We have a real need to be needed. And yet many forces—thinking machines, aging, economic and social dislocation—appear to be making us feel redundant. Are we building a world in which no one is particularly necessary? Do we already live in such a world?

There are circumstances in which it’s obvious that everyone is needed. In “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging,” from 2012, the journalist Sebastian Junger explores the mini-societies formed by soldiers in combat. In a unit at war, everyone lives together, experiences events as one, and contributes toward shared goals; it’s a way of life in which “individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group.” It can be difficult, therefore, for soldiers to return to a civilian existence in which “most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities, and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good.” Junger concludes that “humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

We live, by and large, in a fluid, transactional world of relative plenty and freedom. It’s good, in many ways, that there’s a possible substitute for almost every need, and for almost every needed person: redundancy can be a form of luxury, a route to peace of mind. And yet there’s a downside when needs become fungible, and easily recast as preferences. In “The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto,” the Catholic writer Leah Libresco Sargeant describes the care she wants to provide to her young children, and notes that it is “technically possible to delegate.” If someone else can watch the kids, feed them, and put them to bed, then in which ways, exactly, do they still “need” their mother? You’re valued at your job, but another employee might do; your basketball team needs you, but new players arrive every year. Something is lost in every switch, but it takes work to articulate it. The loss might even be impossible to articulate.

Partly as a result, Sargeant argues, we tend to downplay our needs in an almost anticipatory fashion. We too easily adopt “a narrow definition of ‘normal’ life as autonomous,” and comply when we’re “asked to prune the connections that tie us to others.” We might say that capitalism makes us needy people who don’t need people: we’re full of wants for products and services, but not necessarily for the individuals who provide them. (We, in turn, aren’t strictly necessary, even if our services are.) But there are also political and psychological reasons to make autonomy the default. We prize liberty, independence, and self-definition; we’re wary of the emotional costs of depending on others and being depended upon. As a society, we practice what therapists call an “avoidant” attachment style. “I am a rock / I am an island,” Simon & Garfunkel sang. “I have no need of friendship, friendship causes pain / . . . I touch no one and no one touches me.”

In an essay from 2000, published in Wired and titled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” the computer scientist Bill Joy worried about society’s direction: by 2030, he predicted, we’d be able to build computers “a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today,” making “the prospect of human-level computing power” realistic for the first time. (By some measures, today’s most advanced A.I. chips can be about that fast.) Joy feared that such technology, coupled with genetic engineering and other advancements, might “replace our species”—an anxiety that becomes even more credible when you realize that it’s existed for nearly two centuries. Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man argued that individuals had become “piano keys” that could be played on command, in a composition coördinated by supposedly rational rules. In “Signs of the Times,” from 1829, Thomas Carlyle warned that we were entering a “mechanical age,” in which not just “the external and physical” would be “managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.” Leo Tolstoy, in his 1886 novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” imagined a man who was basically successful but who realized, on his deathbed, that he’d lived on autopilot. These thinkers suggested that we might internalize modernity’s logic of redundancy, finding ways to be unnecessary not just to one another but to ourselves. From this perspective, the development of technologies such as A.I. is just a furtherance of a long-standing trend.