Main Street Agent Lab

Opinion A signed opinion piece. It is the writer's view, not a neutral explainer.

We have been scared of new machines before. Here is what happened to the jobs.

By Troy Murphy, Grace Technology

I fix computers for a living, and I love technology. I run a computer repair business in Tennessee, and I have done this work since 2005.

Lately a lot of people tell me AI is going to take everyone's job. I think that fear is overblown. I am not saying the worry is silly. I am saying we have been here before, so let's look at what really happened. I checked the facts in this piece against the sources listed at the bottom. When I am giving my own opinion, I say so.

Electricity scared people

In the late 1880s, Thomas Edison's company sold direct current (DC) power. George Westinghouse sold alternating current (AC). In 1888 he licensed Nikola Tesla's motor patents to help build his system. [1]

Edison fought AC hard. In late 1889 he wrote, "My personal desire would be to prohibit entirely the use of alternating currents. They are as unnecessary as they are dangerous." [3]

A man named Harold P. Brown did most of the public shows. In 1888 he electrocuted dogs, and then calves and a horse, to show how deadly AC was. He used equipment and help from Edison's lab, and Edison was there for the December show at West Orange. Historians say Brown and Edison's people worked together. [1][2][4]

The fear spread to the newspapers. On October 13, 1889, the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote, "Death does not stop at the door, but comes right into the house, and perhaps as you are closing a door or turning on the gas you are killed." [1] Some of that worry had a real cause, because live wires did kill people.

But the fight ended. In 1892 Edison's company merged with a rival to form General Electric, and Edison left the lighting business. [5] In 1893 Westinghouse won the contract to power the World's Fair in Chicago, and he later built the AC generators for the Niagara Falls power plant. [6] AC is what comes out of the wall in your house today.

What happened to the lamp jobs

Gas street lamps needed lamplighters. In Melbourne, Australia, the Metropolitan Gas Company had 132 lamplighters in 1912. By 1933 it had one. [7] In Glasgow, some lamplighters moved into lighting maintenance work. [8]

So what about the new industry? An economist named George Stigler counted jobs for the National Bureau of Economic Research. In the United States, electric light and power companies employed about 271,000 people in 1939. The gas industry employed about 133,000. Electric employment grew almost five times between 1899 and 1929. [9]

It took decades, and it was not the same people in the same jobs. But the new industry did end up bigger than the old one.

Cars scared people too

In 1907 the editor of the Illinois State Register in Springfield wrote about "these so-called 'devil-wagons.'" He still admitted that "the automobile has doubtless come to stay." [10]

Britain went further. The Locomotives Act of 1865 is known as the Red Flag Act. It said one of the crew had to walk at least sixty yards ahead of a road engine moved by steam, or any power other than animals, carrying a red flag. The speed limit was four miles an hour, and two in towns. It was written for steam road engines, but it covered early cars too, until a new law in 1896 lifted those rules for light vehicles under three tons. [11] In the United States, Vermont passed a similar law in 1894. It said a person had to walk at least one-eighth of a mile ahead of steam-powered vehicles. Vermont repealed it two years later. [12]

The worry was not all wrong. By the 1920s, car crashes were killing thousands of children a year, and much of the public saw the car as a death machine. [13] I think the lesson is not "ban the car." It is "make good rules for how we use it."

Phones and ATMs

The first automatic phone exchange opened in Indiana in 1892. But the Bell System did not open its first fully automatic office until 1921. [14] From 1920 to 1940, AT&T replaced operators with machine switching in over half of its network. Researchers who studied it found that it wiped out most of those jobs. It did not cut work overall for the young women who came after. They moved into office and clerical jobs and service jobs. The operators already on the job had it hardest. Ten years later they were more likely to be in lower-paying work, or not working. [15]

I do not want to skip that part. Change costs real people real money. I believe we should take that seriously and not just say "it all works out."

It was also slow. The number of operators grew from about 178,000 in 1920 to about 342,000 around 1950, because people used phones more. It fell to about 40,000 by 1984. [14]

ATMs came along in the 1970s, and many people expected bank tellers to vanish. Economist James Bessen found that the number of tellers needed at a typical city branch fell from 20 to 13 between 1988 and 2004. But ATMs made branches cheaper to run, so banks opened 43 percent more city branches. Teller jobs did not decrease as ATMs spread. The job changed. Tellers became part of the "relationship banking team," with less cash handling and more talking with customers. [16]

What about AI today?

Some jobs are shifting now, and I do not want to wave that away. A Stanford study used payroll data through June 2026. It found no sign of job loss across the whole economy. But it found that workers ages 22 to 25 in the jobs most exposed to AI have 19 percent less employment than they would have had if they had kept pace with their peers in less exposed jobs. Mostly that is because companies are hiring fewer young people. The authors call these early signs, not proof of cause. Where AI helps workers instead of replacing their tasks, they found employment flat or rising. [17]

New work also shows up. The government counts about 192,900 information security analysts in 2025 and expects that number to grow 21 percent by 2035. It says more use of AI is one reason. [18] I believe there will be more work in building these systems, training them and checking their work.

What are AGI and ASI?

You hear these terms a lot. IBM says artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical stage where an AI system can match or beat human thinking on any task. It also says experts do not agree on exactly what would count as AGI. [19] IBM calls artificial superintelligence (ASI) a hypothetical system with thinking power beyond any human. [20] Neither one exists today.

My opinion

Everything from here on is my opinion. It is not a fact I can look up.

My guess: it will be twenty years or more before we need to have the serious conversation about whether there are enough jobs. Even then, someone has to build the robots, and someone has to fix them. I could be wrong about the timing.

I believe that even if a machine someday reaches AGI, it will not have skin in the game. It will not live with the result of its choices the way a person does. Judgment is not just calculation. It is caring about the result.

My guess is that jobs built on that kind of judgment and trust will last: doctors, judges, counselors, teachers and the skilled trades. My guess for new jobs is AI ethicists, machine behavior auditors, people who help humans and AI work together, and robot maintenance technicians.

I do not know the exact job titles. Nobody does, any more than people in 1889 knew what a software developer was. But I know this: somebody has to decide what the machine is for. I believe that somebody is us.

Troy Murphy, Grace Technology

Sources

  1. Wikipedia, "War of the currents" (Tesla patent license, Edison's 1886 letter, the Times-Picayune quote, Harold Brown's work with Edison's company). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents
  2. Wikipedia, "Harold P. Brown." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_P._Brown
  3. Rockland County Journal, November 9, 1889, reprinting Edison's article in the North American Review. https://news.hrvh.org/veridian/?a=d&d=rocklandctyjournal18891109.2.38
  4. Rockland County Journal, December 22, 1888, on the December 5 West Orange demonstration. https://news.hrvh.org/veridian/?a=d&d=rocklandctyjournal18881222.2.76
  5. Thomas Edison Papers, Rutgers University, "The Current Wars." https://edison.rutgers.edu/life-of-edison/essaying-edison/essay/the-current-wars
  6. History.com, "What was the War of the Currents?" https://www.history.com/articles/what-was-the-war-of-the-currents
  7. Old Treasury Building (Melbourne), "The Lamplighter." https://www.oldtreasurybuilding.org.au/lost-jobs/on-the-street/the-lamplighter/
  8. Glasgow Times, "Glasgow said goodbye to its lamplighters." https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/23031301.glasgow-said-goodbye-lamplighters/
  9. George J. Stigler, "Trends in Employment," Chapter 2 of Trends in Output and Employment (National Bureau of Economic Research, 1947), Table 9. https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c7071/c7071.pdf
  10. SangamonLink, "The automobile as 'devil wagon,' Illinois State Register, 1907" (full editorial text of November 8, 1907). https://sangamoncountyhistory.org/the-automobile-as-devil-wagon-illinois-state-register-1907/
  11. Locomotives Act 1865 (legislation.gov.uk), Locomotives on Highways Act 1896 (legislation.gov.uk), and Wikipedia, "Locomotive Acts" (1878 change). https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/28-29/83/pdfs/ukpga_18650083_en.pdf, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/59-60/36/pdfs/ukpga_18960036_en.pdf, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts
  12. Wikipedia, "Red flag traffic laws" (Vermont, 1894). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws
  13. 99% Invisible, "The Modern Moloch." https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-moloch/
  14. David A. Price, "Goodbye, Operator," Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Econ Focus, Q4 2019. https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2019/q4/economic_history
  15. James Feigenbaum and Daniel P. Gross, "Answering the Call of Automation," NBER Working Paper 28061 (published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2024). https://www.nber.org/papers/w28061
  16. James Bessen, "Toil and Technology," Finance & Development, International Monetary Fund, March 2015. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/03/bessen.htm
  17. Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence," Stanford Digital Economy Lab (revised August 2026). https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/canaries-in-the-coal-mine-six-facts-about-the-recent-employment-effects-of-artificial-intelligence/
  18. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, "Information Security Analysts." https://www.bls.gov/OOH/computer-and-information-technology/information-security-analysts.htm
  19. IBM, "What is artificial general intelligence (AGI)?" https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/artificial-general-intelligence
  20. IBM, "What is artificial superintelligence?" https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/artificial-superintelligence

This is an opinion piece. The facts in it are sourced above. The views are the writer's own.