Rapid advances in AI technology are delivering a mixed bag of hopeful optimism and varied anxieties about all kinds of things: space travel, health care, environmental change. But perhaps nowhere is AI’s impact more keenly watched than the future of work. And if a recent viral post by investor Matt Shumer is any indication, AI is poised to dramatically change the way we do business—and fast. How we respond to those changes is yet to be determined.
Of course, AI discourse has been building for years, and when I recently revisited a favorite classic, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, I was surprised by how relevant this nearly 200-year-old novel was to the discussion—it felt like such a strong metaphorical thread through to our contemporary anxieties.
A little background: When I first listened to Gaskell’s classic 10 years or so ago, I was swept up in the love story, and fully bug-eyed at the refreshingly feminist ending. (I also promptly went to watch the BBC adaptation—paging the Armitage Army!) Sure, the historic insight into the rise of collective bargaining during the industrial era was interesting, but for my younger, romantic heart, it wasn’t really the point.
North and South frames its central tension between England’s industrial north and its agrarian south. The novel follows southerner Margaret Hale, forced to move north with her family, as she adjusts to her new life. It shows her growing sympathy for the working poor, and how she comes to understand the aesthetics—at first so jarring and tasteless to Margaret’s sensibilities—as she falls in love with the least expected of suitors. But I’d argue that the secondary tension at the heart of the novel is between the union workers and the masters in the cotton mill town of Milton Northern (a thinly veiled Manchester). As for Margaret, she is a proxy for Gaskell’s uneducated audience, to whom she was trying to explain the emerging political landscape of the newly industrialized north.
The novel's other central character is John Thornton, a self-made man and mill owner who is also Margaret’s suitor. When his workers strike, Thornton makes good on his threat to replace them by bringing in inexperienced Irish laborers instead. He subsequently loses almost all his money, and very nearly his shirt. It’s not until he forges a relationship with his worker Nicholas Higgins that he’s able to understand how to meet the needs of his employees—financial, but also those more hard-to-grasp things: dignity and respect.
Listening again in the context of today, I have to wonder what Gaskell would have made of AI. Business leaders (our contemporary John Thorntons) are welcoming it as the next great conveyor belt, an efficiency that should in theory cut costs and ramp up production. But might we be walking toward a world where AI is more like those poor, unskilled workers brought into replace the craftsmen? Is it being employed to help humans with needed enhancements and safety measures—or to replace them? A lot of recent signals are pointing to AI actually performing better at some tasks than even skilled workers, but to continually throw capital toward production ends up leaving a ton of people (the characters in our contemporary novel) out in the cold. I suspect Gaskell would agree with me that AI shouldn’t stand in for the craftsmen, or the skilled laborers, in our current industrial story.
One of my favorite colloquialisms I discovered in North and South is “clemming.” It means the act of feeling a gnawing hunger. There’s something so brutal about it being a verb; this is active hunger, not just the state of existing without food. The children of the strikers in North and South are all clemming and crying as they await a resolution to the strike. And perhaps today’s AI fears reflect our inner clemming for something intangible, call it creative freedom or human endeavor, that we’re anxious not to lose.
