Episode Details

On night shift at GM’s Lansing Delta Township plant, there was no one upstairs in engineering to call. I was a shift leader. When the line went down, and we had eliminated all the Neanderthal mechanical culprits, and what was left was a controls fault, the radio call went out.

When a trim shop stops at fifty-five jobs an hour, a hundred and fifty people stop with it. Fifteen cars sit in the buffer to chassis. In about fifteen minutes they are gone, chassis starves, and two hundred and fifty more people come to a stop. The plant loses at least five thousand dollars of gross margin for every minute it stands.

Within minutes of the radio call, Grace Major would roll down with her apprentice in tow. Calm. Collected. A reassuring smile. She kept me at bay and kept me informed as needed, so I could send people off early on break to save the losses. And she always found a way to get it running. She was like a talisman.

On October 5, 2026, Walter Isaacson published an essay in the New York Times about Ada Lovelace. He names a camp after her: people who want humans and machines as partners, with the human kept in the loop. Then he asks, “Why should we insist that we humans remain in the loop?” Machines alone often do better, he grants, and competition will push people out. His answer is that people need meaning as well as abundance, so we should favor tools that include us.

I agree with where he wants to go. But “in the loop” is too easy a test to pass.

A person can be in the loop and be emptied by it. The test is which way the knowing runs. If the work leaves the person knowing more, that loop is a bloom. If it carries what the person knows into the machine and leaves the person where they stood, it is a siphon. Both have a human in them, and the books record only what went into the machine.

That’s the argument.

What was on the card

Start where Lovelace started. She wrote that Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine “weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” Before Jacquard, a figured silk took two people at the loom: the weaver, and a draw boy who lifted the warp threads by hand. Jacquard’s loom of 1804 read the pattern from punched cards, one card for every pass of the shuttle. The draw boy was gone.

What was on the cards? Someone who knew weaving had worked that pattern out thread by thread. The card held what a weaver knew, in a form that could be copied and carried to a loom the weaver would never see.

Isaacson notes that Lovelace’s father, Lord Byron, stood up in the House of Lords for the Luddites, and he says they were wrong: by the end of the century textiles employed about ten times as many people. The knitters Byron defended worked on machines every day. Their fight was with masters hiring workers who had not finished the seven-year apprenticeship. Two years after his speech, Parliament repealed the old apprenticeship statute.

The jobs came back tenfold. The seven years, the part that ran into the person, did not.

A century after Jacquard, Frederick Taylor did the same to the machinist with a standard work card, and he was plain about why: “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department.” In Built to Extract, the Card is the first rung of the siphon.

I should say which side I started on. I came to General Motors in 1989 still writing a doctorate on diagnostic expert systems. At Flint Metal Fab we had huge transfer presses with complicated Unico controllers overhead. When a press went down and the electricians were flummoxed, they flew in a man named Jim from Chicago to troubleshoot it. The expert system I called Trades tried to emulate what Jim knew.

I was there to punch the card. Trades died a natural death. Maybe we cut the diagnosis time for a novice electrician. We still hunted t