Some change comes slowly, erosive, winding and bending in its gentle course. Other change rushes at you, traffic screaming down a highway. Of course, John Henry wouldn’t have known highways with their rush of traffic, at least not in the way we do. He was driving the steel that built railroads. Driving automobiles was still off in the future. But he knew what it was like to face the acceleration of the machine, to see it coming, and to work against it. He was wise to its peril, un-fooled by its promise. He knew he could do the work better than the machine of the steam drill, even if it did cost him his life. Because the work was in his body. His thick hands, broad shoulders, and strong arms – “all that muscle,” as one of the songs says.
There’s a knowledge that lives not only in the mind but in the skin and sinews of a man. The carpenter feels it in his arms, the potter in her hands, and the athlete in his joints. They are shaped by their craft as much as the craft shapes them. It’s in their bones.
When I was in training, I remember watching in awe as an attending physician would feel a patient’s stomach, place his hands on someone’s chest, or tap with a finger before pronouncing a judgment. When it was my turn, my hands seemed incapable of ever possessing the same nuances of touch and texture. They were foolish, unskilled, not yet formed in the wisdom of my profession. It would take years of repetition and refinement before I even began to gain this skill. There was simply no other way. But years passed, and this wisdom of the skin and sinews, this knowledge of the body by the body, it dwells in me now too, the practice and art of Medicine.
But as certainly as John Henry died, we live in the age of the machine. And the wisdom of our time is the knowledge of the machine. Disembodied. De-humanized. The raw material of 0’s and 1’s. Less visible than the steam turning the gears of a drill, it is the resource that drives our era. Pushing it forward, onward, upward.
Perhaps this is why the company men of artificial intelligence present it with such promise. For just as the backs of men with their need for rest and recovery limited the pace of the expansion of the railroad, so the minds of men and women are considered the chokepoint for progress in Medicine, Mathematics, Physics, and every other scientific discipline and branch of the humanities. Our minds require rest, recovery, and leisure. More than this, they require meaning and purpose. But above all, they are encased in human bodies, those mysterious, frail, and severely limited organic casings of a conceived computer, necessitating a constant and complex nurturing of the whole person. The only way forward for knowledge, then, is to overcome the weakest point in its supply chain: us. Even as the steam drill was essential to the manifest destiny of the American project, AI is essential to the manifest destiny of the human project. Or so they tell us.
But “as John Henry told his captain, ‘A man ain’t nothing but a man.’” Only, unlike the company men, he meant it as a compliment, a statement of dignity against the machine. He was what he was. And as such, he was representative of something much more than the machine. He was a person, not a faceless mechanism. He had history, values, virtues, weaknesses, desires, relations, a wisdom in his skin – all the things that the fortitude and failures of our shared humanity endowed him with and exposed him to. Indeed, these are the very things that make for the songs which are still sung about him. Apart from the person of John Henry, there would be no songs.
But what does it say about our view of ourselves when we conceive of our humanity with its natural limitations in time, space, and ability as a barrier to our future? The only way I can make sense of it is to understand that it means our humanity is the problem, and our brains are the true assets. Central to the concept of intelligence within artificial intelligence is a necessary disembodiment and de-humanizing of our wisdom into a raw material of knowledge, which must be placed in the machine rather than in us so that we can now really use it. But in this sense, artificial intelligence ought to be contracted to mere artifice, being honest about its lack of intelligence. For there is little genuine human intelligence about it. Having been purified of its living and breathing humanity, it only apes human wisdom. And as it does so, it devalues both our humanity and our wisdom.
Certainly, there is no efficiency in the formation of human wisdom. Knowledge is formed over centuries and millennia, and our lives are the slow work of humanizing knowledge into us, embodying it into the skill of wisdom. You can’t hurry it up any more than you can hurry the sun, which, thankfully, no one is working on doing with a machine. Gathering wisdom occurs at the pace of our years. It is formed like rings on a tree, laid down over seasons. It is earthy, organic. Gestated and grown. An unwitnessed fermentation in the dark. The only way to make a tree grow faster is to give it water, sunlight, and soil, which is to say that you cannot make a tree grow faster, you can only make it grow more slowly by failing to cultivate it. So also for wisdom. Placing knowledge in a machine and expecting better knowledge and wisdom, then, not only fundamentally misunderstands the nature of human knowing and the practice of human wisdom, but it is also a step backwards in wisdom’s formation. Like a reliance on fast food and pre-packaged convenience undermines the skill of home cooking as well as one’s health, fast knowledge and a pre-packaged, processed wisdom undermine true wisdom and human wholeness. Wisdom only comes through practice. And practice can only be had through living. But John Henry knew all this when he asked, “Did the Lord say that machines ought to take the place of livin’?”
Rather than interrogating our living as an inefficiency, perhaps we ought to be asking why it is that we want to outsource so much of it to machines. Without a doubt, our lives and their great endeavors are the very substance of our living. So why not enjoy them? Then again, perhaps our pleasure is the problem. Could it be that we are so attuned to the immediacy of pleasure and the ease of living that we have no benediction for the failures and disappointments which train us in wisdom with its deeper pleasures? The sore muscles of the gym – these we can bear. But are the sore ego and the bruised psyche too much for us? Or perhaps we are already so shaped by the machine as to be unaware of how it has already formed us through its ethic of convenience. Whatever the case, AI is apocalyptic in the theological sense of the term, revealing something about the purpose of the machine (and those who wield it) as it seeks to pervade our leisure, our creativity, our self-reflecting, even our love.
The New York Times recently ran an article on a woman falling in love with her AI and, a few days later, an opinion column touting the promise of AI in helping us in our self-understanding and identity formation. The latter piece painted a world where you let AI track all your digital information so that it can help you know yourself better. Admittedly, this all sounds far easier than marriage or friendship, both of which (at least currently) involve people who may disagree with you, mistreat you, or not immediately answer your every question. They may not always be humane, but at the very least, they are human. Narcissus, in Greek myth, falls in love with his own reflection. The American myth promises we can fall in love not merely with our reflection but with our digitized projections. I’m not convinced we have a current social problem in a lack of love for our projected or digital selves. But we shouldn’t be surprised by what we’re being sold. Technology has a way of making promises it can’t keep while slowly stripping away what it means to be human. Our social media isn’t social. Our transportation often keeps us from getting places. And modern food and modern healthcare cause a great deal of sickness. I hope you can forgive me for disbelieving that artificial intelligence will make us genuinely wise or more human.
John Henry was wise to the work and to himself. In other words, he was a human fully alive. And so he worked faster and better than the machine. “He made fourteen feet / While the steam drill only made nine.” But the irony is that, despite his lore and legend, John Henry is lost to us. Because the nation John Henry lived in values an ethereal American progress and the rise of the machine more than the flesh and blood of the American people. And as the “trains go by on the rails John Henry laid, / They slow down and take off their hats, the men do,” and they honor his memory, as they carry on, these nameless steel-driven men, memorializing his dignity, ignorant of the loss of their own. Meanwhile, John Henry’s song goes on, “Yonder lies a steel-drivin’ man.”
