{"id":3175,"date":"2026-10-26T09:09:28","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T00:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/?p=3175"},"modified":"2026-10-26T09:11:58","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T00:11:58","slug":"for-clues-about-how-a-i-will-change-work-look-to-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skanto.co.kr\/?p=3175","title":{"rendered":"For Clues About How A.I. Will Change Work, Look to the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Economists hope earlier episodes of labor disruption, from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression, can help us prepare for the age of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In December 1931, economists gathered in Washington to discuss the threat that technology posed to American workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Switchboard operators were being rendered obsolete by the dial telephone. Movie-theater musicians were superfluous in the age of \u201ctalkies.\u201d Teamsters \u2014 men driving teams of horses \u2014 were losing their jobs to drivers of gasoline-powered trucks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cmore rapidly than in any previous age,\u201d warned Sumner H. Slichter, a Harvard economist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd yet we have failed, for the most part, to recognize that change presents a major social problem,\u201d he told colleagues at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly a century later, a new generation of economists is trying to make sense<\/a> of the consequences of another technology: artificial intelligence. And while the jobs they are focused on are different \u2014 computer programmers instead of telephone operators, scriptwriters instead of movie musicians, drivers of trucks powered by diesel, not animals \u2014 many of the questions they are asking are the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would the undeniable benefits of technology be enjoyed broadly, or accrue only to the wealthy few? Would new jobs emerge in time to replace the ones being destroyed? Was government data up to the task of measuring the rapidly changing economy? And, most importantly, what could the government do to slow these disruptions, or at least to help the workers caught in their wake<\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTechnological changes may be so rapid and so far-reaching that they bring about a condition in which all factors of production may be simultaneously unemployed,\u201d Ewan Clague, an economist who later served as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, told colleagues in 1931. He even proposed a policy that would not seem out of place in today\u2019s A.I. debate: \u201cMight it not be possible to work out a method of taxing machinery and equipment<\/a> which would tend to slow down their development?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modern economists are revisiting these earlier eras to find lessons relevant to policymakers today. Why did mechanization in the textile industry create widespread unemployment among spinners<\/a>but not among weavers<\/a>? Why were the protests that workers staged against industrialization in the 19th century more violent in France than in England? (And why did other technological changes draw little protest at all?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why, in short, have some episodes of technological upheaval gone relatively well for workers, and others so badly?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historical examples are particularly useful right now, economists argue, because this moment is so uncertain. The models that economists typically rely on offer an almost comically broad range of potential outcomes, from a modest productivity boost on a par with that of the internet to \u201can unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame,\u201d as nearly 200 economists warned in a recent letter<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

History won\u2019t provide a definitive answer, said Ben Schneider, an economist at the University of Oslo who studies how technology affects workers. But it can offer a window into the way societies have handled previous periods of rapid change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe can look to the past and we can say, well, the implications of the steam engine have basically played out by now,\u201d Mr. Schneider said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Context matters<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When the economists met in Washington in 1931, unemployment was nearly 20 percent<\/a>, and would hit 25 percent within a year, which remains a record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Worries about technology\u2019s taking jobs predated the Depression, but the crisis made them more acute. When telephone companies began replacing manual switchboards with dial telephones in the 1920s, tens of thousands of jobs disappeared. But most of the displaced workers \u2014 overwhelmingly young women<\/a> \u2014 found other jobs relatively quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDuring the period of business expansion before 1929, technological displacement led directly to relatively little unemployment,\u201d economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics wrote in a 1932 report, \u201cThe Dial Telephone and Unemployment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Depression changed everything. Women who lost their jobs connecting calls had little hope of finding work elsewhere. There were similar challenges in manufacturing, where automation allowed factories to produce steel, car parts and other goods with far fewer workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow empty a modern steel mill seems!\u201d The New York Times Magazine lamented in 1938. \u201cThere is something ominous about this \u2014 ominous because of the short cuts to come.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years later, however, those mills were producing steel for the American war effort, and with men off fighting, labor-saving technology was a boon rather than a threat. And in the economic boom in the decades after World War II, concerns about technological displacement were mitigated by the abundant job opportunities \u2014 many of them tied to designing, manufacturing and selling cars, televisions and washing machines for a growing middle class \u2014 that ensured that many displaced workers could find new jobs relatively quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A century earlier, the same pattern had played out in reverse, with much worse outcomes for workers. Landowners in England adopted threshing machines to fill in for scarce human labor when agricultural workers were off fighting Napoleon. When men returned from war, they found that a critical source of work \u2014 threshing accounted for as much as half of a rural laborer\u2019s income during the winter months \u2014 had evaporated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What followed were the \u201cSwing Riots,\u201d a wave of unrest in 1830s England that surpassed the better-known protests of the Luddites<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The state of the broader economy, in other words, plays a critical role in deciding how workers will fare when technology disrupts their livelihoods. Timing matters. So does geography \u2014 it\u2019s better to lose a job in a region that is thriving than in one that is struggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Violent protests against the adoption of threshing machines were much more common in remote areas, said Bruno Caprettini, an economist who has studied the uprising. Closer to cities, where workers could seek other employment, protests were less intense. And by the mid-19th century, as the economy improved and wages rose, protests died down as workers found better-paying jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNobody misses manual threshing,\u201d Mr. Caprettini said. What they missed was the stability that threshing provided. If workers have other opportunities, they will adapt. If they don\u2019t, they will protest, or even revolt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speed kills<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One reason workers were hit so hard by automation during the first Industrial Revolution and in the 1930s is that their jobs disappeared so quickly \u2014 literally overnight in the case of telephone operators. Phone companies typically made the transition from manual to mechanized dialing at midnight on a Saturday, when call volumes were low. Operators who had jobs when they went home on Friday were out of work by Monday morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such rapid changes gave workers little time to adapt. Not only were women who lost their jobs as telephone operators less likely to be working in the telephone industry a decade later, they were less likely to be working at all, according to a 2024 study<\/a>. And those who did have jobs tended to earn lower wages than before the switch to dial phones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In industries where the transitions were more gradual, workers tended to fare better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time gasoline-powered passenger cars became prevalent in the 1900s, for example, it was clear that the technology would eventually come for delivery trucks. But it was only after World War I that motor trucks displaced horse-drawn wagons en masse. The number of teamsters actually rose from 1900 to 1910, then declined gradually in the 1910s before dropping precipitously in the 1920s and \u201930s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The relatively slow transition allowed young men, recognizing there was no future in driving horses, to pursue other industries. That left a shortage of drivers, which meant that wages actually rose for the mostly older workers who stuck around to finish out their careers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something similar may be happening today as modern drivers face a new technological disruption: self-driving trucks. That threat, too, has been clear for years, and there are signs that younger workers have become more reluctant to enter the industry<\/a>, said Kevin Lang, an economist at Boston University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But while truckers have had some warning, A.I. appears to be threatening jobs that until recently seemed relatively safe from technological upheaval, such as software development and legal services. That, too, has echoes of the 1930s, said Amy Bix, a historian at Iowa State University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere really was a deep set of concerns in the Depression era that technology was advancing faster than society\u2019s ability to adjust, and that people were sort of being left to fend for themselves in the wreckage,\u201d she said. \u201cToday, you really do have a very similar sense of uncertainty and fear that these technological changes are all coming so rapidly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jobs change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The A.I. debate, like earlier episodes of technological change, tends to focus on the threat of job losses. But economists say the true impact is often subtler. Technology sometimes costs jobs, they say, but it almost always changes them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1851, about 220,000 people worked as boot makers in England. The number hardly changed over the next six decades, rising and falling only modestly before settling at about 207,000 in 1911.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you look just at that, you might think, OK, not that much has happened in this industry,\u201d said Hillary Vipond, an economic historian<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, the industry changed entirely over that period. The boot makers of the mid-19th century were artisans, working in towns throughout England. The boot makers of the early-20th century were factory workers in cities, producing far more boots per hour at far lower prices than their artisan predecessors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The episode carries several lessons, Ms. Vipond said. Technology made workers more productive, but that didn\u2019t result in a loss of jobs, because lower prices led to increased demand \u2014 a phenomenon known as \u201cJevon\u2019s paradox.\u201d More people could afford boots; owners of one pair could now buy several.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But while the number of jobs didn\u2019t fall, the work changed. That is what often gets missed in discussions of technological disruption, Ms. Vipond said: Technologies destroy jobs, but they also create new ones. By one estimate<\/a>, roughly 60 percent of jobs in the United States in 2018 were in occupations that didn\u2019t exist in 1940.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t focus enough on the new jobs,\u201d she said. \u201cThe reason this hasn\u2019t been a crisis before is because in every decade we have seen new jobs emerge.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disruption is real, and this time could be worse<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Still, Ms. Vipond said, just because new jobs eventually emerge doesn\u2019t mean that transitions are easy for workers. The Industrial Revolution displaced so many workers so rapidly that it crushed wages for decades \u2014 a period known as \u201cEngel\u2019s Pause\u201d \u2014 before demand caught up with supply and workers\u2019 living standards began improving again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even shorter disruptions can be painful for the workers caught in the crossfire, said Mr. Schneider, the University of Oslo economist. Losing a job and being unemployed is costly for workers and their families, even if they eventually find another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s easy for us today to look back and say, yeah, there was some disruption, but basically, in the end, it was worth it,\u201d Mr. Schneider said. \u201cAnd maybe for us it was worth it. But for the people at the time, it might not have felt like it was worth it for them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most economists don\u2019t give much credence to predictions that A.I. will mean the end of work. But the disruptions it causes could dwarf past episodes. The A.I. revolution is also global, affecting not just the rich economies where the technology is being developed, but also poorer countries that have built their economies partly<\/a> on call centers, tech support and other back-office industries that could be vulnerable to technological upheaval.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Lang, the Boston University economist, said that if A.I. wipes out a large share of white-collar jobs, it isn\u2019t clear what would replace them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI have colleagues who say we\u2019ve been worried the world is going to collapse many times in the past, and it never has,\u201d Mr. Lang said. \u201cTo which my response is, I\u2019ve been sick many times, but I\u2019ve never died.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2026.10.22 New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Economists hope earlier episodes of labor disruption, from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression, can help us prepare for the age of artificial intelligence. 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 \u201ctalkies.\u201d Teamsters \u2014 men driving teams of horses \u2014 were losing their jobs to drivers of gasoline-powered trucks. Such disruptions…<\/p>\n

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