How Many Gigabytes Is a Human Life?

For over a century, we've been trying to make humans work like machines. Now, we're spending billions trying to make machines work like humans. How did we get here? And what does this strange reversal mean for the future of work? In this episode of Tech Stories, we travel from Frederick Taylor's stopwatch and Henry Ford's assembly lines to the revolutionary thinking behind Toyota's production system—and finally to the age of humanoid robots and artificial intelligence. Joining me is Jan Schjottelvig, a special guest who challenged the way I think about efficiency, leadership, and what it really means to put humans at the center of work. Together, we explore how technology has shaped the workplace, why efficiency sometimes comes at a human cost, and whether we're asking the right questions about the machines we're building.

Hey, Ferdi here! Every other week, between our regular episodes, I want to take you along for a more personal conversation. No scripts, no studio production. Just me sharing what's on my mind, what I'm working on, interesting discoveries, and a few thoughts about technology and how it's changing our lives. Think of it as a little behind-the-scenes chat. Glad to see you around.

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Every generation thinks it is living through an unprecedented technological revolution. The steam engine changed work. Electricity changed daily life. Computers changed information. The internet changed how we communicate. Each breakthrough promised progress. Each one also created consequences almost nobody saw coming. And now AI has arrived. At first, the pattern looks familiar: excitement, fear, job disruption, enormous investment, promises of a better future. But there may be one crucial difference. Previous machines amplified what humans could do. AI may begin doing the thinking itself. So what can the last 300 years of technological upheaval actually teach us about what happens next? And are we entering another chapter in the history of progress... or something completely new?

Why are we spending billions building robots with two arms, two legs, five fingers and a face—when the human body is far from the perfect machine? In this episode of Tech Stories, we trace the strange history of robots from Unimate, the first industrial robot working at General Motors, to Boston Dynamics’ Atlas and today’s race to put humanoids into factories, warehouses and eventually our homes. For decades, we redesigned factories around robots: fixed positions, predictable movements, safety cages and conveyor belts. Now the strategy is changing. Instead of rebuilding the world for machines, companies are trying to build machines that can enter the world we already created for ourselves. But that opens a much bigger question. If robots can eventually use our tools, climb our stairs, operate our factories and perform the physical work humans once did—what happens to the value of human labor? And if work is no longer what makes us useful, what exactly makes us valuable?