In 1812, as English textile workers smashed the machines they believed were stealing their livelihoods, newspapers and Parliament framed the uprising starkly: machines versus men.
Two centuries later, as pundits warn of AI-driven job loss, we face a modern version of the same debate. We talk about AI as if it’s the first technology to threaten human work. But history tells a different story. The plow displaced farmhands. The spinning jenny–an innovation that let one worker spin multiple threads at once– sparked riots among weavers. The assembly line reduced artisans to cogs. Even the spreadsheet wiped out legions of clerical roles.
Every era has had its reckoning. And in every era, we’ve made the same mistake: treating people as secondary to the system. Whether it was a plow, a loom, or an algorithm, we designed work around efficiency and control instead of connection and possibility. And every time, it’s cost us creativity, trust, and innovation.
Now, in an age of artificial intelligence and endless Zoom calls, we stand at another turning point. The question is whether we will shape the future of work—or allow it to shape us.
To look ahead, it helps to look back. History reminds us that work has never been static. Each transformation—agrarian to industrial, industrial to digital—has been less about the tools we wield than about the human connections those tools enable or obstruct. When we ignore the lessons of history, we risk repeating mistakes that strip work of meaning, dignity, and trust.
Lesson One: Technology Doesn’t Replace Humanity—Unless We Let It
In the 1870s, the typewriter was dismissed as a passing fad, useful only for clerks, while the telephone was derided as a parlor toy. Each wave of invention met resistance, but over time most became indispensable. What history reveals, however, is not simply the adoption of tools, but the choices societies and leaders made in how to use them. The assembly line, for example, could have elevated teamwork and skill; instead, it often reduced humans to interchangeable parts. The typewriter could have expanded women’s professional roles; instead, it largely confined them to secretarial pools.
Today, AI presents the same double-edged possibility. But unlike prior inventions which changed the product or process of our labor, AI changes the way we think and decide. It can augment judgment or flatten it. It can free us for higher-order thinking or drown us in noise. The history of work teaches us that leaders must resist the temptation to hand off too much—trust, empathy, listening—to the machine. These are the muscles that atrophy fastest when neglected, and the very ones the future of work will depend on.
Lesson Two: Progress Requires Imagination
Gabriel García Márquez’s story The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World tells of villagers who discover a giant’s body washed ashore. As they prepare to bury this curious stranger, they begin to imagine a new reality for their community: bigger doorways, stronger houses, wider horizons for their own lives. The history of work is filled with similar moments—times when disruption forced us to imagine beyond what we thought possible.
One of the most searing examples came in 1911, when a fire swept through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Within minutes, 146 garment workers—mostly young immigrant women—were dead, trapped behind locked doors and inadequate fire escapes. The horror of that day galvanized a movement. Within a generation, sweatshops gave way to safety standards, child labor restrictions, and the weekend.
For leaders today, the lesson is clear: don’t wait for the fire to force your hand. Proactively widen your organization’s imagination. Ask what assumptions you are making about how work must be done, who must do it, and what success must look like. Sometimes the most radical act is not inventing new technology, but seeing old possibilities with new eyes.
Lesson Three: Every Era Has Its Trust Contract
In agrarian economies, trust was forged in families and villages. In industrial economies, trust was brokered through unions and social compacts: a day’s work for a day’s wage, pensions in exchange for loyalty. The late 20th century saw that contract fray under layoffs, outsourcing, and the gig economy. What we are left with is a deficit: Gallup finds that only 20% of employees strongly trust their company leaders.
History shows that trust is not incidental to work; it is its foundation. When it breaks, systems falter. In 1894, mistrust and mistreatment at the Pullman Palace Car Company erupted into a strike that paralyzed the nation’s railroads. In 1972, worker resentment over workforce cuts and management speeding up the assembly line at GM’s Lordstown plant triggered a wildcat strike that forced the company to rethink how it treated its people. Hybrid and AI-driven workplaces will be no different. Leaders who treat trust as a renewable resource will build cultures of resilience. Leaders who treat it as expendable will discover that no amount of data, dashboards, perks or AI can replace the quiet glue of reliability and respect.
Lesson Four: Inclusion Isn’t Optional, It’s Resilience
During World War II, women and people of color stepped into factories and shipyards in numbers the country had never seen. By 1945, women made up almost 40% of the workforce. But when the war ended, many were pushed out. Inclusion was treated as a stopgap, not a strategy.
That’s the pattern history warns us about: we open the door in times of crisis, then close it when the pressure fades. Today, we see echoes of that retreat. Under political pushback, companies are scrubbing DEI language from reports, abandoning hiring targets, even disbanding diversity teams.
Inclusion is not charity—it’s capacity. It’s what turns invention into innovation. And that is particularly critical now, as technology races ahead of our ability to make sense of it and put it to work on real problems inside companies. The only way to close that gap is to widen the circle of perspectives and put more minds to work on the hardest questions. Leaders who treat inclusion as temporary will repeat the oldest mistake in the history of work: sidelining talent, stifling progress, and stunting innovation.
Lesson Five: Work Always Reflects the Larger Culture
Workplaces are not sealed laboratories; they are mirrors of the societies that house them. Early industrial workplaces reflected rigid hierarchies of class and gender. Offices of the 1950s reflected conformity and homogeneity. Today’s workplaces reflect our polarization, our loneliness, our anxiety about technology.
That mirror can be sobering, but it can also be a chance to lead. Throughout history, workplaces have sometimes been ahead of the culture, modeling change before laws or politics caught up. During World War II, some factories employed Black and White workers side by side on assembly lines years before they could legally eat together in restaurants in many parts of the country. Later, companies began offering domestic partner benefits long before marriage equality. Work can magnify fractures, or it can model repair.
That choice matters now more than ever. How we handle AI in the workplace will ripple beyond office walls into society. Do we use it to isolate people further, or to free them to come together for deeper collaboration? Do we let it widen inequality, or do we design for access and dignity?
Leaders who cultivate empathy, foster reflection, and embed collaboration into how problems are solved are doing more than strengthening their teams. They’re showing us how to work—and live—together differently in this divided age.
Now What? Practical Takeaways for Leaders
- Design for Humanity, Not Just Efficiency. Ask of every new tool or policy: will this deepen connection or dilute it?
- Reimagine the Social Contract. Build trust through mutual commitments—flexibility, growth, and contribution—not surveillance or control.
- Invest in Endangered Skills. Listening, empathy, perspective-taking. These are not “soft.” They are survival in the AI era.
- Broaden Your Imagination. Learn from history, literature, and art. They remind us what it means to be human and open up possibilities we might otherwise miss.
- Be a Steward of Culture. Every decision is a cultural signal. Lead as if work shapes the world—because it does.
History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it does echo. Every time we mistake technology for destiny, we lose something essential. Every time we reduce people to roles or transactions, we shrink our possibilities. But every time we rebuild trust, widen inclusion, or imagine new ways of working together, we move closer to a future where work is not just toil, but meaning.
Two hundred years ago, the debate was framed as “machines or men.” Today, the question returns in a new form: “algorithms or people.” History shows us that framing is false. It was never one or the other—it was always both. Progress comes when we design systems where technology amplifies human capacity rather than replaces it.
History isn’t a script, it’s a guide. And its lesson is simple: the future of work will be human, or it will not work at all.
First published in Forbes.com.
