In a 2024 podcast appearance, Sam Altman – founder of Open AI, the company responsible for Chat-GPT- said of his then four-month-old son, “My child will never be smarter than AI.”

This quote has stuck with me since I first heard it several months ago, for one because I find its reasoning absolutely demented, but also for my own complete inability to see where he’s coming from.

On that same podcast, Altman gave some rationale for his description of AI as “smart” saying, “Of course, it’s smarter than us…it can do things we can’t.” To that end, both me and Sam’s precious chat-bot are far dumber than a pigeon as neither of us can fly, and our intellects pale to that of the mighty boom crane because we can’t lift steel girders to the top of a building. 

I’m being facetious of course, though I do believe that large language models are dumber than a bird, and on about the same level of a crane, but I am striking at the truth that data and code can not be “smart”, not like we can.

It would be odd to describe the most recent edition of the encyclopedia Britannica as “smarter” than the last one, because “smart” is a multifaceted trait which means something more than being able to recite a large amount of learned information, which is really the only thing an AI can do.

I have read hundreds of tweets from tech bros to try and understand the AI supremacist perspective, but I can’t understand how a person could believe something so anti-human. I don’t know how a man could ever accept his inferiority to a machine.

For me it just keeps coming back to this: did we not all learn the same story in elementary school?

The story of John Henry has remained shockingly consistent for the last 150 years, from the folk song to the Disney cartoon to the story that I really hope first graders are still taught in school. But if you haven’t heard it, the basics go as follows:

John Henry is an American folk hero who, as the story goes, was working on the construction of a railroad tunnel through a mountain, when the captain of the rail laying team brought a steam powered drill to the camp. This new technology threatened to displace most of the workers on the line, so John Henry challenged the captain to a competition to see whether he or the drill could drive steel faster. John Henry took a hammer in each hand and prevailed against the drill. But, he died soon after.

Though the story likely originated among African-American communities, it’s become ubiquitous in American culture, ubiquitous enough that I don’t remember learning it; it feels like something I’ve always known, and as of late, it’s something I find myself thinking about a lot when I look at the news.

Maybe it’s me, maybe the story of John Henry is not as woven into the fabric of American identity as I think it is, but I can’t help but see steam drills every time I hear talk of AI worming itself into our lives and work.

AI is, for one, literally performing the same function of taking jobs from human workers as the machines of the Industrial Revolution, but unlike a steam drill, AI also has the power to displace people from other human functions. Increasingly the position of friend and student are being replaced by Chat-bots.

I’m anxious about the world I’ll have to live in. I’m worried that one day I might seek care from a doctor who cheated through school with AI, and maybe more than anything I’m worried that there’ll be no one new to meet in the “smart” AI powered future, that everyone will have turned inwards to themselves and to AI companions.

But, as much as I’m anxious I’m twice as mad, because as my space in the future melts beneath me, I’m being told that it’s a good thing. I am, in the mind of Silicon Valley billionaires and their sycophantic investors, an inferior product to new AIs, and worse still people believe them.

At a time when AI stands to reshape the world and your place in it, you can’t just lay down and let it happen. For me at least I’ll try as well I can to listen to the stories I was told as a child, which ask me to be belligerent in face of replacement, which depend I live by the words of the old folk ballad:

“Before he let that steam drill beat him down,

Said he’d die with his hammer in his hand.”