June 30, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ — McDialogue™
An Exploration of Media Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™
by Nelson S. Thall, McLuhan Media Scientist / Former Director/Chief Archivist, McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca.
When Machines Can Do Every Job, What Is Left for Man?
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, Artificial Intelligence companies promise to eliminate more and more kinds of work. They tell us machines will soon write our reports, answer our questions, design our products, drive our vehicles, diagnose our illnesses, and perhaps one day perform nearly every occupation. If technology continues removing one human effort after another, what happens when there is nothing left for mankind to do?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
Marshall McLuhan predicted that electronic technology would make many jobs obsolete. But jobs are not the story. Every technology extends some human power and then changes man's relationship to it. The wheel changed where men lived; writing changed the structure of civilization; the computer changed the pace of thought. Artificial Intelligence does not merely remove work. It removes effort, yet effort is the process by which human powers mature. The craftsman learned by carving; the writer learned to think by writing. When the machine performs the labour, the unused power does not wait in reserve. It withers. This is the amputation McLuhan warned of.
Yet the age confuses two different things: the job and the role. The job rests upon skills, and skills are exercised through human powers. Every technology can assume a skill because it extends its outward performance. The role is what a man chooses to do with the hours of his life. That choice issues not from skill but from conscience, the private citadel of consciousness no technology has ever breached. A thought may be placed before the mind, but no power on earth compels a man to dwell upon it. The alarmists who say Artificial Intelligence will hollow out the human person mistake the job for the man. The skill is exposed. The citadel is not.
So what stops a civilization from building machines that do every job? Nothing external. We stand at the precipice, and no law of nature holds the robotoid body back. Yet every technology, pushed far enough, reverses. The tool built to free man from labour becomes, at its limit, the tool that frees him from purpose, handing back hours he was never taught to fill. Only one thing has ever met that emptiness, and it is the one thing no machine can touch: the conscience that converts freed hours into role rather than idleness, enlarging the arts, the sciences and the creativity no machine originates. So the question is not whether Artificial Intelligence leaves us nothing to do. The question is whether we spend the hours it returns to us remembering what only we were ever meant to do.
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All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM) was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
I can be reached at nelson@themediumisthemessage.com