John Henry, the Algorithm, and the Wrong Lesson We Keep Learning

Every time a new wave of technology shows up, we seem to tell ourselves the same story. It usually goes something like this: the machines are coming for our jobs, and the only honorable response is to fight them.

The Industrial Revolution had its loom-smashers and rail-yard skeptics. We have AI think pieces and LinkedIn meltdowns. Different century; same anxiety.

One of the most enduring stories from that earlier moment is the legend of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced a steam-powered hammer, beat it, and died from the effort. The story is usually told as a kind of defiant victory. Human strength, grit, and pride holding the line against cold machinery.

But that may be the wrong takeaway.

John Henry didn’t lose because the machine was better. He lost because he treated it as an opponent instead of a tool. He proved a point, certainly, but at the cost of everything else. The machine kept working. The system moved on. The work still needed to be done.

That feels uncomfortably relevant right now.
AI is not the steam hammer of our time; it is closer to the power loom or the assembly line. It does not eliminate work so much as change where the effort lives. The real danger is not that machines will outwork us, but that we will insist on competing with them at exactly the thing they are designed to do best instead of using them to make our work more effective.

There is a certain pride in doing things “the hard way.” Writing every line yourself. Analyzing everything manually. Proving that your output came purely from human effort. The impulse is understandable; it feels like integrity. Still, there is a fine line between craftsmanship and stubbornness.

The people who thrived during the Industrial Revolution were not the ones who tried to out-muscle the machines. They were the ones who learned how to work with them: supervising, adapting, designing better processes, and shifting from raw labor to leverage.

AI is pushing us into a similar transition. The question is not whether it can replace us; it is whether we are willing to let it remove the parts of our work that do not actually define us. The repetitive bits. The scaffolding. The friction of starting from nothing.

John Henry’s story is tragic not because he lost to a machine, but because he never imagined another option. There was no version where the hammer made him stronger instead of obsolete. No version where winning did not require self-destruction.

That is the lesson worth keeping.

We do not need to race the algorithm. We need to decide where human judgment, taste, ethics, and creativity actually matter, and let the machines do the rest. Otherwise, we risk repeating the same mistake, just with better hardware and a faster clock.

History has already shown us how that one ends.

I might still be a little concerned about Skynet though