For Clues About How A.I. Will Change Work, Look to the Past

In December 1931, economists gathered in Washington to discuss the threat that technology posed to American workers.

Switchboard operators were being rendered obsolete by the dial telephone. Movie-theater musicians were superfluous in the age of “talkies.” Teamsters — men driving teams of horses — were losing their jobs to drivers of gasoline-powered trucks.

Such disruptions were nothing new, the economists conceded. But with the Great Depression raging, the risks to the economy and social stability seemed greater than ever. And it was all happening “more rapidly than in any previous age,” warned Sumner H. Slichter, a Harvard economist.

“And yet we have failed, for the most part, to recognize that change presents a major social problem,” he told colleagues at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/22/business/economy/ai-economy-jobs-history.html