Bulls, Tractors, and the Displacement We Refuse to Plan For On Innovation, Disruption, and the People We Leave Behind

While driving across India last week, I saw something that stopped me cold.

Bulls. Hundreds of them. Wandering highways, grazing on medians, blocking traffic, lying in the middle of roads with the kind of resigned exhaustion that comes from having nowhere else to go.

Not something new but that got me thinking, these weren't always strays.

Thirty years ago, every one of these animals had purpose. They were essential infrastructure in the agricultural backbone of India. Farmers depended on them for plowing, for transport, for the entire cycle of cultivation. Their population exploded because of their utility. They were bred, fed, and cared for because they were indispensable.

Then tractors arrived.

And we celebrated. Rightly so. Tractors transformed productivity. They freed humans from backbreaking labor. They changed the economics of farming, making it possible to cultivate more land, faster, with less physical toll on people.

But nobody planned for the bulls.

We didn't ask: What happens to millions of animals whose entire existence was predicated on a system we're about to disrupt? Where do they go? Who takes care of them? What does a responsible transition look like?

The answer, it turns out, was: nowhere. No one. Nothing.

So now they wander. Ownerless. Purposeless. A living, breathing reminder that we are phenomenal at innovation and catastrophically bad at thinking two steps ahead.

The Pattern We Keep Repeating

This isn't new.

History is littered with examples of technological advancement that displaced entire categories of work without any strategic plan for what came next.

The Industrial Revolution displaced artisan craftspeople and hand-loom weavers. The Luddite movement wasn't anti-progress it was a desperate plea for transition support that never came. We built factories and celebrated efficiency while communities that had sustained themselves for generations simply ended.

Automation in manufacturing gutted the American Rust Belt in the 1980s. Entire towns that revolved around steel mills and auto plants became economic wastelands. We optimized supply chains and moved production overseas, and the human cost was treated as an externality. "Learn to code" became the dismissive response to workers in their 50s who'd spent their lives mastering a craft that suddenly had no market value.

E-commerce decimated brick-and-mortar retail. Malls became ghost towns. Small business owners who'd spent decades building local customer relationships found themselves unable to compete with algorithms and two-day shipping. We applauded the convenience, ordered our packages, and didn't think much about the shuttered storefronts.

The pattern is always the same:

1. New technology arrives
2. We celebrate the efficiency gains
3. Displacement happens
4. We act surprised
5. We offer platitudes about "reskilling" and "adaptation"

The displaced bear the full cost of our progress and then we move on to the next disruption.

When a AI Notepad company declares Middle Management's Dead

I thought about the bulls when I read a blog post last month.

The CEO of Fireflies.ai, a company that transcribes meeting notes, wrote a piece declaring that "middle management is dead." The argument was straightforward: with AI tools that can capture, summarize, and distribute meeting insights, you can run radically flat organizations where everyone operates like a CEO of their domain.

A notepad. With AI. Proclaiming itself as the replacement for the complex web of human coordination, context-building, conflict resolution, political navigation, mentorship, and judgment that middle management actually provides.

The audacity is almost poetic.
But here's what struck me: this isn't just hubris. It's a symptom.

We've reached a point where such founders genuinely believe and publicly declare that their software can replace the nuanced human work of managing people, mediating conflict, building teams, and shepherding projects through the messy reality of organisational life.

It's the tractor moment all over again. Except this time, we're not talking about bulls. We're talking about people.

The Language of Pacification

Listen carefully to how we talk about AI displacement. Everyone says "augmentation."

Sam Altman says it. Sundar Pichai says it. Every tech CEO says it. AI will augment human capabilities, not replace them. It will make us more productive, more creative, free us from drudgery.

And to be clear: that's partially true. AI can augment. It can make certain kinds of work more efficient and less tedious.

But let's be honest about what "augmentation" has become: a diplomatic narrative designed to soften the reality of replacement.

It's the corporate equivalent of saying "we're going in a different direction" instead of "you're fired." Because here's what actually happens:

First, AI augments your work (you're now 3x more productive!) Then, management realizes one person can now do the work of three Then, two of those three people are let go
The remaining person is told to be grateful for the "augmentation"

This isn't cynicism. This is literally how every previous wave of automation has played out. The technology made workers more productive, which meant companies needed fewer workers.

The language of augmentation is how we rationalize doing to humans what we did to bulls: celebrating the innovation while refusing to plan for the displacement.

The Mars Delusion

Here's what really gets me. We're simultaneously:

Planning to colonize Mars
Developing AGI
Investing billions in longevity research Building neural interfaces all while we can't figure out how to transition workers with dignity.

We can imagine terraforming another planet but not re-skilling entire sectors of the economy. We can build systems that pass the bar exam but not systems that ensure the people whose jobs those systems replace have a pathway forward.

We have the technical sophistication to create artificial general intelligence but not the social sophistication to ask: What happens to everyone whose intelligence we've just made redundant?

The contrast is staggering.

We're so enamoured with the future, with disruption, with innovation, with the next big thing, that we've lost the ability to think clearly about the present.

And the present is where actual people live. Where they work, where they raise families, where they build lives that are predicated on certain assumptions about the stability and dignity of their labor.

What Responsible Transition Actually Looks Like

The problem isn't innovation.
The problem is our steadfast refusal to plan for what comes after innovation disrupts the existing order. Responsible transition requires us to ask harder questions:

1. Who bears the cost?

Right now, the cost of disruption is borne almost entirely by the displaced. Companies capture the efficiency gains. Investors capture the returns. Workers capture pink slips and advice about "pivoting."

Responsible transition means acknowledging that if society benefits from technological progress, society has a responsibility to support those who are displaced by it. This isn't charity. It's the cost of doing business in a civilization that claims to care about human dignity.

2. What does the bridge look like?

Saying "learn to code" or "reskill" is not a plan. It's a dismissal. Real transition planning means:

Advance notice (not surprise layoffs)
Financial support during retraining (not empty platitudes)
Actual pathways to new roles (not vague advice)
Dignity throughout the process (not treating people as disposable)

When we transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial economy, it took generations and involved massive social upheaval. We don't have generations this time. AI is moving faster than any previous technological shift.

Which means we need to be more strategic, not less.

3. Are we building systems that serve humans?

Or are we just building systems?

Because right now, it feels like we've inverted the question. Instead of asking "How can technology improve human life?" we're asking "How can we make humans fit into the constraints of our technology?"

Middle management isn't dead because AI made it obsolete. Middle management is being declared dead because eliminating it serves a financial optimization model that values quarterly earnings over organizational health.

We've made a choice. We just refuse to admit it.

The Question We're Not Asking

Here's what haunts me about the bulls: They didn't fail. We failed them.

Their obsolescence wasn't inevitable. It was the result of choices we made, to innovate without planning, to optimize without considering consequences, to move fast and break things without thinking about what we were breaking.

And we're doing it again.

The question isn't whether AI will displace jobs. It will. The question is whether we'll do anything meaningful to support the people whose jobs are displaced.

Based on history? Based on the bulls still wandering Indian highways? Based on the ghost towns in the Rust Belt and the shuttered malls ?

I'm not optimistic. But maybe and this is why I'm writing this we can start asking different questions.

A Different Way Forward

What if we measured innovation not just by efficiency gains, but by how well we support the people displaced by those gains?

What if we required companies deploying AI at scale to publish transition plans alongside their deployment timelines?

What if investors asked not just "What's your growth strategy?" but "What's your displacement strategy?" What if we stopped celebrating disruption as an unmitigated good and started seeing it for what it is: 

a choice with consequences that we can either plan for or ignore.

I'm not arguing against progress. I'm arguing against thoughtless progress.

I'm not arguing against AI. I'm arguing against the casual cruelty of treating human displacement as an acceptable externality.

I'm not even arguing against tractors. I'm arguing against a system that celebrates tractors while letting bulls starve on highways.

The Uncomfortable Truth
The uncomfortable truth is this: we know how to do better. We just choose not to.

We have the resources. We have the wealth. We have the technological sophistication to build systems that could support widespread transition and retraining.

What we lack is the will.

Because doing it right would be expensive. It would slow down deployment. It would require coordination between companies, governments, and educational institutions. It would mean accepting that efficiency gains come with social responsibility.

And in a system that rewards quarterly earnings and "move fast and break things" mentality, those costs are unacceptable.

So we optimize. We disrupt. We innovate. And we leave the bulls on the highway.

Where We Go From Here

I don't have all the answers.
But I know this: we cannot continue to celebrate innovation while ignoring displacement. We cannot plan for Mars while fumbling the present.

We cannot build AGI while destroying the dignity of the humans whose intelligence we're replacing.

The bulls are still wandering. The Rust Belt is still broken. Retail workers are still trying to figure out what comes next.

And middle management despite what the note-taking app CEOs say isn't dead. It's just being systematically devalued so that someone's quarterly earnings look better.

We did this to the bulls. We're doing it to people.
The question is: Are we going to keep pretending this is just the inevitable cost of progress?

Or are we going to start building a different kind of future – one where innovation and human dignity aren't treated as opposing forces?

The tractors aren't the problem. They never were. The problem is what we do after the tractors arrive.

Final Thought

Next time you see a headline celebrating the latest AI breakthrough another job category automated, another efficiency gained, another startup promising to eliminate entire departments pause for a moment.

Ask yourself: Who's being displaced? Where will they go? Who's planning for their transition?
And if the answer is "nobody," ask yourself: What does it say about us that we're okay with that? The bulls didn't deserve to wander highways.
People don't deserve to be discarded in the name of disruption.
We're better than this.
We just have to choose to be.

What's your take? Are we thinking far enough ahead about the human cost of AI deployment, or are we repeating the same patterns we've repeated with every technological shift? I'd genuinely love to hear your perspective.

Tags: #AI #Innovation #FutureOfWork #Leadership #Strategy #Technology #HumanDignity #ResponsibleTech