John Henry (Folklore)

I always thought the John Henry story was more about dignity, fighting for respect of a human being, and its ability to make that effort.

Neal Stephenson actually made that point in regard to AI-generated creative content: it's not coming from a human being. You're not communing with another mind, another human's lived experience. It's just noise from a machine.

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2023/03/03/neal-stephenson-say...

I once read a book of American folklore, and another story that had some broader resonance was engineer Casey Jones. From the Disney cartoon you get the idea that he was just obsessed with not being late. But in reality the trains in this period were popular and overscheduled, and Casey Jones found his engine bearing down on another train that wasn't supposed to be in his path. Thinking the other train was full of people, Casey stayed in the engine trying desperately to stop the train. When they pulled his body from the wreckage, he had one hand on the warning whistle, and one hand on the brake. It turns out the other train was just empty boxcars. The implication is he died trying to save others. A very human thing to do.

In fact there was one John Henry at the time who was the only one in that hemisphere to have been descended from those bred by the Romans for centuries to pound chisels into rocks.

Difficult to be sure about folklore.

The most productive human writer in history couldn't begin to compete with the GPT steam-hammer on quantity of coherent output. It would be John Henry versus a modern tunnel boring machine.