"Mary charged sixpence a week for this service. Then the alarm clock arrived, and Mary's job vanished. Do we mourn the knocker-up today? Do we rage against the tyranny of the alarm clock? Of course not. Because what happened to Mary is what has happened throughout every technological revolution: certain tasks became obsolete whilst entirely new categories of work emerged."
"Let me offer a different provocation: AI is not coming for your job. It is coming for your tasks. And if you cannot distinguish between the two, then yes - you should be worried. The evolution we refuse to see Human work has always been in flux. In nomadic societies, we hunted and gathered. Agriculture tethered us to land and rhythms of seasons. Industrialisation moved us into factories, trading physical labour for wages."
A 1930s knocker-up who woke factory workers with dried peas illustrates how technology eliminates tasks while creating new kinds of work. Alarm clocks replaced a paid waking service, yet livelihoods evolved rather than vanished wholesale. Human work has continuously shifted from hunting and gathering to agriculture, industrial factory labor, and the information economy, each change redefining uniquely human roles. Neural networks and machine learning now sit atop existing software and hardware, dramatically increasing processing and pattern-matching capabilities. The core challenge is recognizing that AI targets discrete tasks, not whole occupations, and preparing to adapt accordingly.
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