We Are All John Henry Now

I was a little kid when I first heard about John Henry, the steel-driving man from the Tennessee hills who defeated a steam-powered machine in a competition to lay track for a railroad through the Smoky Mountains. I knew I was supposed to root for John Henry, and it was easy. He was strong, unafraid, and above all, a person in competition with a cold machine.  

But even as a kid, the futility of John Henry’s mission was obvious. He may have won that track laying race, scattering that machine’s parts over the hills in a steam cloud, but he died of exhaustion. And he was the strongest steel-driving man in those parts, going up against what was surely an early steam engine model. Imagine the second model the engineers came up with, or the tenth. Meanwhile, there is still no second model of men. We are all Homo Sapiens Version 1.0.

John Henry’s story is an allegory of noble defiance against the indifferent machinations of progress. The back story is that our inventive, dynamic species will one day become the victim of its own success, outmoded in the end by its own creation. As a kid, watching the Jetsons, hearing about robots that built cars, and thinking about the endless future ahead of me, a voice in my mind quietly wondered, “… then what are we going to do?”

The notion of machines ending our way of life isn’t unique to John Henry’s story. The Terminator, Star Trek’s Borg Collective, Battlestar Galactica, and several other lesser deities of the sci-fi pantheon have all captured the foreknowledge that surely, some day, machines will be able to do everything we do, and do it better. Each of those stories conjures up a superior species of our own making— plausible, but always just beyond our abilities, safely in the realm of the fantastic. When it comes to plausible myth, John Connor has nothing on John Henry. Only John Henry tells the story of our loss to amoral, rational economic productivity. Only John Henry dares to tell the story of loss as it really is. I see John Henry making the stand that we all might have to make one day.

To be sure, I am well aware of the advances in our standard of living we all enjoy from the process of productivity gains. There is no way my toaster would cost $40 if it were made by an apprenticed craftsman instead of an assembly line of semi-skilled workers. There is no way I could expect to live a long life in comfort if this were still an age of human and animal toil alone.

But McDonalds cashiers are being replaced with iPads. Computers can now take sports statistics and put together well-written news articles. Lawyers now use software to mine documents for evidence instead of employing armies of associates and paralegals in the task. What will they do?

Technology continues to advance at logarithmic rates, even as we lumber ahead the same as always, hoping our own jobs aren’t next. Short of pulling the plug, I don’t see any way we can win this game. The steam engine howls for us all. If you can’t beat ‘em, the only option is to join ‘em. But we'll be all right. Homo Sapiens Version 2.0, here we come.  

The Legend of John Henry's Hammer,

Johnny Cash, live from Folsom Prison.

"John Henry said, I feed four little brothers,
And baby sister's walking on her knees.
Did the lord say that machines aughtta take the place of living?
And what's a substitute for bread and beans? (I ain’t seen it)
Do engines get rewarded for their steam?"