Luddites, Clerks, and AI

The Fear That Spares No One

There is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

This time I felt like writing about something a bit less technical, but still tied to AI — something that unsettles a lot of people right now: the fear of what happens to our jobs. Not long ago, someone who cleaned offices for a living could sleep soundly, unthreatened by computers. Today even they aren't so sure anymore — machines that see, analyze, and decide are reaching into that field too.

I've read forecasts from people who understand this subject far better than I do, to put it mildly. And still, as a history buff who believes it has lessons to offer, let me bring up a few small chapters of it.

The Luddites: When the First Machines Arrived

Early 19th-century England. Weavers smashed spinning machines because mass layoffs were hitting the people who hadn't learned to operate them. In the short term? Yes — employment dropped. Those who managed to shift to running the machines were a small fraction compared to those who couldn't. But over the longer run? Not only did the jobs not disappear, they grew substantially. Did skilled hand-craftsmen vanish? No — mostly the truly excellent ones remained, the ones the market was still willing to pay a premium for. Both worlds kept existing side by side: mass production for the many, handmade work for the connoisseurs.

It's worth saying this without varnish: for the generation that lived through that transition, it wasn't easy, and for a good part of it, things didn't turn out well personally. The ones who benefited from the change in the long run were mostly the ones who managed to adapt to it — not necessarily the ones who suffered through it at the start. That's a lesson worth keeping in mind today too, before we go on.

The Clerks Who Insisted on Pen and Paper

In the early 2000s, when Israel's National Insurance Institute wanted to bring in computers, many veteran clerks pushed back hard against the change to their familiar routine. The fear was twofold: that the computer would make mistakes where they trusted their own judgment, and that eventually it would push them out of the role entirely. Fortunately, that resistance didn't stop the process. Did the number of employees at the institute drop? No. What mostly improved was the quality and scope of service — processing times shortened, and manual typing and calculation errors nearly disappeared.

A similar, well-documented example comes from the US: when ATMs spread in the 1970s, the fear was that they'd make bank tellers obsolete. What actually happened was the opposite — the number of bank tellers in the US kept growing for decades after ATMs were on every corner. ATMs lowered the cost of running a branch, which let banks open more branches and employ more staff — only the role itself changed: less counting bills at the counter, more advice, sales, and complex service.

So What's Different This Time?

Anyone reading this far and thinking "back then it was hands, now it's the head" has a point. Today's AI doesn't just replace manual labor — it touches writing, analysis, decision-making, things we thought were "too human" for a machine. That's a real shift, and it would be unfair to wave it off.

But history has already touched this too. A clerk who once computed payroll by hand, with pen and paper, gave way to payroll software. A paralegal who once spent days searching for precedent in a library gave way to someone who can search a database in seconds. Each time, the machine swallowed another layer of "intellectual handwork" — and employment in that field didn't vanish, it moved up, to a layer that demands more judgment and less mechanical execution. I'd venture to say that, over time, the body is making more and more room for what a person truly is — the spirit.

That's exactly what's happening now. Just faster, and across far more fields.

What's Left for Us to Do

Anyone afraid of this shift should pause and consider: the total amount of work in the world keeps growing, and the range of what it applies to keeps expanding. Things we could only dream about before are now landing on us almost ready-made — and we, the professionals, can barely keep up.

The main thing is to understand how it works, and become an expert in this new field. Forget the days when you had to hand-code every button, measuring its position on screen pixel by pixel. That's gone. What used to earn you credit at work — precise hands, fast execution — isn't the point anymore. But you're still there: the person standing above the machine, the one who knows how to "create." The machine carries out your idea.

I say this from personal experience. I went from a situation where, after a day of work, there was barely any time left for anything, to one where, within a few months — evening hours only, without much strain — I shipped several products that actually work.

Whoever catches this moment early has a much better shot at coming out ahead than those who'd rather sit and moan, "what's going to happen, the machines will replace us." Good luck to everyone.