Why work abstracts up a level during industrial revolutions
Every major technology shift follows the same pattern: the new technology handles the previous era's skilled work, and humans move up. Understanding this pattern is essential for leaders navigating the AI era.
20 January 2025 · 3 min read
History repeats itself. Not in specifics — but in pattern.
Every major industrial revolution has followed a similar arc: a new technology emerges that automates the skilled work of the previous era. Initially there is panic about displacement. Then there is a reorientation as humans develop new, higher-order skills and create new categories of value. The economy expands, and humans do things that would have been unimaginable before.
Understanding this pattern is one of the most useful frames for navigating the AI era.
The progression
Before the printing press: Scribes were highly skilled professionals. Copying manuscripts accurately required years of training. The cognitive load was enormous — managing accuracy, language, and often illumination simultaneously.
After the printing press: Scribes were displaced. But literacy expanded, creating a mass market for books. New skilled roles emerged: editors, publishers, authors, critics. The total amount of human engagement with written ideas increased by orders of magnitude.
Before industrialisation: Skilled craftspeople spent years mastering production — spinning, weaving, smithing, joinery. Each object required individual expertise.
After industrialisation: These craft skills were largely automated. But new roles emerged in factory management, engineering, design, quality control, logistics, and retail. Total employment in manufacturing grew for a century.
Before computing: Routine office work — bookkeeping, filing, typing, calculation — was performed by large numbers of skilled clerical workers.
After computing: These roles collapsed. But knowledge work expanded explosively. Analyst, programmer, product manager, designer — roles that did not exist now employ hundreds of millions of people.
What this means for the AI era
AI is now automating the knowledge work that computers made possible. Pattern recognition, summarisation, classification, code generation, research synthesis — these are now increasingly handled by machines.
The predictable response, based on every previous revolution, is that humans will move up. The question is: up to what?
The answer is probably something like: judgement under genuine uncertainty, creative synthesis, ethical reasoning, relationship leadership, and strategic vision.
These are not new skills. They have always been valuable. But they have been deprioritised because lower-order work consumed most human bandwidth. When AI handles the lower-order work, these higher-order capabilities become the primary source of human value.
Implications for how we develop people
If this analysis is correct, the organisations that will win are those that actively develop these higher-order human capabilities now — not as a defensive response to AI, but as a strategic investment.
This means:
- Leadership development programmes that emphasise judgement, not process-following
- Product organisations built around customer empathy and creative problem-solving
- Decision-making processes that surface and test assumptions rather than optimise for speed
- A genuine tolerance for productive ambiguity
The organisations that treat AI purely as an efficiency tool — automating what exists without investing in human capabilities — will find themselves at a significant disadvantage. Not because AI will replace them, but because their competitors will have humans doing genuinely higher-value work.
The revolution is not coming. It is here. The question is whether your organisation is developing the human capabilities to thrive in it.
Want to talk through this?
Book a free discovery call with the Berst Consulting team.