Do you know what my great-grandfather did for a living? He was a reckoner. A whole profession — people who added columns of figures faster and more accurately than the man next to them. Then the calculator appeared, and within some ten years that work simply dissolved. No strikes, no end of the world. People moved on to where what was needed was not fingers on an abacus but a head.
I remember this every time I hear the anxiety around artificial intelligence. We have been through this before — the machine took our hands, our backs, our monotony. And we handed them over with relief. But this transition is different, and that is the whole point. For the first time what is up for replacement is not muscle but thought. The very thing we were used to treating as our fortress.
And here I catch myself on an honest question: what will remain mine if the machine counts, writes and analyses better than I do? It seems to me that what remains is what cannot be automated — the ability to give all of it meaning. To understand what for. To tell a story in which the figures suddenly begin to mean something.
The calculator did not abolish the human being. It freed him for thought. Perhaps this transition too is not about our being replaced, but about something being handed back to us.
Have you thought yet about what will remain yours — when the machine has learned to do everything else?