When I was training to be a teacher, I learned about something called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Much like the food pyramid, it placed our most basic and important human needs at the bottom: air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, and sex. These are labeled “Physiological Needs.” These are the absolute basics for survival. Going up the pyramid, we find “Safety” (personal security, employment, resources, health, property), “Love and Belonging,” “Esteem,” and “Self-Actualization” at the top.

It’s no surprise that many people are feeling disrupted right now when it comes to their job security. AI fever is taking the world by storm and taking people’s jobs and sense of security with it. Technically speaking, a company’s job is to maximize profit for its shareholders. So it comes as no surprise that every company right now is trying to figure out how to leverage AI to innovate, cut costs, and maximize profits. Unfortunately, this is coming at the cost of people’s well-being. People are losing their jobs, and their work is being outsourced to AI. But companies are also in a place where they have to compete like this, or they will become irrelevant and, most likely, bankrupt.

As I say this, a phrase comes to mind: job security. Job. Security. Money that will be there when you need it. A guarantee that a person will have water, food, shelter, clothing, and resources. The idea that people and our time are valuable. That we should be paid reliably to show up and provide our valuable thinking and energy to a company. Job security is no longer a real thing here in 2026 for most people, particularly educated white-collar workers. We need to decide how we should think about this because this issue is at the core of our most basic human needs.

What we have done with AI is remarkable. We have placed some of the greatest writers, thinkers, and problem solvers of all time into chatbots at our fingertips. We can use AI to help us research, write, organize, plan, analyze, and make decisions. We have harnessed the collective human consciousness. It is powerful. But that power is also changing the foundational understanding that many of us built our lives around: if we became educated, useful, and reliable, we would be safe.

Safety isn’t safe. Jobs are not secure. The world is changing.

I know this is scary. It makes sense to feel scared. We are going to need to evolve. 

Here are some things I think are going to happen as people learn to work with AI. We are going to need to think bigger. We cannot look for security in companies that have no real loyalty to us. We need to invent new things. Make bold new moves. We need to remember the value of being human.

We cannot trust the emotionless reasoning of AI to make all of our decisions for us. Although AI has incredible reasoning power, it lacks the ability to be present. To feel emotion. To identify deception. To care about people. We need to value the things that make us human and different from AI.

AI is changing the foundation of what it means to be intelligent. Humans create high value because we are human. We can be unpredictable. Messy. Emotional. We can care. We can notice what is not being said. We can create something that does not exist yet because something in us refuses to accept the world as it is.

So what does evolution look like in real life?

It looks like the therapist who creates a unique new private practice instead of working for the recognizable name. The teacher who starts a school instead of trying to adapt to an old system. The artist who keeps making work that is strange and human. The homesteader who lives off the land and teaches the rest of us new methods of farming they have discovered. The programmer who creates new tools because they don’t have to spend all of their energy memorizing existing ones.

What we actually need is people who are willing to be fully, irresistably human in every room they walk into. People who bring their emotion, their intuition, their mess, and their care. People who cannot be automated because they are just too alive.

The world does not need more optimization. It needs more of you. The actual you. The creative you. The different you.

The important takeaway here is that, because of AI, humans are going to need to stop relying so heavily on established companies as the foundation for meeting their basic human needs. We need a generation of entrepreneurs, artists, dreamers, and divergent thinkers to step up and help us evolve. We do not need to become a dystopian society run by robots and the rich. We will care about each other. Help each other. Value what makes us human. And create a vision for an incredible future together.

I’m Jessica Pingel. I’m a life coach, human behavior nerd, former corporate program leader who specialized in messy, high-stakes work, entrepreneur, traveler, and renovation artist. (*Notes the failed TLDR*). The moral of the story is that I like building things, identifying patterns, and helping people. Subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on Instagram and TikTok for more thoughtful chaos. Book a free chemistry session with me if you want to try coaching!