Is AI Coming for Your Job?
According to folk legend, John Henry was a steel driving man. He drove steel drills into rock with a hammer for blasting railroad tunnels. When his livelihood was threatened by a steam powered drill, John Henry proposed a contest of man versus machine. When it was over, the steam drill had made nine feet of progress. John Henry made it fifteen, but was so exhausted that “he laid down his hammer and he died.” Like most folk legends, there is some discrepancy between legend and history.
There was a real John Henry. Convicted of burglary, he was leased to the C&O Railroad from the Virginia State Penitentiary as a prison laborer. He most likely died of silicosis from the dusty conditions in the tunnels sometime between 1870 and 1873. Sociologist Guy Johnson interviewed a man in the late 1920s who claimed to have witnessed the contest as a teenager, which he said lasted for a day and a half. John Henry refused to stop and rest, then fell sick and died soon after.
Regardless of the discrepancy, this much is certain: around 1870 the steam powered rock drill was replacing men with hammers because it was faster, cheaper, and safer. What was the result of this? Men who had been swinging hammers in tunnels now had to find something else to do. It’s possible the railroad companies had other jobs for them, or they may have had to find other work. Or, in the case of men like John Henry, they may have been sent back to the Virginia State Penitentiary.
In the story of John Henry, the steam powered drill is portrayed as the antagonist, the thing that John Henry has to defeat or die trying. It wasn’t the steam drill that was going to take his job, however, but his own employer. That is probably not a new idea to you, but it is an important distinction as we move forward; new inventions don’t steal jobs. Employers adopt new inventions to save time and money in order to reduce costs and/or increase profits.
John Henry, whether or not he actually pitted himself against the machine that would replace him, is a symbol of a story that played out many times before his time, many times since, and will continue presumably as long as there are people who can think of better ways to do jobs than how we currently do them. The John Henry story has been retold countless times in a myriad of variations, classically and in popular culture. In some versions the John Henry character wins, in others he loses.
One notable evolution of the story is set in the year 2267 on board the NCC-1701, aka the Starship Enterprise. The Ultimate Computer, a Star Trek episode from season 2 of the original series, aired in 1968. Captain Kirk is begrudgingly assigned to oversee a test of the M-5 Multitronic System, a computer designed to replace all human functions on a starship. All goes well at first, but somewhat predictably, mayhem ensues before Kirk saves the day. Before everything goes haywire, Kirk is referred to as “Captain Dunsel” by his superior, a play on the nautical term dunsail. In the days of tall sailing ships, the dunsail was a small sail forward of the foresail, and only rarely would the sail be of any use. Thus a dunsail (pronounced “dunsel”) came to mean a thing of limited or no purpose. Kirk muses the indignity of losing his captain’s chair to a machine, and ship’s doctor “Bones” McCoy offers this: “We’re all sorry for the other guy when he loses his job to a machine, but when it comes to your job, that’s different.”
Folk heroes and Starfleet captains aside, what about the real world? I worked in public education and libraries for 20 years. In the course of that time I’ve witnessed a lot of strong feelings as technology (and more recently AI) has been increasingly used in those settings. The previous gripes about graphing calculators and Wikipedia making things too easy for students and harder for teachers to do their jobs are now about Google Assistant and ChatGPT doing the work for students and one day replacing teachers. I sat through quite a few meetings listening to librarians talking about how a computer could never do their job, and then we all went back to our offices and continued using Amazon’s (or some other vendor’s) AI powered book recommendations to make the bulk of our purchasing decisions. NPR ran a story in 2018 about the rise of “robo-grading” student essays in which a teacher (by no means alone in her opinion) is quoted, “An art form, a form of expression being evaluated by an algorithm is patently ridiculous." And yet here we are five years later in a world where people are using ChatGPT to help write and revise their doctoral theses.
These unsurprising reactions echo what Bones was saying to Kirk: when it comes to your own job, you take it personally. A former colleague of mine is fond of saying, “people have such small imaginations.” While I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification, on this topic there is a takeaway: It’s hard to have an open mind and look at technological progress objectively when your livelihood is at stake. I have read and listened to a number of arguments on whether or not AI will result in jobs being lost. At either extreme are the obstinate “AI could never do my job because it’s so uniquely human” arguments and the alarmist “AI is going to take all the jobs and completely destabilize capitalism if it doesn’t literally kill us all Terminator-style first” arguments.
In between are a number of compromises. One of my favorites is “AI is a tool. Tools don’t have jobs, they help people do their jobs.” John Henry might have begged to differ. At the same time, there’s some truth there: I have used ChatGPT at work as a tool for synthesizing research into a briefing. It felt like cheating to be honest, like I was getting away with something, but it also saved me a solid two hours.
So, is your boss going to replace you with an AI? The answer is a fairly lame it depends. According to this report by CBS News, AI was responsible for 3,900 job cuts in May 2023, 5% of all jobs lost that month. I don’t want my job to be taken by an AI, but as I just admitted, it’s capable of doing at least a portion of my job from time to time. It would be foolish of me to assume an AI will never be capable of doing my job, regardless of what my job is. It would be equally foolish to assume that we are on the doorstep of an imminent 100% labor force replacement.
What then, is to be done? I hope that I have conveyed that neither denial or dismissal of the issue nor conclusion jumping are particularly helpful. For my part, I intend to keep learning about AI. Not the nuts and bolts of it, but the reported innovations and impacts that it is having (especially on my own career field). I also intend to keep participating in conversations about AI with my friends, family, and coworkers. If or when I think the time is right, I’ll reach out to my elected officials. I invite you to do the same.
