Replace or Reshape: How AI Could Change the Way We Work

Early machines, for instance, could spin, weave, stamp, and cut far faster than individual artisans. Yet these technologies did not lead to long-term elevated unemployment, nor lighten the burdens put on workers. Factory production moved work out of skilled, relatively autonomous craft systems and into centralized regimes of supervision, discipline, and timing. Workers did not just do less of the old labor; they entered a world of clock-based work, managerial oversight, and repetitive tasks. The machine changed who controlled labor and the terms on which it was done.

The same pattern repeated when assembly-line production expanded in the early 20th century. It’s easy to imagine that, because productivity rose dramatically, such efficiency should have meant much less human labor. In practice, the system of mass production pioneered by Henry Ford made work more fragmented, monotonous, and physically and psychologically demanding. Craftsmanship was stripped away, and the pace of labor was subordinated to the line itself. Technical progress produced a new regime of intensified extraction.