The American folk-tale of John Henry tells the story of a clash between man and machine. John Henry, though fictitious, was based on the experiences of thousands of railroad workers, many of whom were African-American, in the nineteenth century.
John Henry was employed as a ‘steel driver’. When the railways were built, tunnels were created by making holes in the rock in which to place explosives, and the steel driver hammered in the drills as hard, and as fast, as they could.
When the companies brought in steam drills to work on the tunnels they were billed as faster than any man. John Henry, as the fastest and strongest steel driver, saw the writing on the wall for his job, and challenged the steam drill to a competition. They would see who could drill through the rock hardest and fastest. The contest began, and John Henry won against the machine, but then died of exhaustion.
The contest between man and machine was immortalised in The ballad of John Henry, which contains the lines:
John Henry said to his captain, a man ain't nothin but a man, but if you bring that steam drill round, I'll beat it fair and honest, I'll die with my hammer in my hand, but I'll be laughing, cuz you can't replace a steel driven man
It’s not difficult to see the parallels between the parable of John Henry and the current debates about artificial intelligence. Just as human beings were in danger of being replaced by the machines of the Industrial Revolution, so many modern workers fear being replaced by AI. Although human employees work hard, the development of AI has raised the spectre of artificial employees who work harder, faster, and without needing breaks.
IBM reports on AI and the future of work, saying: “The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the workplace represents one of the most significant technological shifts in generations. This transformation is reshaping not just how we work, but what it means to work in the 21st century”. So what does the future of work look like, and how should we approach it as Christians?
The changing workplace
Whether we like it or not, artificial intelligence has entered the workplace and it is likely to be here to stay. According to various polls, between 50 to 80% of people have used generative AI (such as chat GPT) to help them in some way, with around a third of people using it daily at work.
Moreover, most of us don’t seem to mind that artificial intelligence is invading our workplaces. According to Harvard Business School, 94% of people favour using AI in some way at work, suggesting that “most people appear comfortable with the idea that technology helps humans perform work more quickly and efficiently.” The UK picture is a bit more sceptical, with 34% of the public expecting a positive impact on working skills from AII, and an equal 34% expecting a negative one. A third of workers in the UK see themselves as a modern-day John Henry and fear AI could put their job at risk.
It is clear that artificial intelligence could pose a threat to some jobs. According to the management consultancy McKinsey, up to a third of hours worked across the United States economy could be automated by 2030. The World Economic Form estimates that there may be as many as 85 million job losses across the world in the next few years. However, it also estimates that new technology like AI could create as many as 97 million new jobs.
Even if AI creates more jobs than it replaces, there is increasing concern about the inequalities that AI can introduce or perpetuate. Clerical work, for example, is one area that artificial intelligence can potentially replace, but it is also a field that is mostly done by women, introducing a possible gender inequality. Microsoft’s ‘New Futures of Work 2025’ report identifies other inequalities that can impact the workplace because of the way that AI is trained and implemented. Commenting on the potential bias of AI systems, Leanne Allen, Head of AI at KPMG UK, notes that “AI is only as good as the data it is built upon, so if you have a historically biased, incomplete or unrepresentative data sets, you are likely to get biased results”.
Artificial intelligence is changing the nature of work, and will continue to do so. Knowing about AI, and how to use it, is going to be a crucial feature of many, if not most, roles in the future. But what about the very nature of work itself?
The end of work?
For some, the advent of artificial intelligence opens the door for a new possibility: the end of work entirely.
Innovations and automation through AI could reduce the amount of work that human beings have to do. CEO of Zoom, Eric Yuan, has suggested that we could be working a three-day work week in just a few years time. Elon Musk, owner of xAI, has said that “AI and robots will replace all jobs,” adding that working will be “optional, like growing your own vegetables, instead of buying them from the store.“
Some envisage a future where AI takes over most, if not all, work, and governments provide a Universal Basic Income which will give every person enough money to live on. We will be freed to pursue leisure, hobbies, and other interests.
This sounds like it should be a good thing. After all, Aristotle once wrote that “all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” Surely if we don’t need to work, then why not sit back, relax, and let the computers do it? After all, if artificial intelligence can do my work better than me, what’s the point of me doing it?
While a life of leisure sounds tempting, it is not what we are designed for. We read in the opening chapters of the Bible that God created human beings and placed them in Eden “to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). God gives humanity the ‘creation mandate’ to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Part of being made in the image of God is to have meaningful, creative work to do.
Humanity’s sin breaks the relationship between us and God, between ourselves, and with the world we live in (Genesis 3). As a result, work becomes hard work, with the ground producing ‘thorns and thistles’ as well as good crops. There are many aspects of work that are difficult, unpleasant, and frustrating. Nevertheless, work is still good and given to us by God.
Removing productive work entirely is to ignore the way that God has made us as his creations. We are made for meaningful work, and we need to hold on to that task. While artificial intelligence can no doubt help with our work, it should not be our goal to remove work completely. We need some kind of meaningful activity in order to live as God intended.
Augmentation or replacement
If we don’t want AI to remove our work entirely, how should it impact our work? Broadly speaking, artificial intelligence can change our work in one of two ways: it can augment our work, or it can replace our work.
When AI replaces human work, it removes human beings from the task entirely. Computers run things without us having to be involved at all. From manufacturing processes, to design work, marketing copy, or customer services, AI has the potential to take away roles from human beings. This is probably the future of work we most fear.
Artificial intelligence can also augment human work, however. This is where technology complements human ingenuity, rather than replacing it. Whether by automating time-consuming processes, acting as a sounding-board for ideas, or working as a research assistant, AI has the potential to help human work rather than harm it.
The future of our work, therefore, depends a great deal on whether artificial intelligence is introduced to augment or replace what we do.
Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, warns about what he calls the Turing Trap. This builds on the idea of ‘The Turing Test’ introduced by Alan Turning in the 1950s as a way to assess whether a machine is intelligent. The idea of the Turing Test has driven innovators to try and create ‘human level artificial intelligence’ (HLAI) which is indistinguishable from a human being. But this can led to AI replacing human work, rather than complementing it. Brynjolfsson writes:
When AI augments human capabilities, enabling people to do things they never could before, then humans and machines are complements. Complementarity implies that people remain indispensable for value creation and retain bargaining power in labor markets and in political decision-making. In contrast, when AI replicates and automates existing human capabilities, machines become better substitutes for human labor and workers lose economic and political bargaining power. Entrepreneurs and executives who have access to machines with capabilities that replicate those of human for a given task can and often will replace humans in those tasks.
Brynjolfsson goes on to say that “not all types of AI are human-like—in fact, many of the most powerful systems are very different from humans—and an excessive focus on developing and deploying HLAI can lead us into a trap.”
The best way to use any kind of technology is to augment human work rather than to replace it. Developing technology is a form of God-given creativity, and part of fulfilling the creation mandate of Genesis chapter one. Technology is a tool which can be used to glorify God, or used for sinful and selfish means. The issue is how we use the technology that has been invented.
Frustrating or productive struggle
One way in which we might be tempted to use AI at work is to reduce or remove the struggles we face. That is one of the key ways in which artificial intelligence is billed as changing the nature of work. Boring emails can be automated, time-consuming work can be done in a flash, and routine tasks can be done for you. Why struggle with a blank page in front of you when AI can write a draft of the report for you in an instant?
There are some realms where artificial intelligence excels, and automation is one of them. Where mundane tasks can be taken from human beings, freeing them to do thoughtful, creative work, this is extremely helpful.
However, we need to be careful. Artificial intelligence, for all of its lauded productivity gains, works to reduce friction in our daily work. When we remove friction entirely from our activity we drastically underestimate its role in our lives. As Chris Watkin, associate professor at Monash University in Melbourne, notes:
Friction is a gym for the soul. The awkward conversation, the blank page, the child who won’t sleep when we have a report to write––these aren’t roadblocks to our growth; they’re the highway to wisdom and maturity, to being the sort of people who can deal with friction in life with resilience and grace. Without it, we remain weak and small, however impressive our productivity.
We can have too much friction at work, and AI can help to reduce that friction. But we can also have too little friction, reducing or removing the struggle which helps us to learn and grow.
There is a helpful distinction to be made between frustrating struggle and productive struggle. Every job has elements of frustration, stemming from life in a fallen world that produces thorns and thistles rather than good fruit. Reducing frustration is a good thing. However, productive struggle hones our skills and shapes us as a person. We remove or reduce productive kinds of struggle at our peril. Author Jeffery Bilbro writes:
Despite the pointless tedium that characterizes much striving, we also experience the productive effort that accomplishes good work and, in the process, changes us. So, we might begin discerning which technologies to adopt – which struggles to bypass … Technologies that relieve frustrating struggle can make our efforts more productive and can increase our ability to do good work, whereas technologies that eliminate productive struggle diminish our capacities and prevent us from becoming the kind of people able to exercise our freedom responsibly and redemptively.
Artificial intelligence applied in the wrong way, or to the wrong tasks, can increase frustration rather than reduce it. Employees have started to identify AI ‘workslop’ which is AI-generated content that appears useful but actually has little if any substance. Results that are incomplete or inaccurate force workers to check, correct, interpret, or even redo work done by artificial intelligence. This ‘workslop’ ends up undermining productivity instead of increasing it.
Doing what only humans can do
The best way to think about the future of work after the advent of AI, and to reduce our worries about it, is to concentrate on doing what only humans can do. Despite the speed and efficiency of artificial intelligence, there will always be things that humans do better than machines.
Christian journalist Susannah Black Roberts offers an intriguing suggestion to combat the worry about job losses due to AI. Her advice is to “time travel proof your career”. She writes:
If there’s a job or skill or career that you can do and get paid for, ish, now, and could have also done in 1750 in London, and ideally could have also done in 400 in Cappadocia, you’re good to go. That means no, don’t be a data engineer. What is that. No one knows what that is.
Sadly those who were encouraged to ‘learn to code’ to find a lucrative career are finding themselves in danger of being replaced by AI coding platforms. But there will always be careers for human beings, and the same kinds of careers that existed three hundred years ago: doctors, teachers, artists, cooks, farmers, builders, architects. AI will certainly be involved in these careers, and there may even be a battle on for some of them (AI may be able to produce artwork, but can it truly be an artist?). But there will be opportunities for human beings to express the skill, creativity, and dedication that God has given to each of us. As Microsoft note in their ‘New Futures of Work 2025’ Report:
Many jobs (for example, teachers, hairdressers, chaplains, therapists) involve “connective labor,” the work of creating emotional understanding to create valuable outcomes. Though some of the tasks of such work could be automated, when people engage in connective labor, it creates mutual dignity and purpose, and weaves the social fabric of society, outcomes only humans can co-create
Not only are there things that only humans can do, there are also jobs that we only want humans to do. Harvard Business School used a ‘moral repugnance scale’ across 940 different occupations to measure how much the public resisted those jobs being automated. The roles that people least wanted to see AI taking were clergy, childcare workers, therapists, judges, and athletes. The jobs that people were most happy for AI to take were clerks, planners, and switchboard operators.
We might assume that the way to be successful in the future world of work is to be more like a machine: work harder, faster, and more efficiently. However, the opposite is more likely to be true. To find your place in the future world of work you need to be excessively human, leaning into the very things that only we can do as image-bearers of the living God.
Humans are able to “comfort a baby, navigate a cluttered forest, or pluck the ripest blueberry from a bush, tasks that are difficult if not impossible for current machines,” explains Erik Brynjolfsson. “But machines excel when it comes to seeing X-rays, etching millions of transistors on a fragment of silicon, or scanning billions of webpages to find the most relevant one.”
Since artificial intelligence is not going away, the most likely scenario for the future of work will be humans and machines working in partnership, just as they have done from the Industrial Revolution. As we lean into our God-given humanity, we can also lean into the strengths of computers and AI platforms. researchers from the University of Cambridge and accountants KPMG, note:
The integration of AI into work may be inevitable, but how organisations choose to integrate it is not. It’s not just about implementing technological change; it's about ensuring workplaces remain human-centered amidst it: using technology to enhance – not replace – humans.
In their report, Microsoft suggests that the way to think about AI is as a “bicycle for the mind.” A bicycle doesn’t remove human autonomy or direction. It rather enhances our power to be more effective and to go further. Artificial intelligence can work the same way, automating routine tasks but not removing human judgement or direction.
The future of work
Predicting the future is always fraught with danger. None of us can quite see what the future holds and what other technological breakthroughs might change the nature of work in the years to come. James counsels about the future by saying:
Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow … Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”
The future of work might be difficult to see, but we know that God has the future in his hands. We may make our plans and predictions, but thankfully it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails (Proverbs 19:21).
It is helpful to remember that there will always be challenges to our view of work. “[It] is likely to bring about an organizational revolution among white collar workers comparable in magnitude to that resulting from the introduction of the assembly-line in blue collar work” is a powerful quote that might make us fearful about the development of AI. However, these words were not written about AI but about the microprocessor over forty years ago. Disruptions to the way we work are nothing new.
In 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, C.S. Lewis gave a lecture to students beginning their studies. He helped them to see the value of study while there was a war on, saying:
The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice … We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life". Life has never been normal.
In our worries about the future of work, it is helpful to remember that life has never been ‘normal’. Artificial intelligence creates no ‘absolutely new situation’, instead it aggravates a human situation which has always been there.
The wisdom of the book of Ecclesiastes is particularly relevant to this topic. Sometimes seen as unduly negative, Ecclesiastes actually gives a realistic portrait of life in a fallen world. The writer tells us:
A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?
We are designed to find enjoyment and satisfaction in our work, even if that work can be ‘toil’ at times. Yet this enjoyment and satisfaction is a gift from God. The ultimate test of meaningful work is not whether it includes AI or not, but whether it is received from God and given back in worship to him.
Human and AI collaboration can bring a great increase in productivity. However, as Christians, we affirm that productivity is not our ultimate goal or the measure of success in human activity. Doing what we do well, and doing it for the glory of the God who gives us the ability, is of greatest importance. The apostle Paul tells the Colossians: “whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17).
Artificial intelligence can make the future of work hard to discern. We do not know what will happen tomorrow. What we do know is that we have a loving, heavenly Father who holds the future in His hands. With work, as with all things, we commit ourselves to Him, knowing that He will make our paths straight.