Voluntary Hardship After Superhuman AI

If AI outperforms us at work and discovery, humans can preserve meaning by creating 'human-hard' arenas—self-imposed constraints and challenges where excellence is defined relative to human limits, not absolute capability. The history of polar exploration after geographic frontiers closed suggests cultures invent worthy difficulties to sustain purpose. — This reframes AI-induced obsolescence from a void of meaning to a cultural-task design problem: societies can engineer valuable human pursuits even when machines are better.