The AI Road Crew

It wasn’t that long ago, in the grand scheme.

My wife’s great grandfather was a dynamiter on a road crew in the Rocky Mountains.

It’s fun to go through old photographs of him and his crew, taking a break from really really hard work cutting roads through the mountains.

This was the era of the Civilian Conservation Corps–or the CCC–that built so many of our roads, bridges, and recreation areas in the 1930s and 40s. We’re talking hard working guys in JNCO-sized pants and Peaky Blinder hats leaning on shovels with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of their mouth smoked down to a nub.

Back then it would take a crew of three dozen or so men to work on building a road, and most of them with shovels, picks, and wheelbarrows. Very few had special skills like the dynamiter. It was a volume game: the more men, the faster we can build the road.

Now, it’s the opposite.

Specialists run the project on a road construction site. Backhoe operators, excavators, skid steers, bulldozers, steamrollers… and a crew is maybe a dozen or so at a time (and often much less).

Yes, machines took jobs away.

But there was also an opportunity created to become a specialist and run the machines – now only chumps are stuck holding a shovel. Grunt work is no longer the average position, it’s the lowest position.

The same thing is happening with AI.

Yes, AI is coming for a lot of jobs.

But like the road crew, that doesn’t mean you’re going to get wiped out (necessarily) – if you learn how to run the machine. Become the expert. If not, you’ll be left holding the shovel in your industry, and that will no longer be the place to be.

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