In the recent past, there was a radical new technology to make work easier and dramatically increase productivity. It would reduce much of the drudgery of work and transform the industry. I am speaking, of course, of…longwall coal mining. Stay with me.

In the early 1900s, coal mining was a “hand-got” process where small groups worked together on a rock face. As described in a 1951 paper on the “social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal-getting,”

“A primary work-organization of this type has the advantage of placing responsibility for the complete coal-getting task squarely on the shoulders of a single, small, face-to-face group which experiences the entire cycle of operations within the compass of its membership. For each participant the task has total significance and dynamic closure” (Trist & Bamforth, 1951, p. 6).

In this system of work, coal miners had “craft pride and artisan independence.”  They could set production targets and work together as a team each day to meet them. (1)

Into this “hand-got” system of coal mining enters longwall coal mining. In this process a large shredder breaks coals away from the wall and it lands on a conveyer belt. Rather than a team working on a single rock face, a system collects coal across a long wall of 150-200 yards with walls propped up by hydraulics. By various metrics this process is substantially more efficient, but as a worker, you replace working with a team on a single rock face with pushing a lever on a conveyer belt all day. The technology dramatically impacts your work and the social system in which you are embedded.

One key aspect of the longwall method was that shifts were developed, and a lack of social cohesion was a result. Individuals were differentiated into roles and there wasn’t a “social whole” as there had been in the past. It also impaired what had been considered “responsible autonomy” among work groups as they determined how to complete the task.

As the researchers outline there were efforts at creating informal small groups to recreate the “old times,” however it was “only to a very limited extent” (Trist & Bamforth, 1951, p. 30). The system also fostered greater sense of mistrust and a pressure “to be out for themselves, since the social structure in which they work denied them membership in any group” (Trist & Bamforth, 1951, p. 32). As a result of these dynamics, absenteeism increased among the miners.

As Trist and Bamforth (1951) describe, “Anyone who has listened to the talk of older miners who have experienced in their own work-lives the change-over to the longwall cannot fail to be impressed by the confused mourning for the past that still goes on in them together with a dismay over the present coloured by despair and indignation” (p. 10). That is unusually poignant commentary for an academic article, but it helps convey the emotional consequences of technology shifts.

The analysis of the social and psychological impacts of longwall coal mining was an early study in the field of sociotechnical systems. In this field, associated with the Tavistock Institute in the UK, there is an aim for “joint optimization” of both humans and technology (Makarius, Mukherjee, Fox, & Fox, 2020). In many situations, the human impact of technology is deprioritized at the expense of efficiency and productivity, which are powerful forces.

All of this provides a similar analogy to the technology shifts of today as a result of artificial intelligence, and the social and psychological impacts the technology has on work. Socially, it can lead to less collaboration with others as we rely on AI. Individually, it can lead to estrangement of cognitive work. We can “fall asleep at the wheel” and uncritically accept AI outputs (Mollick, 2024).

In addition, with AI at the wheel, there can be a loss of intellectual engagement in a task—an absorption in writing or producing a finely crafted report. Add to this a loss of trust in what others produce (Is this just AI output?) Like the coal miners who opine about the “old days” of working together in a group, will we opine the old days of “craft pride” in our intellectual outputs? This isn’t to be a luddite thwarting inexorable technology shifts, but it is to raise the question of the social and psychological consequences of technology.

While these are early days, there are studies suggesting a decline in critical thinking related to AI use (Lee et al, 2025), although no single study is definitive, and there are corresponding benefits to productivity (Dell’Acqua, et al., 2023). Any impacts will be hotly contested, of course. Nevertheless, we have many historical examples of the social and psychological impacts of technology, not the least of which are the miners displaced by longwall coal-mining. And while current impacts of AI may be vague, indeterminant, and contested, we only need look to the past to provide certainty of the potential for human impact.

Footnotes:

(1) This was the finding of Eric Trist, one of the founding members of the Tavistock Institute in London. He, and fellow members of the Institute, had a desire to help improve the quality of working life of workers (Mumford, 2006) and Trist fortuitously collaborated with Ken Bamforth, who had worked in a U.K. mine for 18 years before becoming an industrial fellow at Tavistock.

References:

Dell’Acqua, F., McFowland, E., Mollick, E., Lifshitz-Assaf, H., Kellogg, K. C., Rajendran, S., Krayer, L., Candelon, F.,  & Lakhani, K. R. (2023). Navigating the jagged technological frontier: Field experimental evidence of the effects of AI on knowledge worker productivity and quality. Harvard Business School Working Paper 24-013.

Lee, H-P., Sarkar, A., Tankelevitch, L., Drosos, I., Rintel, S., Banks, R., & Wilson, N. (2025). The impact of generative AI on critical thinking: Self-reported reductions in cognitive effort and confidence effects from a survey of knowledge workers. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Yokohama, Japan.

Makarius, E. E., Mukherjee, D., Fox, J. D., & Fox, A. K. (2020). Rising with machines: A sociotechnical framework for bringing artificial intelligence into the organization. Journal of Business Research, 120, 262-273.

Mollick, E. (2024). Co-intelligence: Living and working with AI. Portfolio/Penguin.

Mumford, E. (2006). The story of socio-technical design: Reflections on its successes, failures and potential. Information Systems Journal, 16, 317-342.

Trist, E. L. & Bamforth, K. W. (1951). Some social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal-getting: An examination of the psychological situation and defences of a work group in relation to the social structure and technological content of the work system. Human Relations, 4(1), 3–38.

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