Pane e rose. Notes on the First of May.
The first work of the day. Venice, November 2023.
I'm writing this in Venice. The First of May matters here, more than it does in Munich. Last night at dinner at La Bitta, my friend Guido said something that has stayed with me: It isn't change — we've always managed to come to terms with that. It's the pace.
We had been talking about AI, about work. That is what is on my mind today.
For Adler, work is one of the three life tasks. Not by accident. It is the place where we make our contribution concrete, where idea becomes matter, where the individual finds a place in the world by adding something to it. Work is never just earning a living. It is the form in which contribution becomes visible and tangible.
The change is hard. Activities disappear, whole occupations dissolve, people lose their livelihoods. That is real and it is happening now. But alongside this, something else is taking place that tends to get lost in the day-to-day debates: the how of contribution is shifting too. When a contribution that used to give meaning — a careful analysis, a precise piece of code, a well-written email — can be produced by a machine in seconds, that isn't only an economic event. It shakes the very ground on which the experience of contributing rests.
Three observations, more question than answer:
First. Guido is right. Pace has an anthropological dimension of its own. It overwhelms the time we need for reflection. Resonance takes time. Attunement takes time. Making a form of work one's own, rather than simply enduring it, takes time. When everything keeps accelerating, the space in which work can still be experienced as contribution shrinks.
Second. The decisive question is not whether AI will destroy jobs. The decisive question is whether the forms of work now emerging are structured in ways that encourage or discourage. Subject status, feedback, equality of standing, the capacity for conflict — these are not HR topics, they are anthropological criteria of judgement. Which AI implementation reinforces an organisation's striving for power, and which strengthens its sense of community? That is not a technological question. It is a question of design. And design does not happen by itself.
Third. What machines cannot replace — care, encounter, attunement, bodily co-presence — moves, structurally, into the centre. Whether this leads to a new recognition of such work or whether it remains invisible because it resists the logic of efficiency is an open question. It is a political question. And it is being decided now, not ten years from now.
These are notes, not theses. A connectivist anthropology worth its name has to be able to say something about work that goes beyond mere reaction. We are only just beginning.
Where this text was written. Altana, 1 May 2026.