Smith, Watt, Marx, and AI That Will Not End Work (tech never does)

What a Scottish economist, his techie, and a German philosopher can tell us about the moment we're in right now.

Adam Smith was a shy, studious man who spent twelve years writing a book that became the founding text of modern economics. He had a steady, if modest, income as a professor. He had a library. He had time.

James Watt was at the same university, at roughly the same time, not as a professor but as the university’s scientific instrument maker: embedded in the academic world, useful to it, respected by it, but not protected by it. He worked in a small shop on campus fixing instruments for scholars and helping make their work possible. He moonlighted as a surveyor. He spent years trying to interest anyone with money in a more efficient steam engine before he finally found Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham manufacturer who had both the capital and the commercial instincts to turn Watt’s invention into a business.

The two men were not strangers passing in some abstract historical fog. They were at Glasgow together. They knew one another. They moved in the same intellectual world. Smith theorized the invisible hand. Watt had to shake it and negotiate terms.

History has never much cared that this was no coincidence. Smith gets the canonical status, the economics textbooks, the currency. Watt gets a unit of electrical power named after him and a footnote. The man who described how capitalism worked is remembered. The man whose engine powered it is not.

It is a recurring trick of history: we remember the observer, but we forget the observed. We honor the man who explained the machine, while the man who built it, and the people who eventually broke themselves against it, become mere data points in someone else’s thesis.

The oversight matters because it helped create a hole in Smith’s framework that Marx later drove a train through. And not metaphorically.

Smith’s model was elegant and, for its time, largely correct. Free markets, free trade, the division of labor as a source of productivity. The pin factory illustration is still taught today. But Smith theorized markets from the outside, from a lectern, with a guaranteed salary. Watt stood closer to the seam between ideas and labor, between the university and the market, between intellectual life and commercial necessity.

Smith glimpsed the cost of his own theories, warning that a person whose life is spent performing a few simple operations becomes “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” He called it mental mutilation. But he treated it as a tragic side effect of progress, not a structural flaw that would eventually set the world on fire. He saw the efficiency of specialization without fully reckoning with what Watt’s engine would do to the people performing it.

The Industrial Revolution that followed was not the genteel marketplace of Smith’s imagination. It was factories, child labor, sixteen-hour days, bodies broken by repetitive work at a pace no human guild system had ever demanded. The division of labor that Smith celebrated as a source of wealth became, in practice, a source of profound human misery for the people doing the dividing.

Marx looked at that gap between what the observer promised and what the observed actually delivered, and found everything he needed. The exploitation was not incidental. It was structural. Capital accumulated precisely because labor could be compressed, cheapened, and discarded. The theorist’s blind spot handed the critic his entire thesis.

And then labor found a way. Not by burning the machine, but by learning to drive it, bargain with it, and eventually shortening the workday from sixteen hours to eight. Not without pain. Not without decades of genuine suffering, political upheaval, and movements that changed the relationship between capital and work permanently. But the armageddon did not arrive. The steam engine did not end work. It destroyed some kinds of work and created others. The people who adapted, who found the new capabilities and learned to use them, got better. The ones who could not or would not faced real hardship. That is not a comfortable story, but it is the true one.

We are in that cycle again.

The Darios of our moment are sincere. The concerns about labor displacement from generative AI are not imaginary. There will be real disruption, real pain, real jobs that do not come back in their current form. Anyone who waves that away is not paying attention.

But the fear today has a new shape. If Watt’s engine threatened the body with physical exhaustion, the Large Language Model threatens the mind with cognitive surrender.

This is the modern evolution of Smith’s “mental mutilation”: the slow atrophy of the muscles of critical thinking, writing, and decision-making because we have outsourced the “why” to a prompt. The risk is not just that the machine replaces us, but that we become as “stupid and ignorant” as Smith feared by letting the machine do the heavy lifting of the soul.

The steam engine did not end work. The printing press did not end scribes and create only unemployment. The word processor did not destroy writing. In each case, the technology changed who could do what, at what cost, and the people who were already good at the underlying thing, thinking, communicating, building, got considerably better at it with the new tool.

Watt was not trying to put surveyors out of work. He was trying to pump water out of mines more efficiently. Marx was not trying to predict the gig economy. He was trying to explain what he saw in front of him. And Smith, brilliant as he was, could not have imagined what was being built in the shop down the hall by a man he actually knew.

The engineer at the next desk is always building something the theorist has not accounted for yet. That has always been true. It is true now.

The question worth asking is not whether AI will end work. It is the same question it has always been: who learns to use the new engine, and who waits for someone else to tell them what it means.

Watt did not wait for a footnote. He found Boulton, shook the invisible hand, and shipped the engine that would rewrite the book Smith was still writing down the hall.