Degrees of Change

Chapter 2AI, Jobs, and the Meaning of Work

—Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Microsoft

In August 2025, Reuters/Ipsos reported that 71% of people fear that AI will cause permanent job loss (Lange and Alper, 2025). It is the central anxiety of our time: if machines can think, write, and solve problems, what happens to us?

There’s a quote often attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Its origin may be debated, but the wisdom holds. Progress doesn’t usually happen in a straight line, but its impact is always clear. As we enter a new era shaped by AI, it’s worth paying attention to those lessons from the past.

Since ChatGPT’s release on 30 November 2022, conversations about work and automation have dominated public debate. Some predict mass layoffs; others imagine shorter workweeks and more free time. But this is not the first time a general-purpose technology (GPT) has sparked such concerns—it has happened again and again throughout history. If history is any guide, what comes next may not be what most people expect.

Technology Always Changes Work

Every big shift in technology has changed the way people work—and almost every time, it has caused fear about the future of jobs. Researcher Louis Anslow, in his study of old newspaper articles titled “Robots Have Been About to Take All the Jobs for 100 Years,” found that worries about machines taking human jobs go back to the first industrial machines and continued with the arrival of computers (Figure ...