This Labor Day reflection comes from a man who has sat on both sides of the table, and who is old enough to admit that the view changes depending on which chair you’re in.

For 28 years I worked in federal civil service. Part of that time I was a front-line manager, responsible for the work and the careers of the people on my team. Another part of that time I was an elected union official, responsible for standing up for those same kinds of people when they believed the agency had gotten something wrong.

The two jobs taught me the same lesson from opposite directions. In management, you learn quickly that an organization’s output is not a machine’s output. It is the accumulated judgment, patience and effort of individuals who chose to show up and care. As a union representative, you learn that dignity is not a fringe benefit. People want to be paid fairly, yes. They also want to be treated as though their work counts for something.

That is the part I keep thinking about as the conversation turns to artificial intelligence.

Plenty of smart people predict that much of the labor now performed by humans will eventually be performed by software. Not all of them agree. MIT economist David Autor has spent years arguing that technology historically changes the composition of work more than it eliminates work outright, shifting what people do rather than whether they do anything. His MIT colleague Daron Acemoglu has estimated the near-term economy-wide productivity gains from AI will be considerably more modest than the loudest forecasts suggest. I am not qualified to settle that argument. I am qualified to say that the experts are not speaking with one voice, and anyone who tells you the outcome is already decided is selling something.

Here is what I believe holds up regardless of how the technology lands. The value of labor was never only the output. It is also the accountability that comes with it — a person who can be asked why, who can be answerable to a neighbor, who can be trusted. No model signs its name to the work in quite the same way.

And that brings me home to Fishers. On a holiday built to honor working people, look around this city. The teachers heading back into HSE classrooms. The nurses on holiday shifts. The road crews, the restaurant staff, the police officers and firefighters working today so the rest of us can grill in the backyard. The small business owners who took a risk on a storefront here. Whatever software eventually does, it is not going to plow 116th Street at 4 a.m.

I remain an optimist. Human work has been declared obsolete before, and it has responded every time by becoming something new. My money is still on the people.