The Tractor of Our Time
What I've Been Thinking About Lately #100
The story The Grapes of Wrath follows a family that was kicked off the farm they had worked on for 3 generations. Although fictional, the story talks about a real starvation crisis that affected tenant farmers after manual labor was made obsolete by the tractor in the early 1900s.
These displaced farmers, unsure where to direct their hunger fueled hatred, hated the tractor, its operator, the landowner, the lenders, and its shareholders. But it was of no use, none of them were the monster behind their unemployment.
The monster, as Steinbeck called it, was the bank. In its insatiable need for profit, it caused human suffering along the way. And even though no particular banker wanted to evict the farmers, the need for profit demanded it. The bank was made by man, but man could not control it.
A century later, it’s easy for us to look at their pain and be grateful. It was a price paid for a freedom we enjoy today. This monster was an evolutionary pressure that freed us to work easier and more lucrative jobs as the share of US workers in agriculture fell from 41% to 2% from 1900 to 2000.
But there is no stop button on evolution, and the tractor of 1939 sounds a lot like AI of 2026.
The same monster that ate tenant farming will eat many kinds of jobs. It will be messy, it will be unfair, it will happen fast, and it wont stop. The monster must eat.
People will hate AI, its creators, and the VCs for the labor they replace. But these are the same people would have hated the tractor in 1939, unable to see beyond today, demanding the ever-changing world stay the same.