Artificial Intelligence: Its Challenge for Human Experience

"Because his family needed money, John Henry went to a nearby mountain where he asked the contemptuous "captain" for work building the railroad. A challenge was set between our mythic hero and the captain's new steam drill. Although the machine soon sputtered and failed, John Henry broke his body and his heart in the quest. He died with a hammer in his hands."

"The ballad's message: "A man ain't nothing but a man." Spirited creatures, we work as we must, but we also do many other things, whistling and singing among them. We love our families and sacrifice ourselves on their behalf. We fight those who challenge and disrespect us. We live and die as bravely as we can."

"Machines, it seems, have only one purpose: to accomplish their assigned tasks. They may break, as that drill did, but they can be repaired. And a new, technically improved version soon arrives. Their lack of sympathy and moral reflection makes them relentless."

"As baby John predicted ("sitting on his daddy's knee") that "steel" would be his downfall, so we moderns understand that the machine world will only expand in scope and importance. On the one hand, those devices make us more powerful and scrutinizing than any generation in history. On the other, they cause us, as individuals, to become ever less competent to judge or even understand those processes we now depend on. Social and cultural living moves beyond the human scale."

John Henry asks a railroad captain for work and faces a challenge against a steam drill. The drill fails, but John Henry breaks his body and heart while hammering and dies with a hammer in his hands. The ballad emphasizes that a person is defined by more than labor: people whistle, sing, love families, sacrifice for them, and fight disrespect. Machines are portrayed as having a single purpose to complete assigned tasks, breaking without moral concern and being replaced by improved versions. Modern life is framed as increasingly shaped by expanding machine power, making people more capable and more scrutinized while also reducing individual competence to judge or understand the processes they depend on.

Read at Psychology Today