Three-Pee-Oh was a steel-drivin’ droid, Lord, Lord …

by David Benjamin

“John Henry said to his cap’n,
‘Oh, a man ain’t nothin but a man,
And before I let that steam drill beat me down,
I’ll die with this hammer in my hand,
Lord, Lord, I’ll die with this hammer in my hand’ …”
―Josh White, “The Story of John Henry”

MADISON, Wis.—During my latest obligation in Las Vegas, among the propellerheads and main-chancers at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), I found myself thinking about John Henry.

The myth of John Henry has long been one of my touchstones. Most people recognize John Henry as the hero of an increasingly obscure folk song about a mighty steel driver who battled a drilling machine—and won, or lost, depending on the version of the song. However, in American folklore, especially the mythology of black America, John Henry is far more significant.
In one respect, the many versions of the John Henry legend, which percolated from the oral ex-slave culture after the Civil War , are the seed that gave birth to the blues, an improvisational structure of rhyme and meter that became the foundation of virtually every variant of twentieth-century popular music. Simply put, if not for John Henry, we might have never had Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Hank Williams, Elvis, the Beatles, Michael Jackson or Taylor Swift.

But music wasn’t on my mind at CES. This year, the Next Big Thing was robots. Tech and auto companies were trotting out their prototype cyborgs, the snazziest of which were “humanoids” with arms, legs and—on a few—faces. These droids are the latest reincarnation of John Henry’s steam drill, machines designed to improve humanity by replacing workers doing jobs that are dirty, dull, tedious and grueling.

Trouble is, the dilemma in this dream hasn’t changed much since 1872, when the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad was digging the Big Bend Tunnel through a West Virginia mountain. The real John Henry was one of the C&O’s steel drivers.

The excavation required two stages, the first of which fell to workers like John Henry. With hammer and chisel, he chewed through the solid rock a narrow crawlspace, little more than two feet from floor to ceiling. The work was dusty and lung-destroying, toxic and claustrophobic. It required no brains, only strength and a stamina that were almost superhuman, and desperation.

After John Henry had clawed a crease in the mountainside and drilled holes into the floor of this tomb, demolition men took over, filling the holes with dynamite, blowing a gap big enough that John Henry could get up off his knees. He could stand up to swing his twelve-pound hammer and batter the rock.

Beyond songs and legend, John Henry’s tragedy is a parable of the Industrial Revolution, with the steam drill as its symbol. The central irony is this: Although John Henry proved himself more durable, dependable and admirable than the technology invented to replace him, his superiority did not matter.

Beating the steam drill, after all, killed John Henry. The completion of the railroad killed his job. And the steam drill evolved—thanks to electricity and hydraulics—into the jackhammer which, of course, also ironically, still requires a human operator.

The John Henry Constant, if we call it that, applies to the creation of a machine to do a man’s job better than a man can do the job, only to discover that the machine is less than a man. The Jackhammer Corollary, however, is that a technology can be re-imagined, tinkered with and improved. Being less than a man proves to be, in the long run, better than being “nothin’ but a man.” Although it was faulty technology, the steam drill augured a future in which men like John Henry were destined to be, in the hopes and dreams of the railroad tycoons of that century and the tech wizards of this century, nothing at all.

Enter the humanoid.

The screens and booths of CES were a carnival of robotic prototypes moving and grooving, listening and obeying, reaching and clutching, auguring the future. A flood of videos showed droids doing menial jobs in factories and warehouses, relieving humanity of tedious, mindless tasks. Dazzled conventioneers were not encouraged to notice that these tasks had to be re-designed to accommodate the robots’ mental and mechanical handicaps. As the saying goes, a droid folding a towel is like a dog walking on its hind legs. What’s remarkable is not that that it does this well, but that the damn thing can do it at all.

Inadvertently, the droids of Las Vegas were demonstrating that most mindless tasks aren’t so mindless after all. For example, trusting that this was not animation, I watched a video in which a silvery humanoid deftly transferred steel rods from a cart to a shelf. It turned this trick at roughly one-quarter the speed that a teenage boy could do the same thing. The droid’s performance was flawless—with a hitch. The materials it was handling were all the same shape, weight and length.

Given a slightly stickier task, sorting and stacking, for example, a cartful of rods of various dimensions, along with joists, joints, steel plates, angle irons, pipes, lampshades, chair legs and maybe a discarded teddy bear, this current-generation droid would be dangerously fumble-fingered or paralyzed with indecision.

I know. Improvements are in the works. There will come day when Robbie the next-gen or next-next-next-gen Robot will cruise through this sort of challenge with one pincer tied behind his pelvic plate. But, for the time being, putting a bunch of different stuff away is a chore still done faster, more adroitly—even mindlessly—by John Henry’s muscle-and-blood successors.

And the job won’t kill them.

The unspoken, unresolved dilemma of CES—and most every technology advancements since 1872—is the inconvenience of human labor. The steam drill was costly to develop and probably no cheaper to operate than John Henry who—according to the song—hammered his fourteen feet at “a dollar and a dime a day.” The machine wasn’t as productive or efficient as John Henry, nor would it ever be so. But that was never the point. People are bothersome.

God—or Mammon—only knows how much Hyundai spent to develop a humanoid that it calls “Atlas.” But any reasonable guess would land in the millions of dollars, with millions more due to be poured into Atlas II and Atlas III, IV, V, ad nauseam. Manufacture a few thousand Atlases and you’re talking billions of dollars and countless years of amortization—all for the sake of eliminating the bother that John Henry once posed for the C&O.

Before we develop a new technology, we don’t know how much it’s gonna cost. But we know how much people cost, and how hard it is to get rid of them. When they become outdated, you can’t just discontinue the product line, cannibalize them for spare parts and recycle their raw materials. You have to feed. house, clothe and medicate them ’til they shut down from “natural causes,” after which disposal is both messy and wasteful.

My annual trip to CES is a reminder that, in the corporate quest for a techno-Paradise in which no wages need be paid to even one carbon-based life form, money is no object. And the objective, which hasn’t changed since John Henry breathed his legendary last, is still a future in which no work unit—no matter how bloated with SOCs, GANs and LLMs it might be—will ever feel a need for the dignity of having a job, making a living and going home to its family.

Or feel anything at all.