Do you remember ledger clerks? Half a century ago this was still a respected profession: a person who spent his days adding up columns of figures. The calculator arrived — and within a decade the profession simply dissolved. The world did not collapse. Those who knew how to count turned to what demands not arithmetic but thought: analysis, decisions, meaning.
We have grown used to thinking that machines take our hands from us. The assembly line, the lathe, the forklift — all of it replaced muscle, and we found somewhere to put our heads to work. But now, for the first time, something else is happening. It is the head itself that is under threat — what we took to be our last territory, the one that could not be taken from us.
And here I catch myself on an uncomfortable question: what, exactly, will remain mine? If the machine counts faster, writes more smoothly, remembers more — where does the boundary of the human run?
I think it runs where meaning begins. Not “how to calculate” but “what for”. Not “what happened” but “what it means for me and for those around me”. To give events meaning, to gather the scattered into a story of one’s own — this, for now, only we can do. And it seems that this is precisely what is now worth learning in earnest.
And you — have you yet asked yourself what, in your work, is done by you and not by your function?