Good morning Chalkheads, imagine going back one hundred years. Back to a time when almost everybody worked the land. Farmers, railroad workers and factory hands. People who measured a day by sweat instead of screen time.
Now imagine trying to explain modern jobs to those people. Tell a farmer or stockyard butcher from 1920 that one day there will be people called “sleep coaches.” People hired to teach exhausted adults how to fall asleep.
Then tell him somebody else earns a living talking into a phone camera as a TikTok influencer. He wouldn’t believe a word of it, but underneath the humor sits something important.
Every time technology changes the world, we make the exact same mistake. We obsess over the jobs that disappear. We rarely think about the jobs that get created afterward. Mostly because they don’t exist yet. They don’t even have names yet. Fear is easy because fear is specific.
AI is going to replace accountants, radiologists, drivers and maybe even the family doctor.
The fear comes with titles, headlines, charts, and predictions.
I’ve watched this happen in my own lifetime. When I first got into the futures business, the trading floor was chaos and hand signals. The only way to place a trade was to call a broker on the phone and have him physically execute the order in the pit. I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of traders screaming prices at one another like a financial rugby scrum.
I started as an arb clerk flashing hand signals across a crowded trading floor. Then came computer screens. Suddenly the screaming started disappearing. Instead of flashing signals with my hands, I was typing buy and sell orders into a keyboard with a mouse sitting beside me.
Now a trader can sit in a cabana somewhere on the Mediterranean and place orders from a laptop. You don’t need to stand in a pit anymore. You don’t even need to be in Chicago. The entire industry changed.
Some jobs vanished completely. Floor brokers, runners, phone clerks and locals screaming in the pit all day long. In the death of the trading floor came new jobs. Programmers, IT nerds, quant traders, algorithm designers and electronic risk managers. Nobody on the trading floor in 1988 could have fully imagined what futures trading would become.
At the same time, my dream job was changing too. I always wanted to be the next Mike Royko. I wanted to write a daily newspaper column in Chicago. Back then the Sunday paper was practically a piece of furniture. Five inches thick with newsprint, comics, sports, classifieds, opinion pages, and department store ads falling onto the kitchen floor.
Now most people read the news on the phone while standing in line for coffee. Newspaper journalism has transformed completely. Some would say it collapsed, but something else happened too.
A guy like me can now write something in Riverside in the morning and have somebody across the country reading it five minutes later. No printing press, no delivery truck and no editor smoking cigarettes in a downtown newsroom.
Just an internet connection and a thought worth sharing. That would have sounded insane thirty years ago.
That is why I laugh a little when people talk about AI like it is the end of human work.
It’s not the end. It is just another transformation. Transformations are messy when you are living through them. The fear is always easy to identify because it already has a vocabulary. Nobody can clearly explain the jobs that will exist twenty years from now because those jobs are still waiting for the inventions that create them.
A farmer in 1920 could understand losing work to a tractor. What he couldn’t imagine was somebody earning a living managing social media accounts or helping strangers learn how to sleep.
Not because he lacked intelligence, but because all the inventions required to create those careers had not happened yet.
That is where we are now. Everybody is staring at the tractor. Nobody can yet see the seven inventions down the road. History says the jobs will come and CNBC agrees. One day somebody will be making a great living doing something we currently would laugh at.
Maybe my great grandson will work as a Screen Fatigue Recovery Specialist. A fancy title for a guy who tells exhausted people to go outside and touch grass. For all I know, my great granddaughter will make two million a year as a Professional AI Apology Writer. Some poor slob will yell at his robot refrigerator, and my bloodline will get paid to smooth things over.
The New Moon climbed into waxing crescent overnight as we move towards the next full moon on May 31st. Which will be a Blue Moon. Cubs and Sox go into the rubber match today in the Crosstown.
Go Chicago….
