1. Research Question
The question tested in this experiment was: How do humans labour?
2. Research Context
Experiment 02 established that to be human is to labour. Humans have always had to do things. They cultivate land, build structures, make objects, move materials, extract resources, process information and organise the activities required to sustain themselves and the societies around them.
But humans rarely labour with the body alone. Humans use tools.
This became the next part of the investigation. If humans labour, how do they actually perform the work? What sits between the human and the task? What changes as the tools humans use become more capable?
I therefore followed the history of human labour through the tools humans have used to perform it.
The starting relationship was relatively simple. The human labours and the tool assists. A stone can become a cutting edge. A hammer extends physical force. A wheel facilitates movement. A plough changes the scale at which land can be cultivated. A loom changes the speed and organisation of textile production.
In this relationship, the human remains the worker. The tool changes what the human can do.
This relationship is remarkably persistent across human history, but it does not remain unchanged. As tools become machines and machines become increasingly sophisticated technological systems, the relationship between the human, the tool and the work begins to change.
The question is not simply whether humans use technology. They clearly do. The question is what happens to human labour when the technology begins performing some of the work itself.
3. Research Method
I investigated the question by following the historical development of the tools humans have used to labour, moving from relatively simple physical tools to machines, calculating devices, computers and software systems.
The purpose was not to produce a complete history of technology. It was to observe what happened to human labour as the capability of the tools changed.
I examined the relationship between the human and the task at different stages of technological development. I considered whether the technology merely extended human physical capability, whether it began performing a physical operation itself, and whether the same pattern eventually appeared in informational and cognitive work.
The history of human calculation provided an important case. David Alan Grier’s When Computers Were Human shows that calculation itself was organised as human labour long before electronic computers existed. Human computers performed mathematical calculations in scientific, engineering and administrative environments.
I then followed the development of calculating machines and computing systems into broader forms of information processing. Campbell-Kelly, Aspray, Ensmenger and Yost’s Computer: A History of the Information Machine provides a historical account of this development from calculation towards general information processing.
I also considered the relationship between technological development and the decomposition of labour. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management is relevant because it demonstrates an earlier attempt to observe, measure and decompose work into constituent operations. David Autor’s work on automation provides a later framework for understanding how technologies can perform particular tasks within occupations without necessarily replacing the occupations themselves.
The method was therefore to follow the tool and observe what happened to the labour.
4. Research Findings
The investigation found that tools are not separate from the history of human labour. They are part of how humans labour.
Early tools primarily extended human physical capability. The hammer extended force. The wheel facilitated movement. The plough changed the scale of agricultural work. The tool allowed the human to do more than the body could do alone, but the human remained responsible for performing the work.
As tools became machines, this relationship began to change. Machines could repeat operations, maintain speed, combine processes and use energy beyond direct human effort. The human increasingly operated, supplied, supervised or maintained a system that performed more of the physical work.
The same pattern eventually appeared in cognitive labour.
The calculator made this particularly visible. Calculation had previously been performed by humans as part of ordinary commercial, scientific, engineering and administrative work. When a person entered a calculation into a machine and received the answer, the machine had performed a part of the work that the person previously had to perform.
The calculator had not become an accountant. It had not acquired human judgement or intention. It had simply taken over a defined task.
The significance of this was that the task being transferred was cognitive.
The transfer continued through computing and software. Computers performed increasingly complex calculations. Databases stored and retrieved information. Spreadsheets performed calculations across large quantities of data. Software could sort, reconcile and process information according to defined rules.
The human remained present, but the composition of the human’s labour changed.
The history of technology could therefore be understood not only as a history of humans building better tools, but as a history of humans progressively transferring components of their labour into the tools and systems they build.
The cognition handover emerged within this longer history.
It did not begin with artificial intelligence.
5. Research Implications
The finding changes how I understand the relationship between humans, technology and labour.
Technology does not have to replace a human being in order to change human labour. It only needs to take something the human previously performed.
That something may initially be physical. It can then become mechanical, informational, computational and eventually cognitive.
This means that the important unit of analysis is not necessarily the occupation. It is the task.
An accountant does not disappear because a calculator performs arithmetic. An engineer does not disappear because software performs calculations. A worker does not necessarily disappear because a machine performs one operation previously performed by that worker.
Instead, the composition of the work changes.
The human reorganises around what the technology has not taken.
This also changes how artificial intelligence should be understood.
AI did not introduce technology into human cognition. The calculator had already done that. Computers had already done that. Software had already done that.
What is different about AI is the potential scope of the handover.
Earlier systems were generally designed to perform defined operations. The emerging systems can operate across broader areas of cognitive work, including generation, classification, comparison, summarisation and recommendation.
The historical question therefore becomes more significant.
If humans have progressively transferred parts of their labour into the tools they build, what happens when the transfer reaches more of the cognitive process itself?
The issue is no longer simply whether humans use technology to labour.
It is whether the systems humans build can increasingly perform the labour through which humans previously produced the work.
6. Conclusion
The experiment began with a simple question: How do humans labour?
The answer was that humans labour through their bodies, their knowledge and the tools they build.
The history of those tools reveals a gradual change.
Tools first extended human physical capability. Machines then began performing more of the physical work. Computing systems subsequently began performing parts of informational and cognitive work.
The human remained involved, but the human did not necessarily perform every component of the task anymore.
That is the cognition handover.
It is not a phenomenon that begins with artificial intelligence. It is a development within the much longer history of humans using technology to labour.
The significance of AI is therefore not that technology has suddenly entered the domain of human cognition.
It is that the handover may now be moving further into the cognitive work itself.
The next question is therefore not whether technology can perform human labour.
It already can.
The question is how much of human labour can be transferred into the systems humans build.
7. References
Autor, D. H. (2015). “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3), pp. 3–30.
Campbell-Kelly, M., Aspray, W., Ensmenger, N. & Yost, J. R. (2023). Computer: A History of the Information Machine. 4th ed. New York: Routledge.
Grier, D. A. (2005). When Computers Were Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Taylor, F. W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper & Brothers.