It’s straightforward to doomscroll lately. AI, it seems, is coming for our jobs. Even occupations that have been beforehand thought of a straightforward path to a middle-class way of life, like lawyer and radiologist, could also be topic to the AI chopping block. But these tales, regardless of their flashy headlines, are lacking nuance. They study the seen (and sure) penalties of the AI revolution, however are lacking the unseen “what comes subsequent” a part of the story. Each historic episode of artistic destruction entails each creativity and destruction. But present information tales are focusing solely on the destruction. We would not understand how AI will revolutionize the American workforce, however previous episodes of comparable technological upheaval counsel that the longer term shall be brighter than we are able to think about.
Current headlines are, certainly, scary. Take into account the next:
- Could 12, 2025: “For Silicon Valley, AI isn’t nearly changing some jobs. It’s about changing all of them” – The Guardian
- June 18, 2025: “AI Will Exchange Amazon Jobs. CEO Andy Jassy Confirms Employees’ Worst Fears.” – Barrons
- July 3, 2025: “Ford’s CEO is the newest exec to warn that AI will wipe out half of white-collar jobs” – Enterprise Insider
- July 19, 2025: “AI will take your job within the subsequent 18 months. Right here’s your survival information.” – Market Watch
These headlines aren’t from some alarmist blogger, sheltering in a tin-hat nook of the web. These are from respected information sources with massive readerships. They usually’re inflicting a synthetic panic.
Take into account the Amazon headline. Amazon has been an trade chief in automation, but employment on the firm has continued to develop unabated. At present, Amazon employs greater than 1.5 million individuals. That’s up from 17,000 in 2007, and almost double its 2019 employment determine. This employment development has occurred even if the corporate presently has greater than one million robots in its workplaces. The roles these robots have changed are primarily these involving menial work or repetitive duties, releasing up labor for extra priceless pursuits. Whereas CEO Andy Jassy not too long ago introduced that AI will doubtless result in future job cuts on the firm, related claims have been made in 2012 when Amazon acquired robotics firm Kiva Programs. Employment grew unabated after this acquisition.
These headlines additionally sound suspiciously like these circulating throughout a earlier public dialog wherein expertise threatened to take all the roles away. Within the mid-Nineties, the web started to maneuver from the plaything of tech hobbyists to a central a part of work and training. Jobs that had beforehand been performed by human processors have been more and more outsourced to information processors.
In 1995, Jeremy Rifkin revealed his e-book The Finish of Work, which argued that the daybreak of the data expertise age would create an enormous and structural decline in jobs. He urged that as many as two-thirds of all current jobs might finally be eradicated by machines. Jobs in manufacturing, agriculture, and clerical work have been significantly weak to this sort of technology-based outsourcing.
To be honest, machines did take over lots of these jobs. However we didn’t have large, enduring, structural unemployment in consequence. As a substitute, new jobs emerged.
As a result of I’m writing a bit on how AI gained’t substitute all our jobs, I requested ChatGPT to assist me determine the best way to determine some jobs that didn’t exist in 1990 and now have a major variety of workers. It very helpfully pointed me to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Listed below are a handful of latest job classes and their present employment figures from that database:
- Software program and Net Builders, Programmers, and Testers: 2,154,370 workers
- Database and Community Directors and Architects: 633,540 workers
- Laptop and Data Analysts: 677,230 workers
Certainly, the complete set of “Laptop and Mathematical Occupations” has exploded since web adoption started accelerating within the late Nineties. Your entire class of “Laptop Occupations” presently has an employment determine of 4,786,660.
These broad classes embody a variety of fulfilling jobs and occupations, together with app developer, social media supervisor, cloud architect, cybersecurity analyst, and influencer. In previous eras, most of the people pursuing these alternatives would have been good candidates for once-stable jobs in legislation, accounting, or manufacturing.
In 1897, Mark Twain heard a rumor that he’d died. He despatched a letter to the New York Journal to clear up the matter, stating that “the report of my demise was an exaggeration.” Not solely are the stories of AI’s employment “demise toll” an exaggeration, however they’re lacking details about the vital second act of the play. After the destruction comes the creativity, and the story of the web may give us clues about the way forward for work on this technological episode as effectively.