The Planned Obsolescence of People

Terkel's most quoted phrase in contemporary AI discourse names the existential condition of discovering one's labor is no longer required. Unlike termination—a discrete event with clear economic consequences—obsolescence is an ambient state. The worker remains employed but feels superfluous; the skills that once justified her position are now widely available or machine-executable. 'It is perhaps this fear of being no longer needed in a world of needless things,' Terkel wrote, 'that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality of much of what is called work today.' The phrase captured factory automation's human cost in the 1970s. In 2026, it describes knowledge workers watching AI absorb the tasks constituting their professional identity. The geography shifted from factory floor to office, from hand to mind, from blue collar to white—but the fear remains: discovering that the mark one spent years learning to make can be made by something that has never known what it is to have a life.