What the legend of John Henry can teach us in the AI era

John Henry beat the steel driver. 

And then he died. So I guess he lost. 

You remember the legend of John Henry, right? The guy who raced a steam engine through a mountain and then died of exhaustion?

It’s a story of human triumph 

and the futility of resisting progress

and a reminder that skill ≠ security

and the physical cost of toil

and the disposability of the common worker

and hubris.

It’s a fable relevant to our time.

Resisting change may be heroic, but what does working yourself into the ground really achieve? 

What’s the point of making it through the mountain if only the machine lives on to see the next mountain?

Now, more than 150 years later, 

long after John Henry would have lived out his natural life 

(if he’d ever existed), 

steam engines haven’t taken all of our jobs. 

The tunnels are built. The age of the steam engine has come and gone. 

Much of our economy still travels by rail, but trains barely register in our consciousness. We think of them as something to be hidden underground, or messing up the rush hour traffic patterns. 

But there's another lesson in the Legend of John Henry.

It teaches us is that instead of breaking rocks alone underground,

maybe we can stop raging against the machine 

and realize that if we want to find the light at the end of the tunnel, 

all we need to do is 

turn around

put down our hammers 

wipe the sweat off our brow

and step back into the light

where there are millions of paths just waiting to be discovered.

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👋 I’m Claire. Yes, I had the Johnny Cash song stuck in my head while I wrote this. And now so do you.

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🎶 “I can turn a jack. I can lay a track. I can pick and shovel too... Do engines get rewarded for their steam?”