Let the Machines Do the Work

At the North Oakland Senior Center the other day, a group of us fell into the very common conversation about AI.  A couple of us actually use it.  We like it; we're cautious but optimistic.  Most of the other Seniors were uneasy.  They worried about jobs disappearing, about machines replacing human contact, about a world where you press buttons and never reach a person, where machines make decisions affecting our lives.  

The anxiety wasn’t abstract. It was personal, children, grandchildren, the future. AI is not the first time we’ve had fears like these. When television arrived in our homes, when calculators appeared in classrooms, when computers entered offices, when cellphones became universal, people said the same thing.  This will ruin us. Children wouldn’t be able to think. We won’t be able to concentrate. People today will lose basic skills. Our minds will turn to mush or worse yet our children’s minds. 

AI is different in one important way. It isn’t replacing muscle or just making an existing task faster. It is beginning to do routine brain work; work that required clerks and procedural work by professionals: entering information, sorting it, finding it, organizing it, producing reports. It can write routine documents, compare information, and interpret it. The changes won’t stop at the bottom. They are already reaching into the cubicles of lawyers, accountants, the examining rooms of doctors, and the work of radiologists, any job that requires routine analysis. 

During my transition from banker to Park Ranger I got to work as a temp in Morrison and Foerster’s mail room.  On my mail rounds I passed cell like offices of associates who spent their days cutting and pasting boilerplate language for briefs and contracts. It reminded me of medieval copyists. Much of that work is already automated. AI will finish the job once it is made foolproof from fictional citations.We have been using technology for centuries to do more work with less labor. Computers eliminated filing cabinets and much of the clerical work force. Every time we make jobs more productive, we create the possibility of having more of what we need with less work.

The question isn't whether AI will eliminate certain kinds of work.  It will.  The question is what we do with our time and the increase in productivity after those jobs are gone.  When we buy a dishwasher do we complain about the time we no longer spend washing dishes.  No, we use that time to do things we enjoy; watch TV, read a book, do macrame or maybe more time at our job.  

For a number of decades now it doesn’t seem like we’ve been using that saved time to live better.  We’ve been using it to produce more, consume more, work more, and make more money for those of us with the new skills required. We were once told that technological progress would give us leisure. Instead, we found ways to make more products working harder and longer. 

AI today gives us an opportunity to make that choice again.  To revisit the question we haven’t really addressed adequately.  What to do with our new productivity?

Where machines can handle more of the basic work of feeding, clothing, housing and organizing schedules, increasing productivity by doing more work with less labor, we create more profit from the same amount of human effort. We can spend that increased wealth on doing other things. It is a remarkable opportunity. If it takes less actual work to provide the things we need, we have more time and resources for things that machines cannot give us: caring for elders, teaching children, restoring wetlands, maintaining public spaces and parks, supporting communities, cooking, making things with our hands, making art, writing poems, welcoming strangers, comforting someone who is frightened.

Some years ago I got to be an EMT in a State Park.  When there was a road accident, I showed up.  The first thing I did was tell the patient “You’re going to be alright,” and then I gave them what first aid I could and got them ready to go the hospital. Then we waited for the distant ambulance to arrive.  Sometimes I would hold their hand or put my hand on their shoulder. Today AI can assess the situation, recommend treatment, come up with a plan, and alert an ambulance.  But AI can’t put it’s hand on someone’s shoulder or hold someone’s hand. 

The promise of AI should be to free us from work that machines do better, not to eliminate humans but to redirect our efforts to things that only humans can do.

The movie industry is especially anxious about AI, perhaps because AI can already produce the same formulaic, explosion‑heavy content that studios churn out. But that only proves the point: AI threatens the mechanical parts of creativity, not the human ones. The great films, the ones with real imagination, aren’t formulaic, and they aren’t threatened. AI can clear away the tedium, but it won’t replace inspiration.

The gains from increased productivity aren’t shared.  If AI eliminates 10 jobs that used to be required, the savings seem to go to the few, the owners, instead of the people making the sacrifice.  AI can be used to make life better for everyone.

It’s a political decision. I come from a long line of wage laborers. I’m not opposed to private enterprise. Ownership and markets drive innovation and make economies more efficient. But productivity should strengthen the Commonwealth, not just the ownership class. If the gains from technology are concentrated at the top while everyone else is told to work harder to keep up, we have used innovation to make a few people extraordinarily wealthy rather than to improve the quality of life for all of us.

We can imagine something better.

The Commonwealth is more than the economy. It is the quality of the life we share. If technology gives us more productive capacity and more time, we can choose to live better rather than simply produce more.  

Yes, I’m idealistic. But if we don’t have ideals, what do we have?

AI is here and more is coming. We cannot stop it, and I don’t think we should want to. The question is who is in charge of what happens next?  Corporations? Investors?  Or the voters.

Productivity should serve life. Innovation should raise the floor for everyone. If machines can do more of the work required to sustain us, then the measure of progress should not be how much harder we work. It should be how much better we can make life for all of us. 

 

 

This essay was written with AI assistance. Editing is like sanding. I used an electric sander to get there and then finished it by hand.

The Mojave Rock, a Buddha of Deep Time

On a road trip to Boulder City near Las Vegas, I stopped just past Baker looking for a place to nap, maybe stay overnight. I drove ¾ of a mile off the highway around a bend where there were no cars, no buildings and just a valley surrounded by hills, a deep bowl in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I love the Mojave.

The next morning as I looked around, there were volcanic buttes and outcroppings, alluvial black and red soil, washes and a few scrub trees. I was on a flattened and cleared area, where people had stopped for decades, to camp, drink beer, shoot guns, whatever people do in the desert. I walked around looking at the ground and seeing plants I’d never seen, an ant nest, the debris of previous visitors. To the side was a dry rivulet, a path where water runs when a rare storm passes.  Sitting in the middle of the cleared space away from the wash was a white and gray crystalline rock with green veins in it. All around it were red and black rocks and outcrops, the stuff of volcanoes, but here was a half buried, crystalline, igneous granite rock formed deep in the earth and different from anything in sight.

I picked it up to look at it.  Millions of years in formation, it was not rounded or a polished stone, not shaped by water or tumbling, not softened by an intermittent stream. It looked as if it had dropped out of the sky to this spot. It was angular, fractured, and rough. It had flat faces from ancient faults, jagged edges from recent fractures, and surfaces textured by desert weathering. It was not a cobble, not a river stone, it was an old rock, newly arrived from somewhere, a piece of the Earth that had never been touched by human intention until that moment. Like me it felt like a visitor in an ancient landscape.    

Of course, another story could be that someone collected it somewhere else in the valley and then decided it was not worth taking home and discarded it where I found it. 

This rock is now part of my personal mandala.  It is different from the other forms on my shelf, Shakyamuni, Guadalupe, Francis of Assisi, and Shiva the Hindu embodiment of transformation. These were shaped by human hands, carved, cast or molded to represent stories and traditions, expressions of devotion and imagination. To me they have meaning and power. But the Mojave rock is something else entirely. It is a manifestation of the Buddha that predates humanity, predates religion, predates culture, predates even the continents as we know them. It is the Buddha of deep time.

To hold this rock is to hold stardust. Every atom in it, silicon, oxygen, iron, calcium, was forged in ancient stars, scattered in supernovae, gathered into the early solar nebula, and drawn by gravity into forming the Earth nearly 5 billion years ago. Before it was granite, it was cosmic dust drifting in the darkness. Before it was a rock, it was part of the Earth’s inner chemistry. Its journey to the desert floor began billions of years before the Buddha Shakyamuni taught his fellow monks in Deer Park, before Mary appeared in Mexico, before Francis preached in Italy. 

Between 90 and 70 million years ago, this interior stardust had melted into magma deep beneath what would one day become the Mojave Desert. As the magma cooled, crystals formed, quartz, feldspar, biotite, each emerging from the molten mixture as conditions allowed. This was the rock’s first form, its first arising, its first suchness. It was not yet a rock you could hold, but it was becoming itself. To me crystallization is awakening: form emerging from formlessness, structure arising from potential.

As millions of years passed, the granite solidified completely. It became part of a vast batholith, a massive body of intrusive igneous rock buried miles underground. It was whole, unbroken, untouched. Then tectonic forces lifted it, fractured it, exposed it. Volcanic eruptions covered parts of it. Lakes and alluvial basins buried it and then revealed it. Hydrothermal fluids seeped into its cracks, depositing epidote and quartz, altering its chemistry, writing new stories into its veins. Weathering broke it into fragments. Freeze-thaw cycles cracked it further. Desert heat and cooling expanded and contracted it. Wind and time softened its exposed surfaces.

Eventually, a flash flood, decades ago or even centuries, carried this fragment downslope. Not far, but far enough to rest among volcanic debris where no granite outcrop was visible. It was moved quickly, violently, not tumbled and polished in a stream. It remained angular, raw, unrounded. It waited there, on the slope. On May 27, 2026 I walked by and saw it, an entity apart, a separate manifestation of the oneness that is the universe. It felt like a meeting arranged by time itself.

My karma met the rock’s karma. My life, my walking, my need for quiet, my curiosity, my attraction to the desert intersected the billions-year journey of the rock. I picked it up. I carried it home. I placed it on my shelf in Oakland, among representations of the Buddha as I understand the One.

But the rock is different. It is not a symbol of the Buddha. It is not a representation. It is not a crafted form. It is the Buddha in its own right, a manifestation of impermanence, interdependence, and suchness that has not been human-shaped. It is the dharma in mineral form. It is the teaching that does not require a story. It is Francis’ kinship with all beings extended to geology. It is Siddhartha’s insight into impermanence written in crystal and fracture.

The rock teaches without words. It shows that form arises from conditions, that nothing is permanent, that everything is interbeing, a part of the whole, interconnected. I see the Buddha not limited to human form or human stories. The Buddha is stardust, magma, crystal, fracture, weathering, movement, presence. The Buddha is the Earth itself.

One day, someone will take my rock from its shelf. They may throw it out. They may place it somewhere else. It may become part of the soil in Oakland or Mexico City. It may be buried, broken, dissolved, uplifted, melted, and returned to stardust. Its journey will continue long after my life has ended. It will be part of the Earth’s story for millions of years to come. Its future is as open as its past is vast.

This rock is a powerful manifestation on my shelf because it is not a symbol; it is reality. It is the Buddha, one with the universe itself. It is the dharma written in deep time. It is the truth of impermanence made visible. It is a reminder that awakening is not limited to human beings. It is, like everything we experience, Buddha nature.