Pull back the camera. Way back.
AI now. Cloud computing. The Web. Long-distance and cellular phone. Industrial robots. Farm mechanization. Wave after wave through the last century.
Back further. Henry Ford's moving assembly line in 1913 was going to gut the craftsmen. The printing press around 1440 ended the work of scribes. Agriculture, roughly ten thousand years ago, ended the hunter-gatherer life that almost every human until then had lived.
Run the tape all the way back to fire. Richard Wrangham's "cooking hypothesis" argues that learning to cook food is what made us human. It freed up the calories, the chewing hours, and the warmth that built the brain you're using to read this.
Same panic each time the wave moved.
Switchboard operators peaked near 235,000 in 1930 and disappeared into direct-dial. ATMs were supposed to end the bank teller. Total tellers actually grew, because banks opened more branches. Farms employed 23% of the US population in 1940. By 1980, under 3%.
US nonfarm employment in 1939: 30 million. In 2024: 158 million. Population grew about 2.5x. Jobs grew about 5x.
Honest caveat. MIT's David Autor finds that since 1980, technology has destroyed slightly more jobs than it created. Worth watching.
But the long arc holds. Roughly 74% of professional jobs in the US today did not exist in 1940. New work shows up.
AI feels abrupt because you are living through it. Zoomed out far enough, it's the same wave that has been rolling through since long before your grandparents' grandparents were kids. Maybe since the first cooking fire.
Same pattern. Same panic. Same answer, given time.
Sources behind every claim
| Claim | Source |
|---|---|
| Cooking hypothesis (cooking made us human) | Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books, 2009). Mainstream theory, not settled timing. |
| Ford's moving assembly line, 1913 | Henry Ford Museum / Smithsonian. Highland Park plant, December 1913. |
| Printing press, ~1440 | Gutenberg, Mainz. Standard date in primary sources and Encyclopedia Britannica. |
| Agricultural revolution, ~10,000 years ago | Neolithic Revolution, Fertile Crescent. Standard archaeological consensus (Bellwood, Diamond, etc.). |
| Switchboard operators peaked near 235,000 in 1930 | Richmond Fed, "Goodbye, Operator" (Q4 2019); NBER WP 28061 (Feigenbaum & Gross). |
| US farm employment 23% (1940) to under 3% (1980) | USDA ERS Farm Labor data; BLS MLR (Nov 1981). |
| Bank tellers grew post-ATM as branches expanded | Bessen, IMF F&D 2015. |
| Nonfarm employment 30M (1939) to 158M (2024) | BLS PAYEMS via FRED. |
| Post-1980 caveat on net job creation | Autor & Thompson, MIT (Apr 2024, "New Frontiers"). |
| ~74% of US professional jobs are post-1940 | Autor & Thompson, MIT (2024). |