Last Updated on February 16, 2026 by Brian Beck
AI, Apprehension, and the Pattern We Keep Repeating
There’s a lot of apprehension surrounding AI right now, and I understand why. People hear “AI” and instantly think: jobs disappear, livelihoods collapse, chaos follows.
But we need to evaluate this without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Because things change. They always have. And the advancements man makes are going to come faster and faster. That’s not a theory—it’s the arc of history.
The resistance to change is nothing new
Go back about 200 years to England at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The Luddites weren’t “crazy” people. They were reacting to a real disruption. Machines did replace jobs.
But what people forget is what happened next: a wave of new work was created in the wake of that disruption—new industries, new skills, new trades, new opportunities. The world didn’t end. It reorganized.
And that pattern didn’t stop there.
The car replaced the horse… and built a bigger economy
The car didn’t just replace a mode of transportation. It replaced an entire ecosystem—one we romanticize today because we weren’t living in it.
With the horse economy came burdens most people never mention:
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animals being run into the ground by callous owners
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filthy streets and literal mountains of waste as “normal life”
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limited range, limited load, limited speed
Then the car shows up and suddenly:
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the streets got cleaner
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travel became longer and faster
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hauling capacity multiplied
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and a sea of new jobs appeared—manufacturing, mechanics, roads, fuel infrastructure, logistics, regulation, insurance… it just kept compounding
Yes, something was displaced. But something far larger was built.
The tractor didn’t “steal” work — it crushed inefficiency
Think about farming. There was a time when planting an acre demanded a brutal amount of manual labor—tens of man-hours for what is now minutes. The tractor changed that.
Did it disrupt labor? Absolutely.
But it also:
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multiplied food production
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reduced human strain
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freed up human capacity for new work
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and pushed society forward
That’s the real story of progress: less grind, more output, less waste, more capability.
AI is just the next tool in that same lineage.
Purpose matters more than the fear
Here’s what I don’t want ignored in this conversation:
Man needs purpose to gather meaning from life. Without purpose, people wither. They drift. They collapse inward. So yes—fear about job loss is real, because it threatens more than income. It threatens identity.
But we have to separate purpose from labor.
Labor can be meaningful, but labor for the sake of labor is not virtue. Busywork isn’t a moral high ground. If a tool removes pointless grind, removes waste, removes inefficiency—and gives us time back—that isn’t automatically a tragedy.
The tragedy is what people do with the time.
Modern life already gives people convenience that kings didn’t have a few hundred years ago, and still we see anxiety everywhere. So the answer isn’t clinging to inefficiency. The answer is using leverage wisely.
AI is leverage.
And leverage is neutral. It can build you up—or rot you out—depending on how you use it.
Tools have always been the multiplier
We’ve used tools for thousands of years. Tools became mechanized. Then automated. Now they’re becoming intelligent.
A hammer made a man stronger.
A tractor made a man faster.
A computer made a man sharper.
AI can make a man more capable—if he chooses to pick it up and learn it.
And if he rejects it out of fear, he doesn’t preserve the old world. He just becomes less competitive in the new one.
That’s not cruelty. That’s reality.
The right response isn’t panic — it’s positioning
Change brings chaos. It always does.
But chaos also brings opportunity.
So here’s my encouragement: don’t automatically reject AI because you’re afraid of what it might do. Prepare for what it will do.
Use the time it saves you to invest in yourself:
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raise your knowledge
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increase your skill
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sharpen your decision-making
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build real value that can’t be copied by a button
Because that effort pays dividends later. Every time.
Closing: where I stand
AI isn’t the enemy.
It’s a tool. A powerful one. And like every major tool in human history, it will reward the people who adapt and punish the people who refuse.
So don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Expect turbulence—but don’t reject opportunity just because it arrives wearing the mask of chaos.
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