For two hundred years the answer to “a machine took my job” was the same: climb to higher-skill work.
It always worked. The loom took the weaving, we went up to running the mill. The tractor took the digging, we went up to managing the farm. Every time, the machine took the work below us, and we climbed to the rung above.
I don’t think it works this time. The machine this time is AI.
The rung we always had
Think of work as a ladder.
At the bottom is muscle. Lifting, hauling, digging. Machines took that first, and it wasn’t pretty for the people standing on that rung. But we climbed. We went up to the next one: routine work. Filing, sorting, adding up long columns of numbers by hand.
Then machines came for that rung too. The spreadsheet ate the columns. The software ate the filing. And we climbed again, up to the rung that felt safe forever: thinking. Judgment. Taste. Deciding what to do, not just doing it.
That was the deal, quietly, the whole time. Machines take the doing. Humans keep the deciding. Stand on the thinking rung and you’re fine.
I climbed that ladder myself. Ten years in growth marketing. Three of them as Head of Growth, running growth for big brands, the kind of names you’d know. I was good at it. I learned the next thing, then the next thing, and every time the work below me got automated, I climbed. That’s what you do. That’s what worked.
And for my whole career, my honest advice to anyone worried about their job was simple: just get better. Learn the next thing. Move up a rung. It’s the advice I’d have given you a year ago without blinking.
The first machine that climbs with us
Here’s where it stops working.
This machine isn’t camped on a lower rung. It’s not taking the muscle, or the filing, or the boring stuff below you. It’s reaching for the top one. The thinking rung. The one we always ran to.
It writes. It argues. It plans, drafts, designs, decides. Anything made of words, it can have a go at. And almost everything we call “knowledge work” is, in the end, made of words. Yuval Noah Harari put it plainly in The Economist a couple of years back: language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Stories, laws, plans, the lot. That used to be the thing only we could do. It was the top rung.
Now you’re sharing it.
This is the part that took me a while to say out loud, because it goes against everything I used to believe. I spent my career sure the answer was always “just climb higher.” The quiet realization, watching this thing get good at the exact work I thought was safe, was that the advice I’d always given runs out somewhere up there. Not because people are running out of effort. Because we might be running out of rungs.
And yeah, I can hear the obvious pushback, because I’ve made it myself. People said exactly this about the loom, the tractor, the calculator, the spreadsheet. Every time, the ladder grew a new top rung and we climbed onto it. So why is this time different?
Honest answer: every machine before took a kind of work and left the thinking to us. This is the first one reaching for the thinking itself. I genuinely don’t know what rung sits above that. I’m not betting there isn’t one. I’m just not standing on a rung and hoping there is.
Own the ladder
So if you can’t out-climb a machine that climbs with you, what do you do?
You stop trying to win the climb. That’s the whole shift. The move isn’t a higher rung. It’s to change where you stand.
Own the ladder.
Be the one who decides what gets built. Point the machine. Own the outcome, the thing the climbing was always for. The person who owns the ladder doesn’t care which rung the machine reaches, because they’re not standing on a rung. They’re holding the whole thing and deciding where it goes.
This is the part of my own story that finally made sense to me. At some point the climbing ran out. Getting better at the work, one more rung, stopped feeling like the answer. So I stopped racing the machine and started pointing it: deciding what got made, owning whether it worked. The clearest version for me was content. Instead of grinding out posts by hand, one at a time, I built a system that does the writing and ran that instead.
That wasn’t climbing to a safer rung. It was stepping off the rung entirely to own the ladder. To be the one who decides what gets made, and owns whether it works.
That’s the seat that doesn’t get climbed past. Not because the machine can’t reach it. Because it’s not a rung at all.
If you’d rather have this built into your team than work it out solo, that’s the work I do. I install the systems, beside you, so the leverage ends up yours.
The climb is over
For two hundred years the answer to “a machine took my job” was: climb to higher-skill work.
The climb is over. And honestly, that’s not the bad news it sounds like.
The thinking rung was never really the prize. It was the highest place we could reach while machines did the rest. Now they’re reaching it too, which means the old question, “which rung do I stand on,” is the wrong question. The real one is whether you’re standing on a rung at all, or holding the ladder.
So here’s the one thing, not a list. Pick one piece of work you do by hand and hand it to the machine this week. Not to free up time. To get the feel of pointing it instead of racing it. That’s the whole muscle: moving from doing the work to deciding what the work is.
The future of work isn’t decided for us. It’s still being authored. The only real choice is whether you’re standing on a rung waiting to see what happens, or holding the thing and deciding where it goes.
I might have some of this wrong. The “no higher rung” worry is a worry, not a forecast, and I’d genuinely like to be wrong about it. But I know which side of it I want to be standing on. Not on a rung. Holding the ladder.