Artificial intelligence is replacing hundreds of jobs across the U.S., creating skepticism and uncertainty about the future of humanity. It is a daunting development as even the creator of AI has warned about the technology’s potential takeover.
The reality is that jobs have been overtaken by new developments in technology for centuries, paving the way for mass production and creating outrage among those who relied on those jobs. From women who worked in the textile industry to switchboard operators in the 1970s, all the way through the 2000s when video streaming services took the place of physical video stores.
With every technological development that eliminated the need for certain jobs, people cried out in protest, including economist Maynard Keynes, who coined a phrase for the phenomenon.
“We are being afflicted with a new disease,” Keynes wrote in a published essay in 1930. The disease, he wrote, was “‘technological unemployment.’”
“From the sixteenth century, with a cumulative crescendo after the eighteenth, the great age of science and technical inventions began,” he added, referencing the turn to other methods of mass production, which, he said, has been in “full flood” since the start of the 19th Century.
Looking to the past may be a good starting point when looking at the future of technology in the 21st Century after a report by Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, Inc. found nearly 4,000 jobs cuts last month were replaced by AI. The fears of continued AI advancements are real and the effect it is having on workers’ livelihoods cannot be understated, but if the past shows anything, humans are resilient and capable of adapting.
And, as Walter Reuther, the founder and former President of the United Automobile Workers Union and labor and civil rights activist from the mid-1940s through the 1960s once said, “Either we shall use our new machines and technology to help us create security and dignity in the construction of a brave new world, or the impact of jet propulsion technology upon a huffing and puffing model T distributive system will dig our economic graves.”
The following jobs have become almost or completely obsolete thanks to technological advancements and show that history is not so different from today.
2 / 13
In the early 1800s, Luddite became a blanket term for people who opposed technology, as weavers and textile workers stood up in protest of machines taking over their factory jobs. Many of the textile workers had spent years, possibly decades honing and perfecting their craft when cost-saving machinery started to take over.
Gig mills, a wool shearing machine, produced wool at a faster rate using only one person instead of several, and the stocking frame machine sped up the process of producing stockings to six times the rate as before.
Some weavers protested by smashing the textile machines while others burned factories or exchanged gunfire with guards and soldiers.
The military eventually quashed the rebellion by 1813 and instated a new law that the act of damaging machine equipment was punishable by death.
3 / 13
Economist Maynard Keynes argued in the 1930s that technology was to blame for the economic downturn during The Great Depression. It was a time when labor-saving changes to jobs meant putting people out of work, such as was the case when the tractor was introduced.
The tractor was first released in 1902 but was too big and expensive for everyday farmers to get their hands on one. But when Henry Ford produced the Fordson tractor in 1917, it saturated the market.
As new technologies were introduced from power lifts and rubber tires to diesel engines, the tractor became a major cog in agriculture. When it was first introduced, roughly one-third of Americans worked on farms but by 1950, that number had dropped to only 10%, according to The Atlantic, and by 2010, that number fell to only 2% of the American workforce.
4 / 13
Elevator Operators were essential to getting from one floor to the next in high-rise buildings in the early 1900s. The elevators worked on a pully system, necessitating a paid worker who guided the car to each stop by hand. These old-school elevators were not the safest technology, with a gap between the floor and the car, meaning if a person misjudged the distance and fell, the operator wouldn’t have time to stop.
To combat this problem, the elevator industry added safety bumpers and an automatic stopping feature, before finally creating the driverless elevator. Much like the uncertainty over driverless vehicles today, the new-age elevator did not make a splash for people who feared using it. “People walked in and looked and walked right back out,” NPR contributor Lee Gray said on a podcast. “They would quickly step back out and try to find someone to say where’s the operator?”
But in 1945, everything changed. That year, New York City elevator operators went on strike, costing the city $100 million in lost taxes and preventing 1.5 million office workers from getting to their jobs. It was then that driverless elevators replaced hand-operated ones, effectively eliminating the position for good.
5 / 13
In the early 1950s, automobile manufacturers began using technology to speed up production and cut down on production costs. One example is Ford Motor Company, which moved its production base to Brook Park, Ohio in 1949, and effectively cut its manpower by 90%.
More than any other area, the automotive industry was most affected at the time as it adopted robots to replace lower and middle-income workers who performed manual labor.
“Our evidence shows that robots increase productivity. They are very important for continued growth and for firms, but at the same time they destroy jobs and they reduce labor demand,” Acemoglu said. “Those effects of robots also need to be taken into account.”
President John F. Kennedy was asked to address the growing issue of technology taking over jobs in 1960, but he voiced his support for the changes, saying the machines were “not created ... so that they can destroy our prosperity and our economic health,” but instead said job seekers should work to transfer their skills.
A 2020 study by MIT professor Daron Acemoglu revealed that in the U.S., every robot added to the workforce per 1,000 workers resulted in a wage decline of .42%, while the employment-to-population ratio decreased by .2% — equaling the loss of 400,000 jobs at the time.
By introducing robotic technology into the automotive industry, employees were replaced by machines that could produce more for less, including welding jobs that paid $12 an hour. The replacement of technology meant that companies could effectively pay only $3.50 per hour while increasing output.
Kennedy said in his speech, that “each advance—each more efficient machine—has not only increased production and raised our standard of living, but it has also improved drastically the hours and the conditions of labor. In an eight-hour day, five-day week, the modern worker produces more than twice as much as his grandfather did, working twelve hours a day, six days a week.”
6 / 13
Although warehouse workers are still commonplace today, there is one aspect of the job that has largely become obsolete — those who sorted the material goods. Up until the 1960s, warehouses hired employees to sort each item as it enters a warehouse, but as technology exploded, those jobs were rendered unnecessary.
Electronic equipment took the place of human workers, which was ideal for production companies that wanted to save a buck, but it put thousands of people out of jobs.
President John F. Kennedy praised the changes in his speech on June 7, 1960, saying the replacement of machines will positively impact the future. “In the future, as the complexity, the versatility, and the precision of modern technology continues its inevitable advance, thousands of processes and functions now performed by men will be done, more cheaply and more efficiently, by machine,” he said.
7 / 13
Switchboard operators were once an essential part of telephone communication in the late 19th- into the early 20th century. During that time, technology wasn’t advanced enough for people to directly dial a phone number and were instead greeted by a switchboard operator when they picked up their phone.
Although a replacement for human operators and switchboards was invented in 1892, only 16 years after Graham Bell patented the telephone, two decades later only about 300,000 out of 11 million telephone subscribers had automated service, meaning they no longer relied on operators.
Ironically, the Bell companies didn’t want an automated switching service, which was initially used only by independent telephone companies. “Bell wanted to make using the phone as easy as possible for customers,” Milton Mueller, a professor of public policy at Georgia Tech specializing in communications and information, told Econ Focus in 2019. “So-called automated switching meant the customer was actually doing work, as opposed to just picking up the phone and telling the operator what he or she wanted.”
It wasn’t until after World War I that Bell management realized the benefits of implementing an automatic switchboard as wages for switchboard operators began to rise. The company started its plans to adopt the new system in 1919, but it wasn’t until 1965 that it implemented its first fully electronic switching system.
At the height of its demand, there were 342,000 switchboard operators, which declined to less than 250,000 in 1960 and dropped to only 40,000 by 1984. But today, there are around 68,000 operators who still us Source: Gizmodo