“The stone receives its being; it does not have to fight to be what it is—a stone in the meadow. Man, by contrast, must make himself against adverse circumstances; that is, he must conquer his existence minute by minute. He is granted the abstract possibility of existing, never the reality. That reality he must seize for himself, hour after hour.
Man must earn a living, not only economically, but also metaphysically.”
Some sentences work like a diagnosis. They do not report a mood; they expose a structure—how something is made. This one does. If taken seriously, it forces a view of human life as a task that does not end with making an income, but with winning form: sustaining a project, choosing a direction, producing continuity where, by default, there would be dispersion.
For a long time, work was an imperfect but serviceable name for that conquest. Not because work guarantees meaning, but because it introduces something meaning often requires: friction—rhythm, delay, sustained effort. Friction, however unromantic it sounds, is one way in which character and craft are forged: what one becomes.
And yet the question returns today at a different scale. Not only “work” in the abstract, but the kind of technique now entering the scene.
Technique and circumstance
In Ortega, circumstance is not “context” as mere backdrop. It is the very material of life: the set of facilities and difficulties in which one is placed, and with which one must negotiate in order to exist. We do not choose our circumstance; we inhabit it. And yet human life does not simply endure it: it attempts to reorganize it.
Technique—on this view—is not a mere instrumental add-on. It operates as a condition of possibility: a way of reconfiguring circumstance so that life can be lived within it. Technique, then, is not “a gadget.” It is the manner in which a life-program becomes practicable: the reform of the world so that the life we imagine does not remain a mere idea.
That is why technique, as it advances, does not only change what we do. It changes the very form of being-in-the-world.
The superfluous and an invented life
Ortega suggests—with an unsettling clarity—that technique produces the superfluous. Not in the moral sense of “mere caprice,” but as what exceeds biological necessity and nevertheless defines civilization: culture, style, order, institutions, habits, disposable time, and a certain idea of well-being.
Here a definition becomes especially fertile:
Technique is the effort to save effort.
The space left by the saved effort is used to “invent life.”
That formula has two faces. On one side, it is optimistic: relieving necessity opens room to live beyond the merely animal. On the other, it is demanding: saving effort does not resolve life; it exposes it. It leaves a hollow and, with it, an obligation—deciding what to do with the freedom technique makes possible.
Human life is not only survival. It is also invention: selecting ends, shaping habits, building a personal and shared figure. Technique can facilitate that invention. It can also complicate it.
AI and symbolic superfluity
AI changes the scale because it does not only fabricate objects or conveniences: it fabricates, at low cost, symbolic forms.
Text, images, music, narratives, arguments, suggested decisions: the materials through which a society explains itself, persuades itself, entertains itself, and governs itself.
In that sense, AI multiplies the “superfluous” precisely where much of modern experience now takes place: the mass production of content, interpretation, and readily available meaning.
The risk, then, is not scarcity but excess:
not the lack of stimulus, but the possibility of a life continuously occupied and yet poorly oriented.
Because if AI multiplies symbolic superfluity—content, interpretations, suggestions—it also multiplies the available “horizons”: many versions of what is possible, many narratives of what should matter, many pre-drawn routes for attention.
Abundance does not guarantee freedom. It can produce dispersion.
Work, form, and authorship
If human life does not consist in receiving a ready-made being, but in making oneself within a circumstance, then it is not enough to have possibilities. One needs a program that selects, ranks, and sustains. Otherwise, “being able to be” becomes permanent fluctuation: endless availability that never coagulates into character.
For a long time, work—in a broad sense, not merely economic—served as one of the major organizers of that program. It imposed rhythm and continuity; it demanded persistence; it forced energy into something that, by resisting, ended up shaping craft and identity.
If a growing portion of that effort is saved or externalized, the question is not simply which tasks disappear, but what principle of form remains in their place.
Here a delicate point emerges: a technique that liberates can open space for invention; but it can also facilitate the delegation of authorship. It is not “replacement” that is decisive, but renunciation: that the hollow is filled with what is already given—with what is suggested, preformatted, offered by the age as a menu—rather than with a choice one truly assumes.
This is not a call to romanticize the past or demonize automation. Ortega does not write against technique; he writes from the intuition that technique is constitutive of the human. But that constitution has a price: a liberated life does not come with instructions.
From government to health: shifts in scale
If AI continues to expand—as it likely will, even if its pace and limits remain debated—it is reasonable to expect it will not remain confined to “creative work” or software. Technique tends to colonize wherever it finds regularity, data, incentives, and institutions capable of absorbing it.
We can plausibly imagine gradual displacement in areas such as:
- Government and administration: automated bureaucracies, allocation systems, resource optimization, auditing and fraud detection, assisted policy drafting.
- Justice: classification and synthesis of case files, jurisprudence analysis, recommendations (with an obvious risk: recommendations becoming decisions).
- Health: triage, diagnostic support, protocolization, follow-up and clinical administration—where tensions between efficiency, accountability, and trust are structural.
- Military and security: surveillance, logistics, simulation, cyberwarfare, autonomous systems—where ethical dilemmas are not ornamental but foundational.
- Critical infrastructure: energy, transport, telecommunications, finance—domains where delegation may be unavoidable, but never neutral.
None of this implies a closed destiny. It does suggest a transformation not only of jobs, but of authority, trust, and the distribution of responsibility.
Stones?
The title is not meant to dramatize. It is an image at the limit.
If the human “must earn a living also metaphysically,” then a life with fewer practical demands can be either a victory or a problem: a victory if the hollow becomes invention; a problem if the hollow becomes mere consumption of what is already available.
Becoming “stones” would not mean being unemployed. It would mean something subtler: living in a circumstance increasingly organized by systems that propose, optimize, and suggest—while personal life becomes less the author of itself. Not by coercion, but by convenience. Not by a lack of options, but by an excess of them.
Technique can relieve necessity, but it cannot, by itself, decide what life is worth living.
And that displacement—from “what must I do” to “what will I do”—is not technical. It is existential.
Perhaps the contemporary task is not to resist technique, but to sustain, within a technically facilitated world, the capacity to orient life: to choose ends, to accept costs, to build continuity.
In the end, the hollow is not rest. It is a question.