The End of Work Has Been Predicted for 500 Years
Technology Doesn’t Kill Work. Bad Governance Does.
Every Generation Thinks This Time Is Different
Every technological revolution comes with the same warning, delivered with total confidence.
This time, jobs are finished.
This time, workers will not recover.
This time, the economy will not adapt.
This time, the machine replaces people permanently.
We tell ourselves this is a modern fear, driven by computers, algorithms, or artificial intelligence. It is not. This panic is as old as industrial society itself. We have said it about books, looms, steam engines, electricity, cars, computers, and the internet. We did not whisper it. We wrote it down, debated it, smashed machines over it, and formed commissions to study it.
The historical record is not ambiguous. In every case, critics were right about one thing and wrong about the conclusion. Jobs were destroyed. Skills were devalued. Entire professions disappeared. The mistake was assuming that the economy is a static list of occupations rather than a living system that reorganizes around productivity.
What actually happened, again and again, is that technology lowered costs, expanded output, created new industries, and generated forms of work that were impossible to imagine at the time of transition. Labor did not vanish. It moved, multiplied, and changed shape.
That does not mean the fears were stupid. They were grounded in real pain, real displacement, and real institutional failure. Workers were asked to absorb shocks while political systems stalled.
Wages lagged productivity.
Ownership concentrated.
Transitions were mishandled.
But the core claim that technology ends work has been wrong every single time.
Before we accept that artificial intelligence somehow breaks this pattern, it is worth looking at what people actually said when earlier technologies arrived, and what actually happened afterward. Not mythology. Not hindsight optimism. The documented arguments, the recorded fears, and the economic outcomes that followed.
History does not promise comfort. It does offer clarity.
The Printing Press
The Argument Against It
The fear around the printing press was explicit and elitist. Religious and academic authorities argued that mechanized reproduction of text would destroy intellectual labor and moral discipline.
Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, wrote in 1492 that printed books would weaken memory, degrade scholarship, and eliminate the profession of scribes. He warned that “printed books are no substitute for handwritten codices,” arguing that scribal labor would become obsolete.
https://archive.org/details/inpraiseofscribe0000trit_c1d1?utm_source=chatgpt.com
This was not fringe commentary. It was institutional anxiety about losing control over both knowledge and employment.
What Actually Happened
Scribes declined. Literacy exploded. Printing created entire labor markets in publishing, editing, translation, bookbinding, education, journalism, and scientific research.
The cost of books collapsed. Universities expanded. Knowledge became an economic input rather than a clerical privilege. Intellectual labor was not destroyed. It was democratized and scaled.
Textile Machinery and the Luddites
The Argument Against It
The Luddites were skilled workers responding to immediate wage collapse, not reactionary fools.
Between 1811 and 1816, they destroyed mechanized looms because those machines erased the economic value of their craft. Parliamentary debates openly predicted mass unemployment and social collapse.
Lord Byron defended the Luddites in the House of Lords in 1812, warning that machinery was “reducing the population to beggary.”
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1812/feb/27/frame-work-bill?utm-source=chatgpt.com
This was a serious labor argument grounded in lived experience.
What Actually Happened
Handloom weaving collapsed. Textile output surged. Cheaper clothing expanded demand, which created factory jobs, logistics networks, dye production, mechanical engineering, shipping, and global trade.
By the mid-19th century, textiles became Britain’s largest industrial employer. Labor shifted from artisanal production to industrial scale. Jobs did not vanish. They reorganized.
Steam Power and Industrial Automation
The fear that steam engines would permanently destroy work was not fringe thinking. It came from the very economists who were building the intellectual foundations of capitalism.
David Ricardo is often misremembered as a cheerleader for markets at all costs. He was not. In later editions of On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Ricardo explicitly reversed his earlier optimism about machinery. He conceded that automation could reduce demand for labor and materially harm workers, writing that “the substitution of machinery for human labour is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers.”
https://www.econlib.org/library/Ricardo/ricP.html
This was not a throwaway line. Ricardo acknowledged that machines could increase profits while reducing wages and employment in the short and medium term. In other words, productivity gains did not automatically translate into worker well-being. That admission still gets ignored today.
Thomas Malthus went further. He worried that industrial efficiency would outpace job creation and leave large portions of the population permanently unemployed and dependent. Parliamentary debates in early 19th century Britain are filled with concerns that steam-powered factories would concentrate wealth among owners while turning workers into surplus labor.
The fear was not simply unemployment. It was social breakdown. Critics argued that steam engines would sever the link between work and subsistence, replacing skilled labor with machines owned by a small class of capital holders.
What Actually Happened
What they got wrong was the idea that this displacement represented the end of work itself rather than the violent reorganization of it.
Steam power enabled factories, railroads, ports, and mass urbanization. It created wage labor at scale, engineering professions, transportation infrastructure, and global trade.
Conditions were brutal. The transition was mishandled. But industrialization created more work, not less, and gave rise to unions, labor law, and political movements that reshaped society.
Electricity and the Assembly Line
The Argument Against It
Labor unions warned that electrification and assembly lines would permanently deskill workers and eliminate craftsmanship.
Henry Ford’s methods were criticized for reducing workers to interchangeable parts and destroying skilled trades. These concerns dominated early 20th century labor debates.
What Actually Happened
Electrification created entire industries that did not exist before. Appliances. Utilities. Consumer manufacturing. Advertising. Retail chains. Office work scaled because electrified offices made coordination possible.
The modern middle class emerged alongside electrification. Not despite it.
The Automobile
The Argument Against It
The automobile threatened one of the largest employment ecosystems in the pre-industrial and early industrial economy: the horse.
At the turn of the 20th century, horses were not a niche industry. They were core infrastructure. In the United States alone, millions of jobs depended directly or indirectly on horse-powered transportation. Stable hands, carriage and wagon makers, blacksmiths, saddle makers, feed suppliers, coach drivers, farriers, and street cleaners all relied on an economy organized around animal power.
In 1900, New York City alone housed an estimated 150,000 horses, supporting tens of thousands of workers tied to stables, transport, and manure removal. Similar employment patterns existed across every major American and European city.
As automobiles began to spread, newspapers and trade publications warned openly of mass unemployment. Horse-related industries understood exactly what was coming. This was not speculative panic. It was structural displacement.
Blacksmithing journals and carriage trade publications documented collapsing demand as early as the 1910s. Municipal leaders worried about economic chaos as horse transport declined faster than replacement jobs appeared.
The concern was not only job loss but speed. The automobile did not arrive gradually. Once costs dropped and roads improved, the horse economy collapsed in a single generation. By the 1920s, urban horse populations had virtually disappeared, taking entire trades with them.
They were not wrong about the destruction. The horse-based labor system was wiped out.
What critics underestimated was how much larger and more complex the replacement economy would become, and how aggressively it would reshape society in its own image.
What Actually Happened
The auto economy dwarfed what it replaced. Manufacturing, road construction, oil refining, insurance, tourism, logistics, suburban development, and retail expansion followed.
Employment tied to automobiles exceeded horse-related employment many times over within decades.
The Consequences We Do Not Talk About Enough
This transition came with a cost we still live with.
The automotive industry, through lobbying and political power, reshaped American cities after World War II. Walkable urban centers were dismantled. Streetcars and rail systems were bought, torn up, or left to decay. Parking lots replaced green space. Left turn lanes replaced pedestrians.
This was not inevitable. It was policy driven. The nostalgia for trolleys and public transit exists because those systems were intentionally dismantled.
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demise
Technology expanded employment. Politics distorted the outcome.
Computers and the Internet
The Argument Against It
The fear that computers would permanently eliminate work was not fringe commentary or media panic. It was treated as a serious national risk by the United States government.
By the early 1960s, mainframe computers, numerical control machines, and automated data processing were already replacing clerical workers, typists, bookkeepers, and factory operators. Large organizations discovered they could produce more with fewer people, and the speed of that shift triggered fears of lasting technological unemployment.
In 1964, an ad-hoc committee of scientists, economists, technologists, and civil rights leaders sent a memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson titled The Triple Revolution. One section warned that “cybernation,” the combination of computers and automation, could weaken the traditional link between jobs and income and leave large segments of the population economically unnecessary if institutions failed to adapt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/peace/papers/1964p.7-01-large.html
That same year, Congress created the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress, signed into law by President Johnson. The commission was explicitly tasked with studying whether automation and computing would cause sustained unemployment and how public policy should respond.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-upon-signing-bill-creating-the-national-commission-technology-automation-and
Labor unions echoed these concerns, warning that automation threatened stable middle-class employment in both manufacturing and office work. These were not abstract fears. Early computer systems eliminated entire layers of clerical labor inside large firms.
What Actually Happened
Computers did not eliminate work. They reorganized it.
Office automation lowered the cost of coordination, allowing firms to grow larger, operate across distances, and create entirely new categories of labor. Software engineering, IT services, systems administration, cybersecurity, data analysis, digital platforms, logistics, and remote service work all expanded rapidly.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, computer-related occupations grew from a negligible share of employment in the 1970s into millions of jobs in the United States alone by the early 21st century.
Employment grew. Productivity grew.
The Consequences We Were Dishonest About
The internet allowed firms to manage production across continents. Work that had anchored communities was offshored. Factory workers in their forties were told their livelihoods were obsolete and their dignity was negotiable.
Pensions vanished. Communities hollowed out. Political leaders gaslit workers instead of planning transitions.
This was not a failure of technology. It was a failure of governance.
The Pattern We Keep Refusing to Face
Every one of these technologies destroyed jobs. That is not controversial and it never was.
What was wrong every single time was the claim that work itself would disappear, that society would somehow run out of things for human beings to do, that technology would make people obsolete rather than reorganize how value is created.
That mistake keeps getting repeated because it is convenient. It allows leaders to frame disruption as destiny instead of a set of choices.
History does not just rhyme. It leaves a playbook. We know exactly what happens when productivity jumps faster than institutions adapt. We know who absorbs the shock first. It is not executives or shareholders. It is workers whose skills are suddenly devalued, whose communities are built around industries that get written off as inefficient, whose livelihoods are treated as expendable in the name of progress.
We also know what comes next, because it has happened every time. New industries form. Output expands. Jobs return in different shapes and places. Living standards rise in the aggregate. Society advances. The long arc bends toward growth.
What never fixes itself automatically is the damage done during the transition.
That damage is where inequality comes from. It is where political instability comes from. It is where resentment hardens and trust collapses. Not because technology moved forward, but because institutions refused to move with it.
We were dishonest about the automobile reshaping cities because admitting it would have meant confronting lobbying power and policy choices. We were dishonest about computers and the internet hollowing out manufacturing because admitting it would have required planning for displaced workers instead of telling them to adapt or disappear. We were dishonest about who benefited and who paid the price.
This is the part of the story that gets erased every time people wave away concern by saying things worked out before.
Things worked out in the aggregate. They did not work out evenly. They did not work out automatically. And they did not work out without political decisions that favored some groups over others.
So if artificial intelligence becomes a disaster for workers, it will not be because history suddenly stopped working. It will be because we chose to repeat the same institutional cowardice, the same avoidance of hard choices, the same refusal to manage transitions honestly, while pretending the machine made us do it.
Fear alone is not an argument. Nostalgia is not a policy.
A Late Night Thought on Christmas Thoughts 12-25-25: above was written two weeks ago
I want to add this part late on Christmas night, because it is something I kept thinking about.
Democrats talk constantly about inclusion and equity. Those words get thrown around like they are principles, right up until we are actually faced with a tool that could make them real.
Now AI enters the conversation, and suddenly the same people who scream equity start saying no. AI is the death of creativity. The death of work. It will make people lazy. It will hollow everything out.
I do not see that at all.
What I see is the ability for more people to finally express what they already have inside them.
For most of modern history, participating in the economy required very specific abilities. You had to be able to write well. Or design well. Or code. Or learn in a very linear way. Or sit still. Or have the right credentials. A lot of people were sidelined not because they lacked ideas, but because the medium of producing work was built for a narrow type of person.
AI changes that.
If someone has ideas but never learned to be an artist or graphic designer, AI lets their creativity come out anyway. If someone is blind but articulate, AI becomes a way to search, communicate, and build without having to rely on someone else at every step. If you are a verbal learner, AI can meet you there. If you are ADD, scattered, and learn ten things at once instead of one, AI can work the way your brain works instead of forcing you into a box.
That is not killing creativity. That is removing the bottleneck.
Will AI replace some jobs? Maybe. History suggests it will. That has happened with every major shift in how work gets done. The printing press, the assembly line, the computer. Each one changed who could participate and how.
The part people keep missing is what opens up on the other side.
There are a lot of people with good ideas who never became entrepreneurs, never built companies, never created anything visible, not because they lacked intelligence or drive, but because their abilities did not align with what the system demanded.
Those ideas just stayed locked inside them. Sad.
If we actually care about equity, this is what it looks like when it shows up.
Are you an ANGRY DEMOCRAT? If so, the please share with other Angry Dems.
Very excellent article. It begs the question: So what should good government do, knowing that AI will rapidly eliminate lots and lots of jobs? We have the benefit of knowing the pros and cons of other disrupting changes. Putting them out of work, out of employer subsidized medical care, out of retirement savings? Should we send them out to the wolves, to fend for themselves? Or make sure we have some kind of social safety net, allowing displaced workers to deal with these changes while maintaining their dignity?
This article comes at the perfect time! What an incredibly insightful read; you've nailed the historical pattern perfecly. As a huge booklover, the mention of books as 'old feared tech' really made me chuckle. It's so true how work adapts and new possibilities always emerge. Brilliant!