I don’t recognize America anymore.  Born here, and having spent over six decades on this soil, I look out and see a country that looks nothing like the sixties into which I was born.  Work pressures us to use “artificial intelligence” to be more efficient, even as those who know the industry best sound warning bells against using it.  I can’t help but think of the America that used to recognize John Henry.  John Henry is key American folklore about who we are.  Or at least used to be.  An African American, John Henry was a steel-driver building railways.  Threatened when the foreman introduced a steam-powered rock drill, he challenged the machine to a contest and won.  At the cost of his life.  The America I grew up in recognized the power of the John Henry story, even as jobs were already being lost to robots.  John Henry was the hero of that story.

What’s happened in the intervening years?  People have flocked to ease and comfort over the struggle to be human.  Even the most intimate of human occupations, such as writing, are being handed over to algorithms that have never lived a day in their lives.  Averaging together human experience, making us all generic.  We need John Henry’s hammer to come alive again.  Someone to stand up for what it means to be human.  Someone who knows that money isn’t the only thing that makes the world go round.  

Some of us dreamed that after the pandemic employers might realize that most employees worked conscientiously at home.  That perhaps more time off wouldn’t hurt the bottom line.  That we could trust one another.  Then the next plague, AI, hit the headlines.  Even more efficiency!  Even less need for humans!  To what end?  Why are we doing this?  Yes, AI is faster, but is it better?  The environmental costs are staggering.  We’d already reached a tipping point where enough people realized we were harming our home that behaviors had begun to change.  Even in red states.  Now tech moguls are selling their snake oil and upper management can’t live without it.  Instead of rewarding those who work hard they invite them to find ways to make their own jobs redundant.  John Henry saw it coming.  He became the hero of folksongs and legends.  Celebrated in film, animation, and television, we sent the message loud and clear: human spirit can overcome the cold efficiency of machines.  So we find ourselves in a county that feels it has outlived its need for John Henry.  I’m willing to pick up my hammer and join him on the line.