VER-XIV-0030
“I used the new tools to make my team better instead of cutting them.”
You had the easy option — automate the people away, book the savings, call it progress. You built with them instead: the tools made each person more capable, not expendable. That is exactly the human use Wiener argued for. Hold that line; the pressure to treat people as cost will not let up.
Your Practice
- Name, concretely, how the tools made each person better at the human part of the work.
- Move the freed-up hours toward judgment, craft, and care — the things machines can't do.
- Ask the team where the tools help and where they get in the way. Build from their answer.
- Resist the next pitch that frames people purely as a cost to remove. Answer it on dignity.
The Architects
“Machines must be used for the benefit of man, for increasing his leisure and enriching his spiritual life, rather than merely for profits and the worship of the machine as a new brazen calf.”
— Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950