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Technology lifts work up a level
Human alarm clocks
Before alarm clocks were invented, some people made a living walking from door to door in the morning to wake others up. Someone doing that job 150 years later would probably be doing something far more fulfilling and interesting than being a human alarm clock.
Computing's early days
Computing began with women plugging wires in and out by hand to process computations. Jobs keep evolving like this. Straight one-to-one replacement shows up mainly in roles like coding and contact center work, and most of the time the labor gets abstracted to a higher, more useful level. It is easy to overestimate the short-term impact of a technology and hard to keep its long-term impact in view.
Wall Street analysts
Fear of AI replacing Wall Street analysts is loud right now. Analysts used to stay up until 2 a.m. moving logos around and typing notes by hand, and AI can do that work now. The more interesting task for an analyst is learning the judgment and storytelling it takes to pitch a company or tell the story of an IPO.
How did human alarm clocks actually wake people?
In industrial Britain and Ireland, the job was called knocker-up. Knocker-ups walked their streets before dawn and tapped on bedroom windows with long poles, and some used peashooters to reach upper floors. Customers paid a small weekly fee, and the knocker-up stayed at the window until someone inside stirred. The trade lasted in some mill towns until the 1970s.
Why were early computers programmed with plugged cables?
Before electronic machines existed, computer was a job title for people, often women, who did calculations by hand. When ENIAC was completed in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania, six women who had worked as human computers became its programmers. The machine had no programming language, so they set it up by plugging cables and flipping switches. ENIAC's builders reported that it could finish an artillery trajectory in about 30 seconds that took a human computer around 20 hours.
Did ATMs really wipe out bank tellers?
Economist James Bessen has documented that the number of bank tellers in the United States rose between 1980 and 2010, even as ATMs spread through the country. ATMs lowered the cost of running a branch, so banks opened more branches. Tellers shifted from counting cash toward handling accounts and selling services. The count of tellers began falling in the 2010s.
Why do people misjudge a technology's long-term impact?
The pattern is often called Amara's law, after Roy Amara of the Institute for the Future. He observed that people tend to overestimate a technology's effect in the short run and underestimate it in the long run. The early years bring hype that outruns what the tools can do. The deeper changes come later, when businesses, habits, and infrastructure have rebuilt themselves around the technology. Electric power took decades after the first factory dynamos to reshape how factories were laid out.
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