The Old Complaint in New Clothes

Somewhere in the wheat belt this season, a farmer will bring in several hundred hectares in the time his grandfather needed for a single paddock. He will do it largely alone, from an air-conditioned cabin, above a header that steers itself to within a few centimetres and measures the yield as it goes. Very little of what he does that week will be doing in the old sense. His work is deciding—when the moisture is right, when to shift paddocks, when an approaching front makes speed matter more than spillage. The doing belongs to the machine. The transition from doer to decider took his family three generations, and nobody along the way felt the need to give it a clinical name.The same transition ran through every office in the second half of the last century, faster and rather closer to home. Within living memory, an executive did not type. He—because back then it almost always was a he—structured the argument, dictated it, corrected the draft, and signed it—the typing pool did the…