Every generation since the first power looms has been told that machines were about to end work. In the aggregate the prediction has failed every time: employment recovered and usually grew. For specific occupations it has often been right, and in the one case where it was most right, the handloom weavers, the adjustment took forty years and halved the pay of the people living through it.
Croppers and framework knitters broke machines in the English Midlands and North as mechanised cloth-finishing and weaving undercut their trades.
What happened next: The protests were crushed by 1816, but the weavers' fate was slower. Some 240,000 handloom weavers in the 1820s saw their earnings fall by more than half over the following decades before the occupation disappeared in the 1850s. Aggregate employment in textiles rose throughout.craft destroyed over a generation
In the first years of the Depression John Maynard Keynes warned of a new disease, 'technological unemployment', as mechanisation outran the discovery of new uses for labour.
What happened next: The unemployment of the 1930s was a demand collapse, not a machine problem. After the war the United States and Britain ran at near-full employment for a quarter of a century while mechanisation continued.aggregate recovered
A group of scientists and activists warned President Johnson that 'cybernation' would create a permanent class of the unemployed. The President appointed a National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress.
What happened next: The commission reported in 1966 that technology 'eliminates jobs, not work'. US unemployment fell to 3.5% by 1969.aggregate recovered
Cash machines spread from the early 1970s, automating the teller's core task of handing out money.
What happened next: The number of US bank tellers roughly doubled between 1970 and 2010 as cheaper branches multiplied and tellers shifted to sales and service. Only after 2010, with online banking, did the occupation begin to shrink.occupation grew, then shrank
Jeremy Rifkin's book argued that computers and robots would eliminate most jobs within a generation, and the argument was widely accepted in the mid-1990s.
What happened next: US unemployment fell to 4% by 2000 and the following decade's job losses came from a financial crisis, not from machines.aggregate recovered
Carl Frey and Michael Osborne estimated that 47% of US employment was at high risk of computerisation within two decades.
What happened next: By 2019 US unemployment stood at a fifty-year low of 3.5%. Specific occupations the study flagged, such as cashiers and telemarketers, did shrink.aggregate recovered
Share of the 6 cases above that resolved this way. Small samples: treat as a prior, not a forecast.
Microsoft is offering buyouts to 60,000 staff and the youngest workers in AI-exposed jobs are falling behind. History's three great labour transitions say what usually follows, and where the unknowns hide.
