic relationships.

“…our well-being has an objective component—that how well our lives go for us is not determined solely by our mental states, by what we think and feel, but also by our relationship to external reality. On this view, it matters whether our beliefs are true and our projects successful, independently of whether we ever find out.”

Does AI’s Dominance Threatens Aspects of Traditional Ikigai?

Ikigai has inspired a range of interpretations, each offering unique insights into what gives life meaning. Among the most notable are Ken Mogi’s The Little Book of Ikigai, which outlines five pillars for cultivating a fulfilling life, and a westernised interpretation – in which Mark Winn distils ikigai into four elements. These perspectives to help provide lenses for understanding how we can derive purpose from our passions, skills, and contributions today. Yet, as artificial intelligence advances and begins to outperform humans in areas once central to our sense of purpose, a pressing question emerges: Does AI’s growing dominance threaten the traditional foundations of ikigai, or can it adapt to a future shaped by automation?

Ken Mogi’s Little Book of Igikai

I was in Japan at the time, and had the wonderful opportunity to speak to Ken Mogi⁴ and read a book he authored: ‘The Little Book of Ikigai’ which I thoroughly enjoyed. Mogi animates the idea with history, facts and anecdotes about Japan and it’s rich culture – he uses simple explanations help readers grasp ikigai . Ken summarises the purpose of Ikigai as the reason for getting up in the morning.

Ken divides the concept of Ikigai up into 5 pillars:

1. Starting small: ‘kodawari’ (こだわり) taking care of life’s small details – an uncompromising and relentless pursuit of perfection in one’s craft, work, or even daily life.
   • Seems applicable to Bostrom’s idea of growing up slowly, in contrast to suddenly transforming into posthuman demi-gods, and experiencing all the meaning/novelty of the journey to get closer to the ideal posthuman forms. This could involve active participation in sociocultural activities.
     Also small acts of self-directed creation and care – kodawari – could persist even in a post-labour society as genuine sources of purpose.
     
2. Releasing yourself: the psychological phenomenon of ‘focussing illusions’ – where we can focus on a particular aspect of life to the degree to which we believe that our happiness is dependent on it. We should let go of externally imposed expectations and rigid self-concepts
   • In a Deep Utopia, one could let go of the drive to compete for survival, the urge to suddenly become a demi-god just to fit in with whatever the trendy pantheon is – there is plenty of time to play around in an existentially secure civ. The reclamation of genuine agency may depend on us avoiding rigid focus on some narrow ideal.
     
3. Harmony and sustainability: The Japanese concept of ‘wa’ (和) is a core cultural value that emphasises harmony, peace, and unity, particularly within a group or community. This partly means the de-emphasis or absence of conflict, and creating an environment where individuals can co-exist comfortably and amiably, prioritising the collective good personal interests.
   • I find this particularly interesting as I have been thinking about ‘realism’ – epistemic, scientific and moral. If value realism ends up being accurate, and superintelligence justifiably aligns to value realism (and assuming it’s justifications are interpretable and thereby verifiable to us humans), in a post-singularity era people may justifiably have different values around aesthetics, though it may be a bit shaky to appeal to ungrounded values. For instance epistemic values (i.e. consulting crystal balls), scientific values (something other than evidence based reasoning) and moral values (anti-realist or nihilist takes on concerns that affect other agents etc)… this means that avoiding value based conflict .
     
4. The joy of little things: Embracing the small and simple things in everyday life – this could be basking in the glory of a simple cup of tea. Meaning can be sensory, ephemeral, aesthetic – a single moment of appreciation.
   • Bostrom mentions drinking tea as a little thing in life that has persistent renewable value – in contrast with the profound interestingness of Shakespeare which could be permanently depleted after a few decades of study⁵. A deeply good future must preserve experiential richness, not reduce all experience to goal-optimised reward loops. The small joys are not trivial—they’re texture, not noise.
     
     
5. Being in the here and now: being in the present can help ground oneself. Ikigai is lived, not abstracted. It requires attention to the moment, not constant projection into the future. Not worrying too much about the future or the past, misplacing our priorities and ruminating on their significance.
   • I hope the post singularity avoids the trap of perpetual deferral – of beings that optimise endlessly but never experience. Presence is a sign of a truly integrated mind. Virtual ikigai activities may simulate purpose but risk detaching individuals from real time. People might be “happy,” but only within scripted, meaningless timelines, never grounded in causally efficacious action.

4 Pillars of Ikigai

A westernised oversimplification of the ikigai concept, this interpretation of ikigai rests on 4 pillars. It is disputed as “non Japanese” – it’s author Marc Winn now acknowledges that this ‘is wrong’⁶.

1. What you love: This refers to your passions, interests, and activities that bring you joy and make you feel alive. This speaks to passion and subjective fulfilment.
   • I think this could persist, as long as what is wanted isn’t high status seeking goods which require tangible. Bostrom recognises the importance of experience as one of the central evaluative dimensions of a good life in a solved world (wisdom, experience, accomplishment). But he warns that simply feeling like you love something isn’t enough. If your love is simulated, induced, or misaligned with reality, it loses depth. Ziesche raises the risk of the ontologically hollowness of simulated love – love of a role doesn’t ground meaning if that role is illusory.
     
2. What you are good at: This involves your skills, talents, and abilities, whether natural or learned.
   • if “what you are good at” is evaluated against future superintelligent AI performance, humans come out looking… quaint. Even laughable. We’re already being outperformed in coding, chess, image generation, translation, and increasingly in the creative arts. If this continues, humans will eventually be objectively worse at almost everything that’s skill-based or outcome-oriented. It may lead to the erosion of human self-worth as AI overreaches into all domains of competence.
     What’s the alternative? Utopia must decouple “good at” from absolute performance metrics. Otherwise, meaning becomes a scoreboard⁷ we’re destined to lose. There are serious risks in a world that mistakes perfection for meaning.
     “What you are good at” must evolve from a performance-based metric to a participation or authenticity based one.
     In a utopia of deep redundancy, what matters isn’t whether you’re the best – it’s whether you matter (you do and you will), and whether you are meaningfully involved in the act.
     Developmental goodness: This relates to the eudaimonic ideal of fulfilling your own potential authentically – how far you’ve come relative to your past self – finding dignity in the journey!
     Relational goodness: Bostrom calls this sociocultural entanglement⁸ – the idea that meaning arises not just from internal states, but from being part of a real, ongoing story.. a life woven into the broader social and cultural fabric – it’s about contributing meaningfully to your local environment or community. Even if a future being lives in perfect comfort, their life might lack depth if it isn’t entangled with others in genuine ways – through history, norms, institutions, and shared narratives.
     Expressive goodness: value not because of output efficiency, but authenticity. Flawed poetry, full of rawness may be more meaningful than a perfect sonnet – what matters is that it expresses your identity, agency and/or care.
     
3. What the world needs: This pillar focuses on identifying societal needs or problems that you can contribute to solving through your work or actions.
   • In a deeply redundant plastic utopia, ‘what the world needs‘ becomes an open question in a world with no unmet material needs. Perhaps the best strategy is to shift the focus from practical utility to wisdom and alignment with objective value. A meaningful life might contribute not by fixing scarcity, but by co-creating cosmic value.
     
4. What you can be paid for: This is about your profession or vocation, the work that provides you with financial stability.
   • Many forecast a post-scarcity world, where superintelligent systems run the economy better than humans ever could. In such a world, being paid is no longer the bottleneck to survival or esteem. This collapses the economic leg of Winn’s ikigai. In AI-dominated societies, humans no longer need to work, and may not even be allowed to in high-risk sectors. Therefore, “what you can be paid for” becomes irrelevant or artificial, and its simulation becomes part of the ikigai risk landscape.
     In a plastic utopia of universal abundance, people could receive the essentials of life – like housing, healthcare, computational access, energy, and tokens – simply by existing. However, access to potentially hazardous resources might be conditional, depending on how reliably they can demonstrate a willingness and capacity to avoid misusing them.

Severance

A masterclass in dramatising the moral implications of dehumanisation (in the context of corporate culture, the separation of work and personal lives). Workers undergo a brain procedure that splits their consciousness into two beings:

• “Innie” – only exists at work
• “Outie” – only exists outside work

Each version has no access to the other’s memories or experiences. They’re effectively two separate selves, severed by a corporate firewall. Of relevance to ikigai after AI, is the question of ‘what happens when a person is cut off from continuity, history, relationships, and autonomy?‘ Even if the experience of each self is manageable (and sometimes even pleasurable), the disconnection itself is a form of de-meanification.

Severed selves are stripped of meaningful connection to the world (where the office is similar in some ways to an experience machine) – to me, the ikigai-risk here is a future of ultra-satisfying but disembedded lives – simulated roles, artificial relationships – which risks this same kind of ontological severance, but instead of between work life and outside life, it’s between real and artificial.

Innies lives their life in a loop, without story, memory, or future. There is no authentic narrative continuity of being the same person embedded in culture, social circles, family and history. Innies have autonomy, but lack narrative continuum. They are given purpose, but it’s fake – they don’t know what they are contributing too – in the show they are contributing to the mysterious ‘Cold Harbour’. They are given fake rewards, like waffle parties or finger traps. Similarly, an experience machine style utopia could generate synthetic ikigai – the feeling of mattering -while robbing us of actual causal impact or social embedding.

Meaning isn’t just about feeling fulfilled, it is also about being genuinely situated in a real world with real stakes, real memories, and real relationships.

AI as an Ally in Discovering Ikigai

Superintelligent AI could also enhance the pursuit of ikigai by acting as a tool for self-discovery. It could help with personalised guidance, a utopian career coach per say, focussing it’s optimisation power to analyse preferences and emotions to help identify passions or activities that align with ones unique sense of fulfilment (as long as it doesn’t overstep). Obviously AI would be freeing up our time by automating mundane tasks – giving us more opportunities to explore what truly matters.

However, this comes with a caveat: relying on AI to define your purpose might feel artificial or reduce your autonomy, potentially undermining the authenticity of ikigai.

Challenges lie ahead in overcoming feelings of futility of perusing anything if AI can do it better for feel it just as deeply, and in being content for our own sakes even if machines can replicate what makes us unique.

Conclusion

In a post-superintelligence future, ikigai faces both disruption and potential renewal. While AI’s dominance challenges traditional sources of purpose like work and skill, it also opens doors to a more personal understanding of meaning. By focusing on internal fulfilment and self-discovery, and embracing our uniqueness, ikigai can endure – not as a measure of utility, but as a celebration of what it means to live a meaningful life in an AI-shaped world.

Footnotes

1. See the whole interview with Nick Bostrom here ↩︎
2. In this case, superintelligence may be so far ahead from humans, even augmented transhumans or posthumans, that it may be like a god. ↩︎
3. By humans, I mean anyone that isn’t AI – this includes any humans, transhumans and posthumans. ↩︎
4. Ken Mogi also participated in a panel on AI consciousness and a talk on Metacognition at Future Day 2025. ↩︎
5. See snippet of my interview with Nick Bostrom here, and the book Deep Utopia where he writes “While one might hold that that the interestingness value that an individual can derive from the works of Shakespeare would be permanently depleted after a few decades of study, what about the enjoyment value of a nice cup of tea? Drinking tea may not be a source of an intense flash of value, the way that an epiphany into some deep truth about human nature may be…but it is quite renewable. The 162,330th cup of tea, on your 200th birthday, may not be less valuable than the one you had a century earlier. And whereas the supply of human-accessible profound truths might be limited, you can always put another kettle on.” ↩︎
6. Inspiration or appropriation? Marc Winn (from the UK island Guernsey) acknowledges that the ‘4 pillar’ Venn diagram often associated with Ikigai didn’t originate in Japan. It’s creator, Mark Winn says in his Meme Seeding blogpost “I merged two concepts to create something new. Essentially, I merged a venn diagram on ‘purpose’ with Dan Buettner’s Ikigai concept, in relation to living to be more than 100. The sum total of my effort was that I changed one word on a diagram and shared a ‘new’ meme with the world.” Most importantly, at the end of this blogpost you can find an NFT for the Mark’s original Ikigai Venn Diagram Meme. Perhaps Mark thought that the Ikigai concept in it’s Japanese form was to vague or complex to be up-taken in western culture – “In some ways, ease is great. But also, transmuting struggle into ease is where the of life occurs. We need to lighten the shade to understand the perspective.” also see https://ikigaitribe.com/ikigai/podcast05/ ↩︎
7. It’s fine for humans to compete against each other in games or sport, of course, as that helps generate meaning. ↩︎
8. Sociocultural entanglement is one of Deep Utopia’s 5 defensive ramparts against meaningless. ↩︎