Future designing over Future Predicting: Why the coevolution YAFI advocates for is crucial

Written by Ethan Ha

27th Nov 2025

The reason for coevolution in the first place is simple: our current obsession with predicting which jobs will disappear completely misses the point. Everyone keeps talking about which roles will vanish first. Some experts come around in interviews and claim that jobs without hardware, factories, or any kind of physical infrastructure will be replaced earlier due to the absence of the cost of destruction involved. But focusing only on disappearance and prediction creates a much bigger problem than the job losses themselves.

The fact is that even if we try our best to predict the future a hundred times, it won’t matter. All of these predictions are made inside economic systems and value systems that will eventually collapse, when we solely watch certain jobs vanish and play imaginary games of sports betting (or more like “job downfall betting”). When no one truly works, when tons of people are living jobless or stuck in jobs without passion, and when weather, society, and polarization worsen, socioeconomic collapse is guaranteed. At that point, all predictions become completely futile.

That is exactly why the principles of coevolution exists and is advocated for by YAFI. Coevolution is not about guessing; it is about designing. It is a study of a structure that acts as a feasible yet fairly utopian vision we can actually attempt to reach. This makes our actions effective, sustainable, and useful. Instead of trying to out-predict something that is inherently unpredictable and has no point in doing so, we shift to deliberately shaping what comes next.

In an era where lack of control defines the human-AI relationship, we need a societal means and a shared vision, similar to how countries operate under political uncertainty. During a time of uncertainty there must be indeed a beacon of hope and assurance and tangible control that we dont lose the responsibility to redeem the erroneously aligned trajectories of human behavior and tendencies, and that we develop algorithms and advance AI models to a human-centric approach. With control.

That is why coevolution is a system where even if major job replacements occur, it isn’t fatal. It does not lead to a complete downfall. According to Coevolutionary benchmark vision, humans must remain as top supervisors even in roles that are mostly automated, when preferred and desired. Tasks can be erased, yes, but foundational vision and guidance always stay in the hands of a human creator.

This is also where the economic idea of preference-induced labor comes in. Rather than being forced into jobs out of necessity, we do what we actually want and what we believe deserves human care and meaning from a philosophical and ethical perspective. In short we emulate, yet actively and not passively, the phenomena visible during e.g. the industrial revolution, e.g. by shifting the philosophical values (such as respect, acceptance, acknowledgement) from efficient, automated high paying tasks, to human led, and humanness-full roles that are desired to be kept as humane as possible by the public, similar to how the values before the industrial revolution were physical toil, endurance and craftsmanship, and the values after the industrial revolution were the cognitive abilities, creativity, and knowledge, as machines got to replace redundant tasks, and the human role shifted towards the one creating, arranging and effectively utilizing these tools.

This value shift in the general collective conscience, and in practice, in the media, politics, education, and industries and employment, prevents us from losing crucial areas to AI and keeps humans important. It ensures that we initially, not AI, decide what parts of life and work are worth protecting and placing value in, instead of allowing AI to naturally choose what it can replace or not and us having to conform to the unstable society and values, that is evidently not the most flourishing and collaborative one.

Another reason why this ideological perspective must coexist with technology is that innovation feels fascinating and hopeful for developers and builders, but for normal people who have no clue what's happening, it feels like uncertainty, mental crashing, and unpreparedness. Coevolution provides mental assurance through a humanness-based value system. It clearly points out what every human can learn and pursue to not be left out or be lost. It teaches the fundamental acts of Poiesis, which can be applied for every fields and expertise and which in the long run will inevitably be valued, and as it also develops unique skillsets for focussing on non-AI generated tasks, but rather in idea creation and envisioning.

The lessons on the coevolutionary mindset and Poiesis is also a way to increase positivity, happiness, and potential in times of hard downfall, societal corruption, discouragement, and possible conflict or criminality. It balances extremes and mitigates damage. It finds the middle of everything—economy, emotion, technology, and identity—in a way that benefits the world the most, prevents unnecessary conflict, avoids hype cycles, and ensures preparedness.

Not overly economically.
Not overly euphorically.
Not overly for AI usage.
Not overly sensitive about AI progress.

This is the main focus for sustained growth.

But achieving this is difficult. Why? Because of human greed—the same greed the coevolution article aims to combat and replace. Greed and money lead to increased chances of weakening entire economic groups, companies, and even nations. They focus so intensely on investment and acceleration that governance, values, human morals, labor structures, and skillsets never get the time to follow. That gap caused by eyes stuck on the profitability of AI is where everything fails.

So the goal of coevolution is to find balance through active effort and perseverance. To shape collective consciousness. To articulate it to the public. To apply it in the real world. To show how coexistence—not dominance—between innovation and sociology, economy and human value, preparation and continued progress, can be achieved.

Coevolution is not just an idea. It is a necessity. It is what prevents the future from happening to us and instead lets us create it on our own terms.

* Note - Why lack of work isn’t equivalent to paradise:

The reason why I constantly claim the world with less human contribution and AI’s replacement of most industries and roles is because I believe that the world without work or with much less work will be not necessarily euphoric. Of course, it may indeed seem like a paradise that children books on ancient Greece and its high class non-slave population portray. Even bible view the lack of work as peaceful and perfect, according to Genesis’ Garden of Eden, and as it claims the work that men received after the fall of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, as a form of “death” resulting from sin. However, in a society with different societal contexts and cultures in which work is valued, respected, and where it is a natural social procedure to pursue a profession for one’s life, the complete lack of work may diminish human emotions of perseverance and hard work as well as one’s role-identification in a society, despite it giving a short-term relief and gratification from reduced stress and ability to pursue one’s passion or hobby he or she waited to do. This will in short lose the collective mindset of growing as a society and a group advancing into a better future, and place humanity in the midst of stagnation. Us, humans, may not recognize how the growing society and participating in the societal growth through whatever profession or occupation one does, as we struggle to view the big picture that is honestly not tangible or visible at all in our individual’s eyes, but the truth is when this societal concept of “Civilizational motion”, referring to the society’s constant movement, development, failure and journey, suddenly disappears, the absence of progress we took for granted will feel absurdly weird, urgent, and problematic. Especially, because humans are anthropologically, nomadic people whether striving for food, new shelters and adapting to changing environments, knowledge and safety.

Exactly because of this stagnation, lack of purpose, and long term misalignment that cause frustrations, further panics, with fragility leading to amplification of human malice, lack of work may not be necessarily advantageous in finding the ultimate modern-day peace and happiness of humans, leading to a conclusion that we were meant to continuously journey this story of life.