You’re hired!

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  By Guest Blogger Doug Rowat

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Artificial intelligence.

If it doesn’t kill us outright, it’ll, at bare minimum, take all our jobs.

This, of course, is the labour-market dystopia envisioned by the Sam Altman-esque AI doomsayers.

But—and this is why you come here, right?—it’s time for some perspective.

The US unemployment rate has bounced around over the decades, hitting highs of nearly 15% during Covid and lows of only 2.5% during the post–World War II, go-go 1950s. But, in the long run, the US labour market always finds its equilibrium, rarely staying at either extreme for long and averaging 5.7% over the long term. And, of note, this long-term average is a full percentage point higher than where the US sits presently, several years into the AI boom.

But throughout modern history there have been countless other technological revolutions aside from AI, each generating their own fears and dire warnings. Commercial jet travel had to deal with the de Havilland Comet disasters, which even more so than AI, truly put the fear of God into the population because planes were literally breaking in half and falling from the sky.

Computers and the Internet generated new fears—remember the movie War Games, or the imagined consequences of Y2K? And the smartphone era is solely responsible for the terms ‘doomscrolling’ and ‘nomophobia’, terms that are a direct result of the fear and anxiety our smartphones cause.

These new technologies all brought their fair share of existential angst, but eventually the technologies (and our fears) stabilized, and these technologies are now considered indispensable to our daily lives. And in each instance, the labour market adapted. At no time in the past 75 years has the US unemployment rate risen to double-digits and simply stayed there. And it has never risen directly as a result of the introduction of a new technology. Unemployment rose in the early 1980s as a result of inflation and geopolitics (an energy crisis), not the advent of the personal computer. Unemployment rose in the late 2000s as a result of a banking and housing crisis, not the rise of e-commerce or social media. And the 2020 unemployment-rate spike was due to a global pandemic, not AI.

In fact, MIT economist David Autor estimates that 60% of the occupations Americans work today didn’t even exist in 1940. Skills evolved and new specialties were created. Solar-panel installer, electric-vehicle designer or cybersecurity expert couldn’t possibly have been imagined as forms of employment back in the 1940s. But the workforce adapted and the US unemployment rate is now no different than it was in the 1940s.

And, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report, the workforce will adapt yet again, not just in the US, but globally. While cashier, postal worker, data-entry clerk, administrative assistant and bank teller jobs are expected to steadily disappear, other jobs such as software developer, data specialist, trades worker, delivery driver and even farm labourer will all increase in demand. Based on the World Economic Forum’s dataset of 1.2 billion formal jobs, millions more jobs are expected to be created than destroyed by 2030:

Global employment change by 2030

Purple – jobs lost; Blue – jobs stable; Green – jobs created. Source: World Economic Forum

Several years ago, I toured Sunnylands in Southern California, a massive 200-acre estate that was once owned by billionaires Walter and Leonore Annenberg. The source of the Annenbergs’ wealth? Primarily, TV Guide. No billionaires are being created from TV Guide money these days (I explained the concept of TV Guide to my teenage daughter who was dumbfounded), but billionaires, of course, are still being minted faster than ever before. The bottomline is that we humans always find new ways to create wealth.

And the labour market always adapts and follows the money. TV Guide jobs have probably been replaced by equivalent jobs at Netflix. And the labour market will adapt to AI as well.

Just ask the new software developers at ChatGPT.

Doug Rowat, FCSI® is Portfolio Manager with Turner Investments and Senior Investment Advisor, Private Client Group, Raymond James Ltd.

Source: https://www.greaterfool.ca/2026/01/03/youre-hired/