Psychology Today | 05.10.2026 21:29
My favorite analogy for the future of work: Years ago, a hundred men with shovels would dig a trench, slowly, methodically, their labor measured in sweat and hours. Then came the bulldozer. Inevitably, a group of ditch diggers must have sat together, shaking their heads, lamenting that this infernal machine would take all their jobs. And in a narrow sense, they were right. The bulldozer did replace them. But that framing, while emotionally poignant, was economically incomplete. The bulldozer redefined the unit of labor itself: A single operator could now do the work of a hundred humans.
