It’s easy to doomscroll these days. AI, it appears, is coming for our jobs. Even occupations that were previously considered an easy path to a middle-class lifestyle, like lawyer and radiologist, may be subject to the AI chopping block. Yet these stories, despite their flashy headlines, are missing nuance. They examine the seen (and likely) consequences of the AI revolution, but are missing the unseen “what comes next” part of the story. Every historical episode of creative destruction involves both creativity and destruction. Yet current news stories are focusing only on the destruction. We might not know how AI will revolutionize the American workforce, but past episodes of similar technological upheaval suggest that the future will be brighter than we can imagine.
Recent headlines are, indeed, scary. Consider the following:
- May 12, 2025: “For Silicon Valley, AI isn’t just about replacing some jobs. It’s about replacing all of them” – The Guardian
- June 18, 2025: “AI Will Replace Amazon Jobs. CEO Andy Jassy Confirms Workers’ Worst Fears.” – Barrons
- July 3, 2025: “Ford’s CEO is the latest exec to warn that AI will wipe out half of white-collar jobs” – Business Insider
- July 19, 2025: “AI will take your job in the next 18 months. Here’s your survival guide.” – Market Watch
These headlines aren’t from some alarmist blogger, sheltering in a tin-hat corner of the internet. These are from reputable news sources with large readerships. And they’re causing an artificial panic.
Consider the Amazon headline. Amazon has been an industry leader in automation, yet employment at the company has continued to grow unabated. Currently, Amazon employs more than 1.5 million people. That’s up from 17,000 in 2007, and nearly double its 2019 employment figure. This employment growth has happened despite the fact that the company currently has more than a million robots in its workplaces. The jobs those robots have replaced are primarily those involving menial work or repetitive tasks, freeing up labor for more valuable pursuits. While CEO Andy Jassy recently announced that AI will likely lead to future job cuts at the company, similar claims were made in 2012 when Amazon acquired robotics company Kiva Systems. Employment grew unabated after this acquisition.
These headlines also sound suspiciously like those circulating during a previous public conversation in which technology threatened to take all the jobs away. In the mid-1990s, the internet began to move from the plaything of tech hobbyists to a central part of work and education. Jobs that had previously been done by human processors were increasingly outsourced to data processors.
In 1995, Jeremy Rifkin published his book The End of Work, which argued that the dawn of the information technology age would create a massive and structural decline in jobs. He suggested that as many as two-thirds of all existing jobs could eventually be eliminated by machines. Jobs in manufacturing, agriculture, and clerical work were particularly vulnerable to this type of technology-based outsourcing.
To be fair, machines did take over many of those jobs. But we didn’t have massive, enduring, structural unemployment as a result. Instead, new jobs emerged.
Because I’m writing a piece on how AI won’t replace all our jobs, I asked ChatGPT to help me figure out how to identify some jobs that didn’t exist in 1990 and now have a significant number of employees. It very helpfully pointed me to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Here are a handful of new job categories and their current employment figures from that database:
- Software and Web Developers, Programmers, and Testers: 2,154,370 employees
- Database and Network Administrators and Architects: 633,540 employees
- Computer and Information Analysts: 677,230 employees
Indeed, the full set of “Computer and Mathematical Occupations” has exploded since internet adoption began accelerating in the late 1990s. The entire category of “Computer Occupations” currently has an employment figure of 4,786,660.
These broad categories include a range of fulfilling jobs and occupations, including app developer, social media manager, cloud architect, cybersecurity analyst, and influencer. In past eras, many of the individuals pursuing these opportunities would have been good candidates for once-stable jobs in law, accounting, or manufacturing.
In 1897, Mark Twain heard a rumor that he’d died. He sent a letter to the New York Journal to clear up the matter, stating that “the report of my death was an exaggeration.” Not only are the reports of AI’s employment “death toll” an exaggeration, but they’re missing information about the critical second act of the play. After the destruction comes the creativity, and the story of the internet can give us clues about the future of work in this technological episode as well.
