Every generation is certain that THIS technology will finally destroy us. Every generation is wrong.
Looking for links to books and other resources? Scroll to the end of the post.
I’ve been seeing a lot of doom and gloom lately, in the news, on social media, and from politicians using the fear of AI to drum up support for their pet projects and power grabs.
“AI will replace everyone.” “The economy will collapse.” “No one will need writers or designers or marketers or agencies.” “Society won’t survive this.”
Here’s commentator Matt Walsh (who I normally agree with), writing to his millions of followers:
AI is going to wipe out at least 25 million jobs in the next 5 to 10 years. Probably much more. It will destroy every creative field. It will make it impossible to discern reality from fiction. Are we really just going to lie down and let AI take everything from us?
I don’t buy it.
Not because I’m blindly optimistic. But because I’ve studied the history of this kind of fear, and the pattern is so consistent, so predictable, that it would be funny if people weren’t so terrified every time it repeats.
Every generation encounters a technology so transformative that brilliant people, including Nobel Prize winners and heads of state, become convinced it will destroy the economy and unravel society. And every generation is wrong.
As Matt Ridley wrote in The Rational Optimist, “The generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and massages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity.”
Let me show you what I mean.
The Printing Press (1440s)
When Gutenberg’s invention started flooding Europe with books, it didn’t just disrupt one trade. It threatened to collapse the entire knowledge economy. Scribes, who had been the backbone of information production for centuries, saw their profession evaporate. Monasteries that had sustained themselves through book production lost their economic purpose overnight.
Swiss biologist Conrad Gessner petitioned monarchs to regulate the book trade, warning of the “confusing and harmful abundance of books.” German scholars in the 1480s were already overwhelmed, lamenting that they couldn’t keep up with the flood of printed material.
This wasn’t a niche concern. The elites genuinely believed unregulated printing would destabilize the entire social order.
What actually happened: Mass literacy. The Scientific Revolution. The Reformation. The Enlightenment. The democratization of knowledge. The number of jobs created by cheap printed material dwarfed the scribe jobs lost by orders of magnitude.
Worth noting: the people screaming loudest about the printing press were the people who had the most to lose from it. Scholars, monarchs, and religious authorities who had controlled the flow of information for centuries suddenly found that power slipping away. The printing press didn’t destroy society. It pulled power down from the elites to ordinary people. And that’s a pattern worth watching for, because it repeats. When you hear powerful people warning that a technology is going to be catastrophic for “everyone,” it’s worth asking whether they really mean everyone, or whether they mean themselves. (Though even the elites tend to come out ahead eventually. No monarch in the 1500s had air conditioning, modern medicine, or a lucrative deal with a streaming service. A little farsightedness goes a long way, even if you’re only in it for selfish reasons.)
Mechanized Textile Production (1810s)
This is the original tech panic, and it’s worth understanding because the scale of fear was enormous. The fear of machines replacing workers actually predates the Luddites by centuries. Queen Elizabeth I personally denied William Lee a patent on his knitting frame in 1589 because she feared it would create mass unemployment. By the early 1800s, textile workers were the largest industrial workforce in England, and machines didn’t just threaten one shop or one town. They threatened the economic foundation of an entire nation of skilled craftspeople.
Lord Byron rose in Parliament in 1812 to defend the machine-smashers, arguing that “nothing but absolute want could have driven a large, and once honest and industrious, body of the people” to such desperate measures. Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1829 that the transformation went far beyond economics. It was remaking human nature itself: “Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.”
Things got so bad the British government deployed 14,000 soldiers into the English countryside to contain the unrest. More troops than were fighting Napoleon. They made machine-breaking a capital offense.
The fear was that the entire structure of working life was being destroyed, and nothing would replace it.
What actually happened: The Industrial Revolution raised the standard of living dramatically, created a massive middle class, and made goods affordable to ordinary people for the first time. England went from economic crisis to global superpower.
The Railroad (1820s-1840s)
Railroads didn’t just scare passengers. They annihilated entire industries overnight and triggered widespread economic panic. The coaching industry, canal transport, horse breeding, and every inn and stable along the old roads faced extinction. Workers in these older industries wrote pamphlets blaming railways for urban poverty and social disruption. Critics in farming communities argued that trains would destroy local identity, drain rural areas, and upend the social order.
What actually happened: Railroads became the backbone of the modern economy, slashed the cost of goods, created entirely new industries and towns, and generated millions of jobs that hadn’t existed before.
Electrification & the Automobile (1920s-1930s)
By 1930, electrification and the automobile had transformed the economy so rapidly that John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist alive, wrote that the world was suffering from a brand new affliction. He called it “technological unemployment,” defining it as unemployment caused by “our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”
The mood was outright despair. Keynes described two camps of pessimists: those who believed “nothing can save us but violent change” and those who thought the economy was “so precarious that we must risk no experiments.”
Sound familiar?
To his credit, Keynes himself believed the disruption was temporary. But his coining of “technological unemployment” gave a name and intellectual credibility to the doom predictions that followed for the next century.
What actually happened: GDP per capita in the United States increased over fivefold. Electrification and the automobile created tens of millions of jobs and entire new sectors of the economy that nobody in 1930 could have imagined.
The Computer & “Cybernation” (1960s)
In 1964, a group of 35 luminaries, including Nobel laureate Linus Pauling and Nobel economist Gunnar Myrdal, sent an open letter to President Lyndon Johnson warning that computers were about to make most human labor obsolete.
They called it the “Triple Revolution” and warned that a “new era of production” had begun, one that would create a system of “almost unlimited productive capacity” requiring “progressively less human labor.” They declared that “the traditional link between jobs and incomes is being broken” and that “promises of jobs are a cruel and dangerous hoax.”
This wasn’t Reddit speculation. This was Nobel Prize winners telling the President of the United States that the economy as we knew it was ending.
Looking back decades later, sociologist Daniel Bell delivered the verdict: the whole thing was “one more instance of the penchant for overdramatizing a momentary innovation and blowing it up far out of proportion to its actuality.”
What actually happened: The computer revolution created entire new industries, millions of jobs, and the greatest sustained period of economic growth in human history. Only 40% of workers today are employed in occupations that existed 85 years ago. The rest work in jobs that didn’t exist before the technologies that were supposed to destroy employment.
Robots & Automation (1980s)
In 1983, Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief made one of the most famous doom predictions in economic history, comparing humans to horses: “The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish, in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.”
He argued that any worker whose job consisted of following specific instructions could, in principle, be replaced by a machine. The implication was civilizational. The entire structure of human economic life was about to become obsolete.
What actually happened: The decades following Leontief’s prediction saw one of the longest economic expansions in American history, the rise of the personal computer, the Internet, and the creation of millions of entirely new job categories that nobody could have predicted.
The Internet & Outsourcing (1990s-2000s)
Ross Perot warned during the 1992 presidential campaign that free trade would create a “giant sucking sound” of jobs leaving the United States. Pat Buchanan (whose perspectives I usually endorse) called it “deindustrialization” and predicted the death of American manufacturing. The fear wasn’t about one industry. It was that the entire American middle class would be hollowed out.
Then the Internet arrived, and the doom predictions doubled. Brick-and-mortar retail would die. Publishing would die. Travel agencies, bookstores, record stores, newspapers…all dead. The economy couldn’t possibly survive this much disruption at once.
What actually happened: U.S. unemployment fell to historic lows in the late 1990s. E-commerce, social media, digital marketing, cloud computing, and the app economy created millions of jobs that hadn’t existed a decade earlier.
See the Pattern?
Karl Marx in the age of steam: automation will destroy the working class. Keynes in 1930: technological unemployment is upon us. Nobel Prize winners in 1964: computers mean that “promises of jobs are a cruel and dangerous hoax.” Another Nobel laureate in 1983: humans will go the way of horses.
Same logic every time. This technology is so powerful it will destroy more jobs than it creates, and the economy cannot adapt.
Wrong every time. Not because the disruption wasn’t real, but because the doomsayers consistently underestimate humanity’s ability to adapt, create, and build new things on top of the old.
Maybe we shouldn’t blame the pessimists too much, or ourselves for listening to them. In his book Abundance, Peter Diamandis points out that our brains are wired for pessimism. Evolution shaped us to fixate on threats and filter out good news. Add a media ecosystem that profits from fear, and you get a population convinced that catastrophe is always right around the corner, despite living in the most prosperous era in human history. With AI, the pessimism seems even more intense than usual. People aren’t just worried about the world falling apart. They’re worried about their own lives falling apart, convinced that a small class of AI-owning elites will be the only ones left standing. It’s the same fear that textile workers had about factory owners, that farmers had about railroad barons, and that office workers had about computer programmers. And it has been wrong every time for the same reasons.
Artificial Intelligence (2020s)
And here we are again.
In 2023, Geoffrey Hinton, widely called the “Godfather of AI,” quit Google so he could speak freely about the dangers of AI. Thousands of prominent figures signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development, warning of “profound risks to society and humanity.” Goldman Sachs predicted 300 million jobs lost. A former OpenAI researcher said there was a 70% chance AI would destroy or catastrophically harm humanity. Even Elon Musk put the odds of AI destroying humanity at 20%. A book published recently by two prominent AI safety researchers is titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Headlines scream about millions of jobs vanishing. Politicians promise to protect us from the machines if we just give them more power. The narrative is everywhere: AI will destroy creative work, eliminate white-collar jobs, collapse the economy, and leave most people unemployable.
When you point out that every previous generation said the same thing and the world didn’t end, they say “yeah, but this time it’s different.”
“But This Time It’s Different” (It Isn’t)
The strongest version of the argument goes something like this: Previous technologies replaced physical labor. AI replaces mental labor. If both physical AND mental work can be automated, what’s left for humans to do?
This sounds devastating until you realize it’s the exact argument Wassily Leontief made in 1983. He didn’t just talk about factory robots. He said “any worker who now performs his task by following specific instructions” could be replaced. That covered mental work too. He was wrong because humans don’t just follow instructions. We set goals. We build relationships. We exercise judgment and taste. We identify problems nobody asked us to solve. Every time we automate one layer of work, we discover a higher layer we didn’t know existed.
Then there’s the speed argument. AI adoption is measured in months, not decades. ChatGPT hit 100 million users in just two months. It took Instagram 2.5 years and Netflix 10 years to reach the same milestone. But faster adoption means faster transition to the other side. The Internet disrupted everything in about 15 years. AI may do it in 5. That’s not a reason to panic. It’s a reason to move.
And the demand argument: if AI displaces millions of workers, who buys the output? This is what economists call the lump of labor fallacy. Every productivity revolution in history has made goods cheaper, which leaves more money in more people’s pockets, which creates more demand, which creates more jobs. That’s exactly what happened after mechanization, after electrification, and after computing. When you lower the cost of something, you don’t unemploy people (except temporarily, perhaps). You make things more abundant. The average American household in 1901 spent about 80 cents of every dollar on food, clothing, and shelter, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Today that’s down to about 49 cents. The gains from productivity revolutions flow downward through cheaper goods and new opportunities.
Won’t all of this just make the rich richer? AI is actually shaping up to be the great equalizer. It gives a solo operator the capabilities that used to require a whole team. A one-person business can now produce marketing, code, design, legal review, and customer research that would have required five or six employees a few years ago. That’s power shifting down, not up.
Perry Metzger, CEO of the AI startup Cylinic, made this point on The Tom Woods Show. He talked about using Midjourney to create custom illustrations for his blog. He never would have hired an artist to illustrate blog posts before. He couldn’t have afforded it. AI didn’t replace an artist. It created art that wouldn’t have existed. And that pattern, Metzger argues, will repeat across medicine, education, agriculture, engineering, and every other field where the bottleneck has always been the limited number of human minds you can throw at a problem.
That whole episode is worth a listen if this topic interests you. Tom Woods raises every objection his audience might have, and Metzger works through them one by one. One point worth highlighting: Metzger argues that if there’s anything to fear from AI, it’s that politicians will intentionally scare us into pushing through regulation that conveniently restricts what the rest of us can do with AI while leaving government free to use it to create whatever dystopian future of surveillance and propaganda it wants.
My Own Experience
I’m not just making a theoretical case here.
At least half of my work time involves using AI, and some days it’s nearly 100%. I use it to help me write and edit emails, website content, articles, blog posts (yes, like this one), contracts, books, and social media posts. I use it to review contracts and agreements, summarize meeting recordings and pull out action items, create photos and videos, edit videos, and analyze data.
My team uses AI to write code for websites. My lead developer estimates his productivity is 50-100% greater because of it. We use it to brainstorm and edit marketing copy and produce custom workflows for client projects.
None of this is turned over to AI 100%. We don’t say “Hey, code this whole website!” or “Write this book for me!” And I don’t trust AI blindly. I review everything it produces because it makes mistakes (ugh, some of the things I’ve caught…🙄).
But here’s what matters: my team as a whole is easily 100-200% more productive because of AI. Me personally? I’d say 500%.
The Real Lesson
I’m not dismissing the disruption. The Luddites weren’t stupid. They were skilled workers watching their livelihoods disappear, and their pain was real. Transitions hurt. Some people lose jobs that never come back in the same form. That’s true of every technological shift in history, and it will be true of AI.
But fighting the transition hurts more than embracing it. The people who smashed the looms didn’t save their jobs. The people who embraced the new technology built the next economy.
Every time, the people who lean into the change, who learn the new tools, who find ways to do better work and serve their customers better…they step up to better work that they enjoy more, that pays more, and that provides more of what society actually wants.
If you’re a business owner sitting on the sidelines waiting to see how AI shakes out, you’re not being wisely cautious. You’re the guy in 1995 who said, “I don’t think this Internet thing is going to matter for my business.”
You don’t want to be that company or that person.
What To Do Instead of Panicking
Embrace the tools and learn to use AI to make your work better, faster, and more valuable. Free yourself from the tasks you hate so you can focus on the work that actually matters, the work that requires your judgment, your creativity, your relationships, and your taste.
The question isn’t whether AI will disrupt everything. The question is whether you want to be the one trying to stop this tidal wave, or the one surfing it.
More faith, less fear.
Go Deeper
Here are five books, a podcast episode, and another podcast that will arm you with the data and perspective to be a rational optimist in a world that profits from pessimism:
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. The case that exponentially growing technologies are solving humanity’s biggest problems, backed by extensive research. Diamandis documents how we’re on the verge of meeting the basic needs of every person on the planet.
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley. A history of how trade and innovation have lifted humanity out of poverty. Ridley’s argument is that when human beings are free to exchange goods and ideas, prosperity follows.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. Provides a useful framework for dealing with the disruption that accompanies innovation.
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World by Hans Rosling. Rosling dismantles the fear-driven narratives we absorb from media and politics, replacing them with data that tells a very different story about the state of the world.
Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley. The data-driven case that resources are becoming more abundant, not scarcer, as population and technology grow.
The Tom Woods Show, Ep. 2383: “Fears About AI Are Overblown” featuring Perry Metzger. Two years old, but still relevant. A great conversation that walks through the AI panic point by point. Tom’s show is worth subscribing to generally. He covers topics most people won’t touch and does it with serious guests.
The All-In Podcast with Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg. Four venture capitalists and tech investors who cover AI, technology, economics, and policy every week. They’re generally optimistic about AI’s potential without ignoring the real challenges, and they bring on guests who are actually building in the space. If you want to stay current on where AI is headed from people who are investing in it, this is a good one to follow.
Want to work with a company that doesn’t fear the future and can help you embrace it? BUILT builds high-end, custom WordPress solutions, working primarily as a white-label partner with marketing agencies (but bring us your project, no matter who you are, and let’s talk). Get in touch at BUILTwebdev.com.
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