In 1942, a German philosopher living in exile in New York wrote this in his diary: "Believe I have found the signs of an entirely new form of shame this morning. I will provisionally call it Promethean shame."
His name was Günther Anders. Born Günther Stern — he changed his surname to Anders, which means "different" in German, because he had an unmistakable desire to be different. He'd studied under Husserl, married Hannah Arendt, fled the Nazis, and ended up working in a factory in Los Angeles. That factory job changed his thinking forever.
What he saw on the assembly line was something no philosopher had described before: workers who weren't angry at the machines. They were ashamed of themselves. Ashamed that the machine was faster. More precise. Tireless. Replaceable without grief. The workers looked at the conveyor belt and felt — not rage, not resistance — but the quiet humiliation of being the weaker part.
In 1956, he published The Obsolescence of the Human. His thesis: humans don't fear technology because it threatens them. They fear it because it humiliates them. The machine doesn't need to replace you for you to feel replaced. It just needs to be better than you at the thing you thought made you valuable.
He called this the Promethean gap — the growing distance between what we can build and what we can emotionally process. Prometheus gave humans fire. Seventy years later, Anders pointed out that the fire had outgrown us.
I've spent fifteen years in digital leadership at Booking.com and Danone. I've sat in hundreds of rooms where new technology was being introduced. And I've seen this exact feeling — not in a 1950s factory, but in modern offices with standing desks and oat milk.
The senior data analyst who watches ChatGPT produce in ten seconds what took her a week. She doesn't say "I'm scared." She says "I should be faster."
The marketing director who quietly stops sharing his copy because an intern with a prompt writes something comparable. He doesn't push back. He goes quiet.
The team lead who starts measuring her people against AI output metrics. Not because anyone told her to. Because the machine set a new baseline, and now human speed feels like human failure.
That's not resistance. That's not "change fatigue." That's Promethean shame. The feeling that you — born, fragile, slow, emotional — are defective next to something that was made.
Anders saw something else too. He noticed that shame drives a strange response: instead of rejecting the machine, people try to become it. We start valuing efficiency over judgment. Speed over depth. Output over meaning. We reshape ourselves to match the thing that humiliated us.
Sound like any AI transformation you've been part of?
Here's what Anders couldn't have known: that seventy years after he named it, an entire generation of knowledge workers would feel this shame simultaneously. Not in a factory. At their desks. In their inboxes. In the silence after a meeting where someone showed what AI could do and nobody knew what to say.
The question isn't how to make people less afraid of AI. Fear you can argue with. Shame is different. Shame makes you go quiet. Shame makes you pretend you're fine. Shame makes you adapt to the machine instead of asking what the machine should adapt to.
The real work isn't teaching people to use AI. It's helping them remember what they're for.
I'm Vlad Sterngold. I've worked in professional kitchens, the military, advertising, my own startup, and 15 years in digital leadership at Booking.com and Danone. Now I'm building a coaching practice helping people navigate the human side of technological change.