in 2015, standing on a hill overlooking coimbatore, you could watch the textile mills reshape the landscape. tirupur’s garment factories were supposed to empty out. automation was coming.
today those same factories expanded. more machines, yes. but also more people. 130% more output even with trump tariffs. the work shifted, evolved, adapted.
we’re good at finding new things to do.
last week i asked ai to generate concepts for a client project. work that used to fill my sketchbook. my film set colleague watched the screen populate. “you can already draw,” she said. “if the computer does it for you, what will you do?”
the question of our age… ai promises to automate not just routine tasks but creative ones. writing, design, music. is it about losing jobs but losing purpose?
the industrial revolution promised freedom from physical labor. the digital revolution promised freedom from mental work. somehow we ended up more stretched, more scheduled, more occupied than ever.
both were real technological transitions with measurable economic impacts. neither delivered a golden age of leisure.
history shows we adapt. adaptation takes time. late 18th century england, 20% of women and children hand-spinning textiles. forty years of mechanization. children who started spinning lived past middle age before child employment ended. career-length transition. even US manufacturing declined fifty years. 1960s to 2019. generational.
we’re maybe five years into ai. moving faster. maybe. ai investment expects automation of anything reducible to pattern recognition. turns out that’s most of what we do.
what remains uniquely human when machines can answer questions, optimize our world, entertain us, create our art?
my most active creative thinking happens in friction and delay. waiting for water to heat. walking. steaming idlis. standing in line.
maybe we’re approaching reversal. after centuries of humans doing machine-like work, time for humans to become distinctly human.
i.e., focus not on efficient or productive but on spaces between productivity. precisely because it can’t be automated. this requires radical shift in how we think about time and purpose.
tirupur mills taught me automation doesn’t move in straight lines. human ingenuity finds new problems.
but as ai automates labor and leisure, we face the real question.
not finding new work to replace old. discovering what it means to be meaningfully unoccupied.
learning to value zero hour not for what we fill them with but for what they are. life cannot be earned, just lived.
strange if the teacher was machine, not human.