HUMANIFY

Do I still matter?

It is the oldest question in working life and the one nobody puts on a slide. Every generation of workers has asked it at the moment a new machine arrived, and every generation has been told not to worry.

In 1776 James Watt's engine went into commercial production and the pace of work stopped being set by daylight and human muscle. Since then the same story has run five or six times. A technology arrives that can do a piece of what a person does. Work is reorganised around the machine. Something is taken from the people doing it, not usually their jobs, at least not at first, but their standing. Their sense of authorship. The feeling that the thing would have gone differently had they not been there.

Marx had a word for what that does. Alienation: not merely unhappiness at work, but a severing of a person from their own effort.

Artificial intelligence is the latest arrival and the most searching one yet, because for the first time our supposed monopoly on cognition is being challenged.

Here is the part that gets left out of the panic. Across two hundred and fifty years, in every epoch, the organisations that pulled ahead were not the ones that mechanised hardest. They were the ones that put the human back in. Cadbury and Pullman both spent lavishly on their workers' welfare; only one of them gave those workers any standing, and only one of those towns is still standing.

The pattern repeats with awkward reliability, and it has a name. Better, it has a verb, because this is something a leader does rather than something an organisation has.

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