Working definition. A world is more than a collection of objects. It is the web of meanings, practices, expectations, and relations through which reality is lived.
Inherited meaning
Philosophy distinguishes the physical universe from a human world: a meaningful whole disclosed through language, embodiment, culture, and action. Different communities can inhabit overlapping worlds without experiencing the same possibilities inside them.
Meaning in the imagination economy
AI does not merely add tools to an unchanged reality. It alters what counts as skill, authorship, evidence, work, and possible action—the coordinates of a world. The central question is therefore not only what AI will make, but what kind of world its arrangements ask us to inhabit.
What changes in practice
Evaluate a proposal beyond its user journey. Ask what becomes normal around it, which relationships it reorganises, what language it introduces, and whether the resulting world is one people should have to live in.