The fear comes back every few months, and this time it has better aim. The machine can write now. So this time, people say, it’s coming for us.
When we want reassurance we reach for Hidden Figures. Usually for Dorothy Vaughan. She watches the IBM mainframe arrive to replace her team of human computers, teaches herself to program it, trains her whole team and walks into the new world as the woman who runs the machine instead of the one it replaced. Adapt or be adapted. It’s a good lesson. It’s also the one everybody already took.
Watch the rest of the film and a second figure is doing something the adapt-lesson misses. Katherine Johnson doesn’t run the machine. She checks it. Before John Glenn will fly, he asks for her by name. Get the girl to check the numbers, he tells them, and if she says they’re good, he’s ready to go. The IBM 7090 had already produced the trajectory. Glenn didn’t trust a number with no one behind it. He trusted the number a person he could name had confirmed by hand.
Two women, two moves, and we file them as two lessons: learn the tool, and keep a human in the loop. But that isn’t what the movie is. It’s one story.
It’s one story because none of them faced the machine alone. Dorothy didn’t save herself, she brought her team up with her. Katherine’s check only counted because she was trusted, and trust runs between people, not between a person and a room-sized computer. The machine sat in the middle of a group of people who vouched for each other. It didn’t take the trust out of the work. It sat inside it.
That’s the part worth carrying forward. When you use one of these models to write something another person will read, you’re the whole room at once. You’re the team learning the new tool. You’re Dorothy running it. You’re Katherine checking what it hands back. And you’re Glenn – the one who takes the checked result, puts a name on it and flies, carrying whatever comes next. Operate, verify, deliver: three people in 1962, one chair now. The trust didn’t leave the work and it didn’t move to the machine. It moved onto you, every seat of it, at once.
The seat that goes empty
Here’s what one chair costs. When the room was full, the three jobs kept each other honest. Dorothy couldn’t run a number Katherine wouldn’t check, and Glenn wouldn’t fly on a number nobody had checked. Three people, three seats, each one a check on the others.
Do all three yourself and one of them quietly goes empty. It’s always the same one. Operating feels like work – you’re prompting, steering, revising. Delivering feels like work – you’re publishing, sending, putting it out under your name. Verifying is the seat that feels like nothing, because the machine already handed you something that looks finished. Fluent. Confident. Right. So you run it and you ship it, and Katherine’s chair sits empty, and you never notice, because the number looked good.
That’s the real risk in front of us. Not that the machine takes the work. That it makes it easy to deliver without checking – to fly on a number with no one behind it.
And checking got harder at exactly the moment it got lonelier. A column of hand-figures never looked sure of itself. This does. The machine writes with the same confidence whether it’s right or inventing, and you’re now the only person in the room who can tell the difference. Katherine had a team who expected her to be certain. You have a tool that sounds certain for you.
What the reader trusts
Which is why the thing you hand a reader was never really the text.
They can get text now. Fluent, instant, free. What they can’t get from the machine is the one thing it can’t produce for itself – a person who checked, and whose name is on it. That’s what Glenn wanted. Not a faster number. A number someone would answer for. It’s the scarce thing now, and it’s the only part of the job the machine can’t take, because it was never the machine’s to give.
One story, still
The women in that film didn’t beat the machine by being faster than it. They were never going to be. They beat the fear of it by not being alone with it – a team that came up together, a check that was trusted, a name the whole mission stood behind.
We do it in one chair now, which is harder and lonelier than they had it. But the shape holds. The machine was never the thing that earned trust. It sat in the middle of people who did.
So the writers who last won’t be the ones who run the machine best, or ship the most. They’ll be the ones a reader can name – the ones who stayed in Katherine’s seat when it would have been easier to leave it empty. The machine can operate. It can deliver. It cannot be the person you trust. That was always the human’s seat. It still is.
Originally published on LinkedIn.