i always return to this quote from Against the Grain

"I am tempted to see the late Neolithic revolution, for all its contributions to large-scale societies, as something of a deskilling. Adam Smith’s iconic example of the productivity gains achievable through the division of labor was the pin factory, where each minute step of pin making was broken down into a task carried out by a different worker. Alexis de Tocqueville read The Wealth of Nations sympathetically but asked, “What can be expected of a man who has spent twenty years of his life putting heads on pins"