Redefining the Hero of Storytime in the Age of AI

The carpet in Mrs. Hilscheim's kindergarten room was green and surrounded by bookshelves. We would convene there every day shortly after taking lunch, usually some version of elementary school fine dining that included something with a green bean casserole or IGA peanut butter smeared across wonder bread. This was "story time," and it was glorious. Mrs. Hillsheim would take a seat in one of the colorful chairs, and the rest of us would sit cross-legged and wide-eyed at her feet as she presented tales and turned the pages of many a book and story. We learned basic sentences and, verbs and feelings. Frog and toad were there, as was the unfortunately named Dick, his plainly named counterpart Jane, and whatever that dog's name was. They were also fantastic fables -? Aesop's stories, like the one with the greedy crow, tell us the value of appreciating what you have. And old folklore tales like the one of John Henry, which taught us the value of working yourself to death in the event that you feel like a machine is coming to take your job. I was five.

For those of you who need a refresher, here goes the story of John Henry, which comes out of American folklore. It likely started being passed about sometime in the 19th century as the railroad was emerging, and in this tale, John Henry is a powerful and skilled, larger-than-life figure. In most tellings of the story, they literally start out with" John Henry was a steel-driving man" which immediately paints a picture of this super strong guy who is defined by what he does and known well for it across the community. So anyway, we've got the "steel-driving man," John Henry, and he's great at his job, but then along comes a steam-powered drilling machine into town. This is about the time when industrialization was just getting started, and this machine is now recognized as a potential threat to John Henry's identity and his job. What unfolds next is the type of thing much of this era American folklore is made of: The competition is set between John Henry and the steel-driving machine, they compete. John Henry outperforms the steel-driving machine by pounding steel spikes into the ground at a furious rate, thus demonstrating that man can outperform the machine. All's great, but he dies in the process and is celebrated accordingly as a larger-than-life figure and an enduring symbol of resilience, determination, and strength. The lesson, apparently, is that when industrialization and technology come for your jobs that it is better to work yourself to death than it is to be flexible in your identity and definition of work and how to incorporate that new technology. Again, I was 5.

This story has been passed around for generations and has likely shaped the early development of what being a "good worker" means for many people. It has also been a foundational building block to the great edifice of the fear of technology that we have built in our country throughout our history of work.

I do want to be clear before I move on- I love a good tall tale as much as the next person, and I think that the story of John Henry is a fantastic one, and the books that have been done in telling this story do a great job of bringing it to life- if you haven't spent time with the works of Ezra Jack Keats-one of our American treasures and the finest author of children's books in his generation-I cannot recommend doing so strongly enough.?

So why am I here talking to you about my kindergarten days, green bean casserole, Mrs. Hillscheim's green carpet, and how folklore has told us the story of the value of working oneself to death in a job that you've let define that self? Well, there are two reasons for that: first is because storytime is one of the two big memories I have coming out of kindergarten, and in the fervor around AI, it seemed relevant, and second is that my other core kindergarten memory is that Mrs. Hillesheim loved pink pigs does not make for a compelling article.

Okay...so let's start getting to the root of this article then. The psychological concept of "priors" is that our current perception of issues is largely defined by our interpretation of anything and everything we have encountered over the course of our lives or anything that bears any similarity to the issue at hand. Furthermore, how we interpret current situations is not informed just by our own personal experiences but by the societal and cultural influences around us, as well as those that are influenced by evolution. For example, when it is dark outside, and one hears a slithering sound off in the grass, most of our natural reaction is one that sounds like, "That's not good, and I gotta get outta here." - Now I say that is the case for most of us because some people may have been brought up as nocturnal long grass snake hunters, and so for them, this sounds like the dinner bell. For the rest of us, this sounds like something that is foreign and scary, and we are out of our element, and therefore, there is an immediate triggering of our fight or flight response.

Now let's think about how our "priors" have been being updated and influenced as it relates to how new technologies are going to impact the role of human beings. Well, there's certainly the John Henry story in which we are shown that it is better to work oneself to death than let a machine take your job. But there are also ample examples of stories where technology, rather than being a useful tool for people, ends up displacing us, replacing us, and being a threat to humanity: see Terminator movies, virtually every alien invasion movie, and most 1980s films which involved a computer of any sort. Since we were young, our priors have been informed by the idea that robots are bad and unpredictable, and they have it in for us. So it's no surprise that much of the reaction we have seen over the past year as it relates to how AI is going to impact the job market sounds an awful lot like "The robots are coming for your jobs." Furthermore, "AI is going to make human employees unnecessary" makes for something catchier and more the type of clickbait that draws eyes today than does. "New technology is here, and we should all be patient while we determine how it best incorporates itself into our day-to-day work lives."

But what if we shifted the narrative around us? What if, on the storytime carpets around our country, the folklore was re-told? What if when the steel machine showed up, John Henry pragmatically made the decision to seek to better understand how the technology worked so that he could determine how he could reduce his manual labor and bring his expertise to bear in support of advancing this new technology? Well, in that case, John Henry would have lived a long and productive life watching the boom that was the Industrial Revolution, the rapid expansion of the railway system enabled by machinery, which reduced manual labor and moved many workers into more upscale high-paying jobs. Rather than being a martyr, John Henry could be a leading example of what an optimized workforce would have looked like at the time. It's not lost on me that John Henry, "the steel-driving man who refused to be defined by what he did, but rather by who he was, transformed himself into a steam machine optimization engineer and supported the expanding railway system until he retired happily" is not the attention grabber for the kindergarten audience…but it sure does set a better tone for how we should think about people's role in the workforce in the future.

Furthermore, shouldn't the story that we are all telling be rooted in reality rather than in fear-mongering or folklore? The reality is that throughout the course of technological advancement, the end result has always been that the human workforce has been the critical driving engine behind making the most of technology and improving the living and working conditions for all involved.

The mechanization in agriculture, which introduced tractors and combines, may have led to the decline in traditional labor in farms, but it added significantly to other new job sectors such as manufacturing, services, and technology. The steel-driving machines of the Industrial Revolution did not eliminate the role of people in the workforce; they advanced it and saw wages double for employees. The globalization of production and supply chain didn't eliminate the American workforce; it evolved, advanced, and reimagined it. The information technology revolution brought with it the advent of computers, and rather than leading to widespread unemployment, which was predicted, it created entirely new industries and job categories from software developers to cybersecurity experts and beyond, which resulted in nearly 50 million jobs being added to the US workforce during this period.

People's ability to find the best ways of working effectively and efficiently together with technology has always defined the great transformations in industry and economy. The same will be said as we think about this wave of technological innovation—it will be defined by how all of us participate and invest in making the best of the technology and each other.

Let the modern-day telling of John Henry be our story and how we leveraged artificial intelligence, large language models, and robotic processing to our advantage. Let the modern-day version of this tale be about how routine and transactional job functions were automated and how we, the people, became even more essential in areas of creativity, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal skills. Let's stop doom-scrolling the stories where the robots take over the world, and all humans are jobless, staring down this dystopian future. Let's start clicking on and writing the stories where we stand on the shoulders of history and find new ways of bringing the human imagination and resilience to the forefront and how we leveraged technology to improve our lives and redrew the boundaries of what is possible in our world – that's the kind of story, one based on the new reality we will see, that I'd love to grab a square of green carpet to take a seat and learn about.

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