Your Vanishing Career: A Houdidni History of Jobs

Prologue — The Disappearing Act

Technology doesn’t send condolence notes; it sends pink slips. It eats certainty like termites through beams—you don’t notice until the floor gives. Every generation insists it’s the exception. I’ve heard it for forty years in mahogany boardrooms and fluorescent HR caves: confident faces, familiar rhymes, Italian loafers on quicksand.

I’ve advised titans whose bonuses could fund small wars. They weren’t worried either. In 2007 a retail CEO told me, grinning, “Brick and mortar will never die.” Five years later he called from his kitchen table, not his corner office, negotiating a parachute over the smoking crater. A media mogul dismissed “this internet fad.” His obituary—both kinds—ran online. No paywall.

Jobs don’t vanish; they perform disappearing acts—slipping out the side door or exploding in smoke and dry ice, leaving a stunned audience. The iceman, lamplighter, stable hand—they all took bows certain the curtain would rise again. Tomorrow had new headliners.

This is a time machine through 150 years of work and a field manual for surviving the next hundred. We’ll attend some funerals—occupational obituaries for roles that shaped our parents’ lives, our own, and our children’s. We’ll laugh, cringe, and probably spill a drink on the coffin. The spotlight is hot.

Blink and you’ll miss the trick—and you’ll be the one to disappear.

Chapter I — Smoke, Steam, and Soot (1875–1900)

History doesn’t whisper, it coughs. And in the late 19th century, America was hacking up soot like a two-pack-a-day smoker. The Second Industrial Revolution wasn’t a polite cocktail party—it was a barroom brawl between muscle and machine, and the machines were winning. Cities swelled with laborers chasing factory whistles, their lungs filling with coal dust and their pockets filling with nickels. The backdrop was smoke, steam, and steel; the soundtrack, a symphony of hammers, whistles, and locomotives.

The cast of characters was as colorful as it was doomed. Blacksmiths hammered iron in cramped forges, sparks flying like fireworks for a nation still in adolescence. Lamplighters scaled ladders each dusk, torch in hand, turning darkness into gaslit glow—only to be rendered unnecessary when Edison’s bulbs arrived with the arrogance of a brighter, cleaner dawn. Carriage drivers cracked whips over horses, ferrying bankers and debutantes through streets that smelled unmistakably of manure. Chimney sweeps—sometimes children scarcely taller than a broom—risked their lungs and limbs to scrape soot from the nation’s new obsession with warmth. Dock stevedores bent their backs into crowbars, unloading global cargo one barrel at a time. Textile hands toiled in mills that devoured both fabric and fingers. And then, of course, the “knocker-uppers”—human alarm clocks who went door to door tapping on bedroom windows with sticks to rouse workers before the factory horn. Siri, meet your great-grandfather.

All of these jobs—once fixtures of urban life—are now more extinct than the dodo bird. You don’t find them on LinkedIn, except as historical curiosities. And yet, in their heyday, they were as certain of permanence as any modern coder, consultant, or compliance officer is today.

The forces that ended them were merciless. Steam power ripped muscle from the equation. Railroads collapsed distances and erased the need for local haulers. Mechanized mills reduced artisans to anonymous hands. Urban electrification banished lamplighters with the flick of a switch. Skill became shift. Dignity became drudgery.

I’ve sat across from plenty of modern executives who believed their industries were eternal. They remind me of the icemen—brawny men hauling blocks of frozen water into kitchens with the swagger of men who thought they owned the future. “People will always need ice,” they said, until the electric refrigerator rolled in like a silent assassin and left them melting in the gutter. Today’s CEOs—whether in retail, media, or banking—sound the same when they assure me that “people will always need” their particular product. Every time I hear it, I can almost smell the horse dung in the street.

This was the inflection point. From artisanal to factory. From skill to shift. From autonomy to assembly. The romance of craft gave way to the cold efficiency of mechanization. It wasn’t just job loss—it was job alchemy. Stable hands became mechanics. Blacksmiths became machinists. Lamplighters became nostalgia. The economy didn’t stop; it just changed the locks, leaving millions rattling the doorknob.

Occupational Obituary: The Lamplighter (1800s–1900s):

“Extinguished by progress; survived by nostalgia. Once the nightly sentinel of gaslit streets, armed with a pole and a flame, he brought light to darkness and predictability to chaos. Replaced by the flick of a switch, remembered only by poets, painters, and the occasional historical tour guide. Services held at dusk; bring your own candle.”

The lesson from Smoke, Steam, and Soot?

No job, no matter how sturdy it feels, is more than a rented role in history’s theater. The spotlight moves on. The audience forgets. And the curtain never waits.

Chapter II — Mechanical Horses & Wired Voices (1900–1918)

If the 19th century was soot in your teeth and calluses on your palms, the early 20th was static in your ears and grease under your fingernails. Factories no longer belched smoke just for the thrill of it; they belched on schedule, like German trains. Electricity slithered into cities, humming through wires, flickering bulbs, and turning the American worker into something caught between awe and unemployment.

The poster child of this transition was the horse. For millennia, it had been the Uber driver, the FedEx truck, the family sedan, and the weekend getaway all rolled into one gloriously manure-producing package. Stable hands fed them, groomed them, and shoveled their daily editorial comments into wheelbarrows. Then Henry Ford walked in with his assembly line in 1913, and suddenly horsepower meant pistons, not ponies. The day the first Model T rolled off the line was the day the stable started smelling less like hay and more like panic.

One generation was all it took. Blacksmiths who had been hammering shoes onto hooves found themselves tightening bolts on carburetors. Carriage drivers who once cracked whips now stood by street corners with their hands in their pockets, wondering why no one wanted a ride in their increasingly ridiculous buggies. Imagine the existential crisis: you’ve spent your life mastering reins, only to be replaced by a steering wheel. No wonder some old-timers spat at the first sputtering automobiles—although, to be fair, many of those early cars did deserve to be spat on.

Meanwhile, whole new species of workers emerged. Elevator operators in crisp uniforms ferried bankers skyward in the nation’s first steel towers, narrating the trip like reluctant tour guides: “Third floor—hosiery, haberdashery, and heartbreak.” Switchboard operators became the unseen custodians of America’s gossip, plugging and unplugging cords with a speed and dexterity that made pianists jealous. You wanted to tell your mistress you’d be “working late”? She knew before your wife did. Railroad crews still roared across the continent, mine laborers still dug their way toward black lung, and factory workers learned to live by the rhythm of machines that never got tired, never took a cigarette break, and never joined a union.

The forces behind all this upheaval were merciless. Fordism turned work into choreography—everyone doing the same move, in the same place, at the same time. Electrification made the sun optional. Standardization replaced idiosyncrasy with efficiency; the world no longer wanted your personal flair, just your ability to repeat yourself perfectly for 12 hours a day.

And perhaps most revolutionary of all: information began to outrun people. A whispered word could travel across copper wires faster than a train or a horse ever could. For the first time, conversation beat locomotion. It was intoxicating. It was terrifying. It was also, if you were a switchboard operator, the best front-row seat to America’s dirty laundry ever sold.

Sidebar: The Day the Stable Emptied

Picture it - one morning, a blacksmith hammers a shoe onto his last horse, muttering about “kids these days” as a sputtering Model T rattles past. By evening, his son is tightening spark plugs in an auto shop and trying not to set himself on fire. A single generation separates hay bales from gasoline pumps. The forge became a garage. The driver’s whip became a horn. The soothing whinny of horses gave way to the coughing, backfiring soundtrack of early combustion engines—a noise that sounded less like progress and more like a smoker with bronchitis. Some called it innovation. The stable hands just called it Tuesday - only now, Tuesday came with unemployment and the faint smell of gasoline.

Occupational Obituary : The Stable Hand (Died, 1910s):

“Faithful groomer of hooves, oat dispenser, shovel-wielder, and provider of unsolicited horse trivia (‘Did you know a horse sleeps standing up?’). Survived by the auto mechanic, who smelled less like manure but swore more creatively. Never quite achieved the romance of a Remington painting. Services will be held roadside—please honk twice in remembrance, three times if your carburetor’s acting up.” The inflection of the age was simple and merciless: horses out, horsepower in. Stable boys became grease monkeys. Switchboards replaced street shouts. And the idea that some jobs were “forever” went the way of the buggy whip—sold in antique shops and bought by people who thought it was a back scratcher.

America had shifted gears, and if you weren’t in the car, you were under it.

Chapter III — Switchboard Nation & War Work (1919–1945)

If the 1920s were a Charleston, the 1930s a funeral dirge, then the 1940s roared in as a Sousa march played on factory floors. America learned quickly that work could vanish, multiply, and mutate overnight. The Depression had already hollowed out whole industries; the war would reassemble them with bolts, rivets, and patriotic slogans.

The heartbeat of this era was the switchboard. Operators sat at their posts like conductors of a national symphony, plugging and unplugging gossip, orders, and emergencies. They didn’t just route calls; they were the connective tissue of the country, the original search engines with better posture. Every whispered affair, every late-night excuse, every “you’ve got the wrong number”—they heard it all, and sometimes “accidentally” disconnected it. For a while, they were indispensable. Then, one day, machines arrived that didn’t gossip, didn’t giggle, and didn’t care if you were cheating on your wife. Progress is efficient, but it isn’t fun.

Meanwhile, the jobs of the day seemed both plentiful and precarious. Clerks and typists filled the nation’s offices, hammering out carbon copies in basements stacked with filing cabinets. Welders and riveters found themselves essential when factories shifted from making Buicks to bombers. Farmhands, once indispensable, discovered tractors worked harder, faster, and without needing lunch or union breaks. By the mid-1930s, even that shrinking cohort was choking on Dust Bowl winds, their labor literally blown away.

The Great Depression was an education in absence. Jobs didn’t just disappear; they collapsed in on themselves. Typists pawned their typewriters, clerks lined up for bread, and men with shovels took work digging ditches for Roosevelt’s alphabet-soup programs. It wasn’t glamorous, but in an America that measured dignity by whether you were “working,” it kept people alive. Breadlines were the new HR department: if you showed up on time, you got a loaf.

Then the world went to war. Overnight, unemployment vanished—because suddenly, everything had to explode. Factories once churning out radios and refrigerators were repurposed to produce tanks, rifles, and B-24 bombers. Sewing machine operators now stitched parachutes instead of dresses. Chemists swapped shampoo formulas for explosives that could part your hair permanently. Even the cafeteria cooks were drafted into “supporting the war effort,” their ladles weaponized for morale.

Women took center stage. Rosie the Riveter wasn’t a mascot—she was millions of women, welding fuselages, tightening bolts, assembling tanks, and typing military orders with a precision that could win wars. For a moment, the country discovered that women could, in fact, do everything men could do, often faster and with fewer smoke breaks. But when the victory parades ended and the soldiers came home, the bait-and-switch was breathtaking. The same women who had built the arsenal of democracy were told, politely and persistently, to take off their overalls, put on a smile, and rediscover the joys of gelatin salads. America had just given women the keys to the factory, then yanked them back with a “thanks, sweetheart.”

Minorities, too, had their wartime moment. African Americans worked in shipyards and munitions plants; Latinos were recruited into agricultural labor through wartime contracts; Japanese Americans enlisted even as their families were being “relocated” behind barbed wire. In moments of desperation, Uncle Sam was suddenly an equal-opportunity employer. But as soon as the victory was secured, the invitations quietly expired. The corner offices and union halls slammed shut, and minorities found themselves back on the outside, sweeping up the confetti of parades they had earned.

Through it all, mass communications stitched the country together—FDR’s fireside chats, radio bulletins from the front, Bing Crosby crooning about white Christmases no one was having. Agricultural mechanization marched on, shrinking the agricultural workforce into a relic. Total war production created jobs by the millions, but they weren’t careers; they were assignments, temporary postings in a world on fire.

The lesson was brutal but clear: jobs could vanish in an instant, reappear as long as there was a crisis, and vanish again the moment peace broke out. For the first time, America’s workforce learned that their value wasn’t tied to permanence—it was tied to panic.

Occupational Obituary: The Town Telephone Operator (1890–1970):

“Beloved gatekeeper of gossip, orchestrator of whispers, and master of plugs and sockets. Once held the nation’s secrets in her headset: your boss’s orders, your lover’s excuses, your aunt’s recipe for rhubarb pie. Known for lightning reflexes and Olympic-level eavesdropping, she was the beating heart of America’s conversations. Cause of death: automatic switching, a heartless machine that never chuckled at a misdialed number or gasped at scandal. Predeceased by the Telegraph Operator (“dot, dot, dash, done”), survived briefly by the Call Center Rep, who is currently on hold with HR. Funeral services will be conducted remotely: press 1 to pay respects, press 2 for floral arrangements, press 3 to hear this message again. For a live operator… please hang up, you’re seventy years too late.”

This was the era where women discovered they could do everything men could do—until men discovered women were doing it and promptly fired them. Minorities were ushered into the building only because Hitler scared the hell out of everybody. And work itself became patriotic theater: your paycheck stamped with Uncle Sam’s seal of approval, your overtime marketed like a weapon, your exhaustion branded as victory.

I’ve lost count of the number of CEOs who sit across mahogany tables and tell me, with a straight face, “This is unprecedented.” Wrong. The Depression taught America that jobs could vanish without warning. The war taught America that jobs could multiply like rabbits in heat—but only as long as the crisis demanded it. When the guns go quiet, the layoffs are louder.

The switchboards hummed, the rivets held, the bomb dropped. And when the smoke cleared, America was ready to swap grit for grass lawns, milk bottles, and the soul-crushing glory of middle management.

Chapter IV — Fill ’Er Up, Honey: Supermarkets, Superhighways, and Superficial Security (1946–1969)

The war was over, the soldiers came home, and America built an empire out of cul-de-sacs and conformity. Soldiers dropped their rifles, picked up mortgages, and discovered the miracle of green lawns maintained by sprinklers on a timer. This was the era when the American Dream acquired a ZIP code. Permanence was suddenly available in 30-year fixed installments.

Work put on a necktie and carried a clipboard. The middle manager emerged—an evolutionary leap somewhere between factory foreman and bureaucratic wallpaper. He didn’t rivet or weld; he “oversaw.” He didn’t produce or sell; he “coordinated.” He was the human embodiment of the memo: full of words, light on meaning, and stacked in triplicate. For two decades, middle managers mistook their own permanence for destiny. But history would reveal what everyone else suspected: they were scaffolding. Disposable, replaceable, collapsible scaffolding.

Meanwhile, the suburbs sang with jobs now so extinct they sound like punchlines. The milkman still clinked bottles onto doorsteps, doubling as a neighborhood gossip wire—sometimes doubling as something else, judging by how many kids in the 1950s had suspiciously similar jawlines. Gas station attendants were the grease-stained concierge staff of the highway. They’d jog up to your car, salute you with a rag, and ask, “Fill ’er up? Want me to check your oil, your windshield, your tire pressure, and maybe your soul while I’m at it?” They cleaned glass, pumped air, and topped off radiators like NASCAR pit crews with worse dental plans. Nearly every station had a garage bay or two, where mechanics chain-smoked and diagnosed your carburetor with nothing but a hammer, a curse, and the kind of confidence only nicotine can buy.

And then there were the barbershops and beauty salons, where blue-collar men could sit in a vinyl chair and get a haircut, a shoeshine, and a nail buff all at once—multitasking decades before Silicon Valley tried to brand it. The back rooms, of course, were stocked with contraband: Stag, Argosy, Esquire, and that new interloper, Playboy, which barbers swore they “only kept for the articles.” Everyone knew the truth—no one was lining up for articles. These shops were equal parts grooming parlor, therapy session, and low-key gentlemen’s club. A man could walk in looking like he’d lost a fight with a lawnmower and walk out ready to conquer the bowling alley.

Ah yes—bowling alleys.

By the 1950s they were everywhere, the great democratic sport of knocking things down for cheap beer money. At first, scrawny teenagers called pinsetters scrambled behind the lanes, resetting pins while narrowly avoiding concussions. Automation put an end to that circus, and the machines did it better, faster, and without demanding a Coke break. Overnight, pinsetters went extinct, replaced by machinery that didn’t bruise and didn’t quit.

The great disappearing acts of the age were almost too many to count. Elevator operators—men in crisp uniforms who cheerfully asked, “Which floor, sir?”—were tossed aside when Americans realized that pushing a button wasn’t actually that hard. Film projectionists, gods of the flickering light, were slowly dimmed by automation and indifference. Typesetters and linotype operators, masters of molten lead, saw their craft flattened by offset printing. Locomotive firemen lost their shovels to diesel engines. Cobblers and shoe repairmen were shoved out by cheap, disposable footwear, the shoe becoming the Kleenex of consumer goods. Fishmongers and green grocers, once staples of Main Street, disappeared into the fluorescent maw of the supermarket. And somewhere in a forgotten back office, a lonely mimeograph repairman adjusted a crank on a purple-ink beast while an entire generation of schoolchildren took deep, blissful sniffs off fresh handouts. They were the original huffers, their math worksheets reeking like low-octane gasoline. OSHA wasn’t just asleep—it hadn’t even been born yet.

The 1950s and ’60s also unleashed America’s love affair with wheels and screens. Drive-in restaurants brought cheeseburgers and milkshakes to your car window, often delivered by teenagers on roller skates who somehow managed not to spill ketchup into your lap. And then came the drive-in movie theater—a vast, flickering cathedral of car hoods and steamed-up windows. Families rolled in with kids in pajamas, but by the second act, half the cars had turned into maternity wards. An entire generation of Americans was conceived beneath the glow of John Wayne, Doris Day, and a projector that didn’t know it was moonlighting as Cupid.

The throughline of it all was disposability. Supermarkets replaced butchers, bowling machines replaced boys, automation replaced artisans, gas pumps replaced people, and cheap shoes replaced cobblers. Service, once sacred, was now just a line item waiting to be eliminated. America didn’t mourn these jobs—it forgot them. Efficiency was the altar, consumption the prayer, and permanence the illusion.

Occupational Obituary: The Gas Station Attendant (1920s–1970s):

“Faithful custodian of windshields, tire gauges, and unsolicited advice about carburetors. Known for the sacred phrase, “Fill ’er up?” and the uncanny ability to check your oil with a rag that predated Eisenhower. Once doubled as therapist, amateur mechanic, and grease-stained confessor of roadside woes. Survived briefly by self-service pumps, pay-at-the-pump kiosks, and a generation of drivers who have no idea anyone ever cleaned their windshield for free. Funeral services will be unattended—please prepay inside.”

The postwar dream was a sleight of hand. The milkman delivered gossip, the barber slipped you a Playboy, the gas jockey called you “sir,” and the middle manager convinced himself his job was a birthright. It looked permanent. It felt permanent. But permanence, as always, was the greatest illusion.

By the end of the 1960s, America had supermarkets instead of green grocers, fast food instead of diners, bowling machines instead of kids, mimeographs instead of fresh air, and drive-ins instead of privacy. It was a high-water mark of stability—and therefore the perfect setup for the next vanishing act.

Chapter V — The Silicon Dawn (1970–1989)

They told us the future would be chrome and moon boots. It arrived smelling like hot dust and coffee—beige boxes on particleboard desks, red lasers in supermarkets, orange robot arms that never called in sick. Between 1970 and 1989, work walked through a one-way door: from grease to code, from foremen with clipboards to spreadsheets with the bedside manner of a guillotine. Earlier revolutions rearranged muscle; this one rewired muscle memory. All the little rituals—dictation, filing, inspection, the punch-press tango—were converted into software, sensors, and charts that don’t laugh at your jokes.

I remember the first time a CEO waved me into a mahogany boardroom and pointed at his new Wang terminals as if he’d adopted very bright children. “They make us twice as fast,” he beamed. “At what?” I asked. “Everything,” he said, a man confidently standing on a rug he hadn’t noticed was already moving. For a glorious minute, the typing pool became a command center—search/replace instead of Wite-Out; versioning instead of pleading. Then the beige PC rolled in, and executives discovered the bold button. Self-service capitalism was born right there on the C-suite credenza: I’ll type it myself. It sounded egalitarian. It was just cheaper.

The Apple Macintosh kicked open the art department door wearing a grin and carrying a laser printer. January ’84, the smiley screen said hello; by ’85, PostScript + LaserWriter + PageMaker staged a tasteful coup on publishing. The old choreography—galley proofs to typesetters; grease pencils on paste-ups; the darkroom’s chemical fog—collapsed into “File > New.” I watched an agency owner run a finger across his beloved paste-up table and say, “We built a life on this.” The next week he built invoices in PageMaker. Craft didn’t die; its billing code did.

Then the quiet guillotine of jobs: CAD/CAM. AutoCAD landed in ’82 like a crystal ball with a grid. Lines snapped to attention, layers obeyed, revisions stopped requiring fresh vellum and a rosary. Draftsmen who’d carried the city in their wrists—street plans poured through the forearm like a hymn—were renamed “CAD techs,” then re-org’d into a smaller number because one caffeinated engineer with a PC could do the work of three with T-squares. The ammonia ghost of the blueprint machine faded from hallways; the mechanical pencil, that wand of quiet authority, retired to a cup on someone’s last day.

In retail, a beep murdered hand-keyed prices with a smile. Barcodes made inventory real-time, and the second you make something real-time you make a person optional wherever speed beats conversation. I once asked a grocer what he thought of the new scanners. “I love them,” he said, “except for how they hate my cousins.”

But the main event took place under factory lights, where robots stopped posing in brochures and started filing grievances in headcount. Unimate robotic arms had been welding since the ’60s; the ’80s made it a cast member. Six-axis arms took over welding cells and paint booths with the stamina of things without lungs. PLCs ran timing like tyrants; CNC replaced the romance of touch with the smug precision of code; machine vision squinted at defects without needing coffee or forgiveness. The old choreography—die setters, toolmakers, line inspectors—was recast: cell tenders, maintenance techs, integrators, robot whisperers with torque wrenches and software licenses. The plant still needed geniuses, just fewer per shift.

Which brings us to Detroit, where the official story was “foreign labor is cheap.” The actual story: foreign systems are better. Just-in-Time. Andon cords. Poka-yoke. A catechism of small humiliations for executives who’d treated quality as a department instead of a habit. In 1984 at NUMMI in Fremont, CA, the GM-Toyota joint venture proved the sermon works on American soil—and with a workforce previously deemed “unmanageable.” Same humans, different system, radically different outcome. That was the knife twist: it wasn’t the people; it was the process.

You can yell a door into alignment or redesign the hinge; only one of those options shuts properly.

Executives reacted to Japan the way tourists react to good sushi: by buying a bonsai and declaring themselves changed. A few actually were. They came home with humility, SPC charts, and the terrifying revelation that defects were a crime scene, not a shrug. The rest came home with laminated slogans and a T-shirt that said “Kaizen!”—then, like blind fools, kept right on measuring success in decibels and threats.

Now, about unions - saints in some retellings, villains in others. The truth is less cinematic and more tragicomic. For decades the tacit deal was clear: pattern bargaining, COLAs, health care that made insurers sweat, and pensions that felt immortal. When profits tightened, management called those wages “fat” and “unreasonable,” never mentioning that the C-suite had just discovered the acoustic properties of private jets. Then inflation bit, interest rates spiked, imports arrived with doors that shut properly, and a president fired eleven thousand air-traffic controllers on television. Executives took notes. Unions discovered that a robot arm has no sense of solidarity, and a spreadsheet has no conscience. The union hall fought for wages; the CFO fought for variable cost curves and depreciation schedules.

Guess which side invited a robot to the meeting….

When unions pushed back—on wage tiers, on manning tables thick as medieval manuscripts—companies found a passport. Offshoring started as an experiment and became a reflex.

First the easy pieces: harness assemblies, castings, anything that could handle a boat ride. The shipping container turned oceans into hallways. Fax machines, CAD files, and copy-exact specs made distance a rounding error. Maquiladoras filled with cheap labor bloomed just over the border in Mexico. That, coupled with the newly inked NAFTA trade agreement, killed over a million American manufacturing jobs and put a bullet in the head of what was left of the Rust Belt. China, along with “The Five Tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Malaysia) and the “Tiger Cubs” (Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, and Viet Nam) learned your drawings faster than purchasing learned their names.

I sat through a meeting where a VP of Ops said, “We’re moving production closer to the customer,” meaning a port on the other side of the planet. Geography died on a PowerPoint slide; the job followed it out the door.

If you want the motive for gutting middle management, here’s the trio that did the deed:

• Tools — PCs, spreadsheets, databases. Work was pushed down (“do your own memo, Bob”) and out (vendors could gulp your specs on Friday and quote you Monday);
• Doctrine — Shareholder value became religion; “delayering” became virtue. The board stopped asking “Can we?” and started asking “Why haven’t we?”; and
• Pressure — deregulation and global competition. Airlines, trucking, telecom—once tidy fiefdoms—were shaken like piggy banks; margins needed new friends. Headcount volunteered.

I once watched a whole layer of nearly five hundred middle managers vanish between a Monday town hall and a Friday cake. The cake read “Teamwork.” The knife said “synergy.”

Robot HR, 1986:

• Strengths: never tardy; weld bead like a god; immune to fumes; indifferent to gossip.
• Weaknesses: needs guard fencing and a priest.
• Development Plan: teach vision to count to five; teach management to stop calling it “my favorite employee.”
• Compensation: an amortization schedule.

Inside the building, casualties piled up in alphabetical order. Accounts Payable got “streamlined” by data entry screens that reconciled while you blinked. Keypunch took early retirement; no one ordered a cake. Graphics turned into a Macintosh with a LaserWriter and a person named Terry who knew kerning. The typing pool went quiet and turned into a printer queue. You could see the trend from the parking lot: fewer cars on Fridays, more spaces on Mondays, a security guard who knew too many names.

And yet, perversely, the decade also created work. Robot maintenance techs learned to diagnose servo tantrums by ear. PLC programmers invented a new genus of midnight emergency. CNC operators became artists of microns. Quality engineers made charts that told the truth faster than a memo ever could. The pie shrank for some and grew peculiar new slices for others. Headlines said, “jobs lost.” Footnotes said, “jobs changed.” Reality paid rent in both neighborhoods.

The plant distilled into one image: a robot in a caged cell, sparks haloing the space where a person used to stand. The office condensed into another: a cursor blinking at the top of a memo, a tiny lighthouse guiding your boss to the thought, “Do I really need someone else to type this?” Multiply that question by a thousand org charts and you have the sociology of the decade.

Let’s not canonize the past. Plenty of work rules deserved a tune-up; not every grievance was a moral crusade—some were the sort of rituals boredom invents. But let’s be honest about what the decade invented: a world where the system is the boss, the data is the judge, and the person is the variable. The plant that once measured worth in sweat stains now measured it in Cp and Cpk. The office that once measured loyalty in years now measured productivity in keystrokes. And stitched into every progress graph was a tiny, elegant caption:

You are optional.

Occupational Obituary — The Human Line Inspector (1935–1988):

“Beloved guardian of “good enough,” famous for detecting a burr by touch and a lie by posture. Could shame a foreman with a raised eyebrow. Cause of death: AOI cameras, SPC charts, and a buzzer that summons an engineer instead of a conversation. Survived by a clipboard nobody wanted and a jacket that still smells like cigarettes and victory.”

In lieu of flowers, please submit a deviation request.

This wasn’t mere automation; it was a cultural conversion. Wang taught offices to process words; the Mac taught them to publish; CAD taught them to draw; robots taught them to weld; and spreadsheets taught them to reorganize you. Unions bargained with history and discovered history doesn’t sign MOUs. “Faster, cheaper, better” stopped being a brag and became the air—inhale it or fall behind. When labor pushed back, capital booked a flight. The shipping container turned oceans into hallways; your job learned to travel.

By 1989, the office was a cockpit, the plant a choreography of code, the corporate conscience a quarterly letter. The old world faded not with a bang but with a beep—the sound a scanner makes when it recognizes a pattern and renders a person optional. The lesson, if you care to learn it before the next act: you cannot negotiate with a robot. You can only decide what that robot serves—and who shares in the dividend.

Chapter VI — The Internet Eats the Middle (1990–2007)

The 1990s arrived with a dial-up purr and a promise: information would set us free. It did—roughly the way a hurricane “sets free” a carport. The decade wired the world and wiring does what wiring always does: it finds the shortest path to ground. In business, “ground” is cost. Information got fast, distance got cheap, and the middle—those well-lit floors of coordinators, brokers, runners, clerks, and assistant-to-the-assistant glue people—discovered the shortest path to savings ran straight through their job descriptions.

Email became the new foreman and didn’t even wear a tie. It arrived at dawn, multiplied by lunch, and developed a gift for cc’ing you on threads you didn’t start and could never end. A memo used to be an event; email turned it into weather. PowerPoint replaced argument with bullet points. Excel replaced memory with “the model says.” And then a cartoon paperclip popped up to ask if you were writing a letter, as if mockery were a core feature of productivity.

Meanwhile, the web picked up its fork and started eating. Expedia taught customers to book their own flights; Orbitz and Priceline piled on. The travel agent didn’t so much vanish as evaporate into a niche: safaris, honeymoons, disasters—anything a website might still ruin. eBay turned your attic into a market stall. Craigslist did to classifieds what a sinkhole does to a parking lot. Napster introduced the music industry to “free,” and iTunes introduced it to “ninety-nine cents and a clean conscience.” Amazon started with books and ended with your expectations. Main Street watched a parade of big-box stores, and then the big-box stores watched the web. Each wave arrived with the same cheerful headline: “Great deals.”

The subhead was always, “For someone else’s job.”

Inside the enterprise, ERP—SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft—arrived on pallets, rolled through loading docks like invading armies, and installed a new map of reality. Your old way of doing things was “tribal knowledge.” The new way was “the process,” and the process lived in a database guarded by a consultant with a laminated swim-lane diagram and the sleep schedule of a bat. Departments were re-sorted into shared services and centers of excellence. The org chart thinned in the middle while the bottom got standardized and the top learned to say “global template” without smiling.

Supply chains discovered a new theology: orchestrate or die. Walmart’s Retail Link graded suppliers on clairvoyance; EDI stopped feeling exotic and started feeling like tap water. RF scanners told warehouse workers what to pick; pick-to-light told them where to put; cross-docks told trucks not to get comfortable. Your steps went up, your errors went down, your pay stayed where it was, and someone in Bentonville knew you’d mis-scanned a pallet before you did.

The call center, a minor character in the ’80s, became the mall of the 2000s. IVR menus learned to say “your call is important to us” in forty dialects of insincerity. Tier-1 scripts turned empathy into a flowchart. Then the phone lines changed time zones. Overnight, Americans named “Brad” and “Tiffany” got help from “Brad” and “Tiffany” in Bangalore and Manila—brilliant, underpaid college graduates reading the same scripts with fewer coffee breaks. You could hear globalization in the pause before a vowel; you could measure it in the price of a minute on hold.

And the IT department—once a basement with a box fan—became a war room. Y2K panic sent budgets to the gym; COBOL developers were suddenly hot again, their résumés smelling faintly of mothballs and salvation. After the ball dropped and the lights stayed on, someone asked, “What do we do with all these servers?” Answer: intranet everything. HR forms went online. Expense reports went online. Your ability to pretend you didn’t receive a policy update died in an audit trail.

Wall Street discovered latency and lost interest in you. Floor runners and specialists watched screens take the pit. Decimalization shaved pennies off spreads and hundreds off payroll. ECNs hummed where shouting used to live. Finance didn’t lose its drama; it relocated it inside routers.

Then came the dot-com gold rush: lava lamps, kegs on Fridays, refrigerators full of ambition. The rules of business were rewritten in Expo marker. Socks were puppets. Pets sold pet food to other pets. For a minute you could expense a scooter. Then came the crash. I remember the first layoff day with a DJ. (If you’ve never seen a balloon arch reflected in a cardboard banker’s box, count yourself blessed.) The survivors learned the lesson history favors: profit still matters, but precision now lives in software. The web ate vanity; the spreadsheet ate mercy.

The Offshoring Decade (Passport Required, Seat Back Upright)

Between the first banner ad and the last dial-up tone, a new phrase entered the American workplace: “I got offshored.” Said the way people used to say “I caught the flu.” You hadn’t done anything wrong; you’d just come in on Tuesday and discovered your job had more frequent-flier miles than you.

The map looked like this: design in Boston, PO cut in Bentonville, proto in Shenzhen, code in Bangalore, calls in Cebu, closing entries in Kraków, cash application in Costa Rica, tax domicile in Dublin. Management called it follow-the-sun; employees called it follow-the-job. If you wanted to know where your work went, check the bill of lading.

We like to narrate this as a few clever companies getting cute. The truth is the entire planet enlisted.

The Five Tigers had sharpened their teeth like razors since the ’70s. By the ’90s they’d upgraded from nibbling to carving. South Korea built chaebol empires that could ship you a TV, a sedan, and a future in the same quarter. Taiwan perfected contract manufacturing and chip foundries so disciplined American semiconductors looked like science fair projects. Singapore turned logistics into a religion; Hong Kong could broker oxygen.

And then the dragon you could see from space lit the sky with a blinding economic flash - China didn’t “join” global supply chains – it became them.

Special Economic Zones bloomed; ports grew cranes like antlers; power plants woke up humming. “Just a little capacity” became “we can do your whole product line—faster.” After WTO entry in 2001, the container ship evolved from steel box into career counseling. CAD files flew east on Friday; photo proofs returned Monday with an apology for the time zone.

While the factory floor went to sea, the office work learned to dial internationally. India became the back office of the world on English fluency, technical talent, and a surplus of night owls willing to live your day during theirs. TCS, Infosys, Wipro taught CFOs a phrase they still whisper to themselves at night: labor arbitrage. For a glowing decade, BPO and IT services turned Bangalore and Hyderabad into verbs. You could measure globalization by the pause before a vowel on a support call.

Then came the plot twist best appreciated with a stiff drink and a laugh out loud: The irony was so sweet - offshoring got offshored.

As wages crept up and scripts got easier to script, Philippine call centers took slices for accent “neutrality,” near-shore hubs in Eastern Europe caught the back-office boomerang, and automation crept in like a cat that already owns the house. Tier-1 calls slid into IVR mazes, then chatbots. Ticket triage went to rules engines, then models. The job you’d moved across an ocean moved again—into a server rack. The joke wasn’t “on India.” The joke was on any role whose deliverable could be templated, timestamped, or taught to a machine. Offshoring was never a place; it was a method—and methods migrate to wherever electrons are cheap.

Sports Fans, I once sat in a meeting you’ll swear I’m inventing. The COO beamed: “Contact volume down forty percent post-offshore.” The head of CX coughed politely: “Because the IVR hangs up on fifteen percent of callers who say ‘representative’ three times.” The CFO blinked like a man seeing daylight for the first time. “Is that… good” he asked?

“For the margin,” I said - “As far as reputational damage to your brand, let me get back to you.

The Technology Boomerang (We Invent, They Iterate, We Import)

Here’s a truth we prefer to whisper: a great deal of the tech that ate American jobs was born in America—then went abroad for finishing school, a diet, and a makeover. We built the early spreadsheets, OSes, chip architectures, barcode standards, databases, CAD tools, even the quality gospel (hello, Deming), then shipped the playbook with the parts. Partners didn’t just read it; they annotated it, translated it into process, and sold the improved version back to us—with gift wrap and better battery life.

The script:

• We invent the thing;
• We teach the thing to a “trusted overseas partner” to utilize their (cheap) workforce for better margins;
• The “partner”, being talented, not raised by wolves (but cunning as a fox), learns;
• IP enforcement is…sketchy. Reverse engineering is a national pastime; “shanzhai” (copycat with creativity) puts on a lab coat; and
• Their branded Version 2.0 ships from Shenzhen, Suwon, Hsinchu, or Singapore—faster, cheaper, better—and we buy it on Amazon Prime.

We called it theft sometimes—and sometimes it was. But we also sent the drawings, BOM, SPC charts, firmware, vendor list, toolpaths, and a Christmas card. We mistook contract manufacturing for a moat and discovered it was a ferry. We were, and frequently are, the Goat:

• United States: invents it, funds it, names it something boring;
• South Korea/Taiwan: manufactures it with terrifying discipline; calls it “next quarter’s baseline”;
• China: scales it to the horizon; knocks off three versions before lunch; launches a Pro model by dinner; and
• We: order two, marvel at the price, hold a town hall about “competitiveness.”

I once heard a CEO claim, beaming, “We’ll keep the IP; they’ll just build it.” Next slide: a Gantt chart titled Tech Transfer Milestones. “Not transfer,” he said, “collaboration.” Two years later he was collaborating with ExecuNet in search of new career opportunities.

We tried to fight the boomerang with patents, NDAs, stern letters. Useful tools. But the countries that “borrowed” best weren’t winning on law; they were winning on execution—supplier development, brutal line discipline, relentless iteration.

You can litigate a counterfeit; you can’t litigate a yield curve.

The Day Email Became Your Boss

An old-line manufacturer hired me to “fix strategic communication issues.” Translation: no one trusted anyone who could hit reply all. We piloted no-email Wednesdays. Productivity soared. So did panic. Executives arrived clutching printed Gmail threads like subpoenas. One VP asked, “If I can’t cc: ten people, how will they know I’m working?” “Try making a decision,” I said. He blinked. “Can you put that in an email?”

The Internet’s Favorite Snack: Intermediaries

Whole job categories existed to bridge gaps in information—travel agents, stock runners, print brokers, dispatchers, reservation clerks, claims middlemen, classifieds managers. The web filled the gap with a form. “Press submit” is the most expensive sentence ever written for a payroll department.

Unions vs. Fiber Optics

Unions tried to bargain with geography; fiber optic cable didn’t bargain back. When call-center wage floors rose in Phoenix, customer care blossomed in Cebu. When back-office ops got tight in New Jersey, reconciliations clocked in from Gurgaon. When both learned to run, RPA learned to crawl, then walk, then file your expense report while judging you silently. The negotiating table was replaced by a latency report. If you plan to strike against time zones, pack snacks.

Retail kept rearranging itself with the geometric elegance of bad news. Self-checkout turned cashiers into aisle therapists for confused customers. RFID pilots promised faster everything and delivered a little less theft and a lot more surveillance. Kiosks showed up and demanded your patience. Store associates became half logistics, half bouncers. Meanwhile, the warehouse learned a new dance: wave picking by day, replenishment by night, and you don’t get to choose the playlist.

Compliance ballooned after Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley. For a few years, the middle found sanctuary called internal controls. Then software learned to test them. A CFO told me, “Our auditors love us now.” I asked, “And your headcount?” He said, “We’re celebrating efficiencies.” Translation: the software can sample 100% of transactions, and it doesn’t charge by the hour.

The culture learned some new tics. BlackBerry turned executives into lab rats for dopamine. “Out of office” became folklore. I knew a CEO who slept with his device under the pillow like a technological tooth fairy. He woke up thrice nightly to reply “Thanks.” He believed it signaled leadership. It signaled availability, which is a different religion with a harsher god.

IT support boomed, ironically, because everything that replaced the middle kept breaking at 2 a.m. The help desk became a confessional: “Forgive me, I clicked something.” Scripts triaged the confessors. If you made it to a human, you won. If not, you rebooted and reconsidered your life.

And yes, some things truly got better. The productivity surge of 1995–2004 was a real thing; the Solow Paradox packed its bags. Checks cleared faster; shipments arrived sooner; information was less wrong. The economy found new work in logistics, analytics, digital ad sales, and content creation that began as “blogging” and ended as “ten million jobs and three viable careers.” Improvements were genuine. The casualties were, too.

Occupational Obituaries:

Video Store Clerk (1982–2008)

“Beloved curator of Friday night, philosopher of the Late Fee, high priest of “We’re out of Top Gun, may I recommend Hot Shots?” Cause of death: streaming, mail-order DVDs, and the human desire to watch a movie without changing pants. Last words: “Be kind, rewind; then resign.” Survived by a thousand think pieces and exactly one store in Bend”.

Travel Agent (Full-Service, 1952–2002)

“Trusted navigator of fare wars and seat maps, master of hold music, protector of upgrades. Cause of death: websites that let customers click themselves into middle seats at 6 a.m. on Tuesdays. Survived by boutique specialists and everyone who learned, the hard way, that “non-refundable” is a lifestyle.”

Tier-1 Support (Human, 1996–2012)

“Reader of scripts, absorber of rage, master of “Have you tried turning it off and on?” Cause of death: IVR mazes, chatbots, and the discovery that customers will self-serve if you frustrate them artfully. Survived by Tier-2 (human), currently being shadowed by a model named after a forest animal. In lieu of flowers, please press 0, then 0, then say “representative” until disconnected.”

The internet made information cheap and therefore middlemen expensive. ERP made process visible and therefore variance suspicious. Offshoring made distance cheap and therefore geography negotiable. And our own immaculate playbooks—beautiful swim lanes, glorious SOPs—made imitation cheap. What stayed valuable lived at the edges: high-touch persuasion, high-stakes judgment, and the work of changing systems, not simply enduring them. Everything else was automated, documented, outsourced, or renamed self-service.

Sports Fans, I’ve sat through a thousand meetings where someone swears, “This time is different.” - It isn’t. The method changes - the math doesn’t.

When information moves faster than people, people who move information for a living get moved out. When process becomes software, supervision becomes metrics. When cost can commute, jobs pack a bag. And when you ship your methods with your parts, don’t be shocked when the improved version shows up at your front door with free shipping.

By 2007, middle managers were a memory-foam mattress—pleasant, supportive, and prone to permanent indentations. The iPhone had just appeared in a black turtleneck, the housing market was clearing its throat for a second act nobody wanted, and the term “platform” was about to stop meaning shoes.

The web had eaten the middle manager like a ravenous Great White shark. Next, it would start eating the rank-and-file workforce at the speed of light.

Chapter VII — Uberization & the Great Recession (2008–2016)

First came the iPhone—sleek and smug. Then the Great Recession—arriving like a repo man with a jackhammer. Put them together and you get the sentence of the century: “Congratulations, you’re now an entrepreneur.” Full-time jobs with benefits dissolved; apps chirped, Tap here to earn!—as if landlords accepted optimism.

Platforms called it “sharing.” What we shared were assets and anxieties. Spare rooms became hotels, cars became taxis, weekends became someone else’s convenience. The old bargain—work for a company, get a benefit—was replaced by quests: “Complete 12 deliveries by midnight for $14 and a dopamine squirt.” HR was outsourced to ratings. Five stars or famine.

It felt frictionless because all the friction moved into the worker. You supplied the car, gas, phone, data plan, back pain, and risk. The platform supplied a map and a model with the emotional range of a vending machine. You weren’t fired; you were deactivated. You didn’t clock in; you went online. You didn’t ask for a raise; you prayed for surge.

The Part Where Mortgage Banking Lights the Fuse

The Subprime Mortgage industry turned homeownership into improv. If you could fog a mirror, you got a mortgage—plus a second for the mirror. NINJA loans, teaser rates, originate-to-distribute; then alchemy: MBS into CDO into synthetic CDO, a scented candle in a fireworks factory insured by credit default swaps and blessed AAA by ratings agencies paid by the issuers. A tug on repo lines, and the plumbing sucked air: Bear-Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the rest of us held on for dear life. Some of us made it through, many of us didn’t.

Blast radius: families, firms, then outright countries. Iceland face-planted; Ireland nationalized losses like a weather system; Greece met austerity’s Greek letter. At home we entered job winter: unemployment near double digits, foreclosures as far as the eye could weep, résumés multiplying like rabbits in a storm. An economic weapon that vaporized payrolls and left office furniture intact.

In late 2008, at an investment bank “off-site” held in the cafeteria, a CFO whispered to me, “No one could have foreseen this, Frank.” I pointed to a chart titled Foreseen. He nodded gravely: “Exactly - like that - but unforeseeable.”

How the Apps Moved Into the Ashes

People desperately needed income. Platforms desperately needed labor. VC needed growth – like yesterday. Voilà: Uberization—turning macroeconomic wreckage into a cheerful interface with confetti.

Taxi drivers learned first. Yesterday’s cabbie knew three thousand streets and one thousand stories. Today’s driver knows GPS, ETAs, and the thin line between 4.96 (safe) and 4.79 (the cliff). The old boss was a dispatcher with a nicotine habit; the new boss is a heat map. Performance review: the average mood of strangers after airport runs and karaoke mishaps.

Dispatchers? Their kingdom vanished between a dial tone and a tap. Two-way radios fell silent, replaced by ACCEPT buttons and an FAQ that begins “Great question!” and ends “We regret we can’t respond individually.”

Ratings became etiquette at knifepoint. “Be your own brand,” hustle gurus said. Translation: smile forever. Drivers stocked water and mints like hostage negotiators. Couriers photographed doorsteps like crime-scene techs. Hosts ironed pillowcases like hotel staff—minus the staff. If you’ve never begged a fifth star from someone eating curly fries in your backseat, you haven’t truly sampled late capitalism.

A curbside exchange: “Still or sparkling?” “Tap is fine.” “Tap is a 4.7.”

Meanwhile, in the Marble Lobby

Policy arrived in three letters—TARP, QE, ZIRP. Banks went to rehab on the public’s dime; bonuses took a brief sabbatical and returned tan. Regulators wrote Dodd-Frank while fintech planned its 2010s makeover. We socialized losses, privatized rebounds, and told workers to “embrace flexibility,” which meant bring your own safety net.

A town hall to remember: “No layoffs—just reassignment.” Three weeks later: “We’re partnering with a platform.” Employees became “independent providers,” benefits became promo codes, and HR became Ratings.

The CFO called it “variableizing cost.” Translation: turning payroll into a weather app.

Terms of Surrender (Formerly Known as Service)

Contracts turned into ToS that updated at 3:14 a.m.: By tapping AGREE you waive the right to be a mammal. Benefits didn’t vanish; they were gamified: Unlock healthcare discounts after 400 deliveries this week! If your spleen could hit acceptance-rate targets, you might earn a coupon toward its replacement.

The engineering was miraculous. GPS gave every phone veteran-cabbie instincts. Payments dissolved into the background. Identity became a velvet rope: license, background check, periodic selfies. Two-sided marketplaces went from curiosity to operating system: rides, rooms, chores, tutors, groceries, dignity. We stopped calling people workers. We called them taskers. Jobs became tiles—accept, decline, surge, boost. On a good week, you were a one-person franchise. On a bad week, a screensaver.

Collateral damage: dispatchers, receptionists, town-car bases, “the guy in the Mercury who brought you takeout.” The formula: two-sided marketplace + smartphone + unpriced externalities = cheap for a while. The secret sauce wasn’t code; it was subsidy.

Not everything was bleak. Barriers fell. People locked out of formal work found on-ramps that didn’t ask for résumés or forgiveness. Cities moved at 2 a.m. Restaurants survived on wheels. Customers got power. Workers got work. The job market slipped out a side door.

Occupational Obituary: Taxi Dispatcher (1937–2014)

“Maestro of static; triager of chaos with a cigarette and a grease pencil. Could find a lost wallet, ring, and driver. Cause of death: an app with no small talk, a heat map with no mercy, and a rating system that treats empathy as a rounding error. In lieu of flowers, tip in cash and look out for the late shift.”

Chapter VIII — AI Beta & Frictionless Commerce (2017–2025)

The decade began with two suspect words—at scale—and two more—you’re muted. By the time we found the unmute button, the world had been shoved into a mass beta test: cloud AI humming in rented server farms, LLMs autocompleting our sentences (and eventually our résumés), cashierless pilots blinking under fluorescent lights, and remote work revealing that half of management’s job had been walking around looking managerial.

Roadmaps led to pilots, POCs, MVPs—and oops. Decks promised: computer vision that could spot a grape rolling off a conveyor; NLP that translated legalese to English and back without crying; robots that would finally lift boxes so humans could focus on their “highest and best use” (chiefly meetings about robots); and embedded payments so seamless you could buy things by thinking about buying them. The friction didn’t disappear; it relocated to the worker—again.

The Beta That Ate Tuesday

AI showed up like an overeager intern: tireless, cheap, occasionally hallucinating in Latin. Ask for notes, it wrote a sonnet. Ask for a summary, it confessed to a crime. Stack average AI against average white-collar work and the spreadsheet shrugs: the AI is cheaper. The knowledge moat—your PDFs, templates, FINAL_FINAL_v7—sprouted leaks. If your value proposition was “I find and format things,” your future arrived in a hoodie asking for an API key.

Data entry auto-filled. Tier-1 help desks watched chatbots eat low-hanging fruit, then medium fruit, then ask for the ladder. Basic support became routing with a comic relief button labeled escalate to human. Routine paralegal research turned into a scavenger hunt the machine enjoyed as much as the associate did. Gravity shifted from “who knows?” to “who integrates?”

Zoom, Slack, Repeat (A Tragicomedy in Five Pings)

Remote work made offices optional and status lights sacred. We learned to nod thoughtfully at rectangles. “Circle back” meant “I forgot what we were circling.” “Quick sync” was a calendar virus. Slack became a perpetual town square no one volunteered to sweep: #urgent, #urgent-urgent, #no-really-urgent, and #random where culture went to hydrate. Copilots haunted the chat: It looks like you asked for a decision. Would you like a summary of the last nine indecisions? Yes, Chippy. Hold my beer.

Frictionless Commerce (Now With Extra Friction)

The dream: walk in, take stuff, walk out. Cameras see, shelves weigh, graphs judge, payments fly. It felt like shoplifting with permission—and required enough computer vision to track hummingbirds in a hurricane. In practice we got dazzling demos and stores where half the magic worked and the other half sent you to Cheryl, the lone human who knows produce codes and which melon has a soul.

Payments dissolved into the background: tap, click, face, car, fridge. Checkout became rumor. Consent became “you scrolled.”

Warehouses played planet-sized Tetris: AMRs scurrying like Roombas with ambition; pick-to-light; vision systems double-counting and trusting themselves once. When robots failed, humans finished. When humans flagged patterns, robots learned.

The future wasn’t man or machine; it was log the exception so the machine stops needing you.

Four Meetings That Everyone Had:

• Do We Need All These People?: CFO compares headcount to “Copilot Savings.” HR says “augmentation.” Legal says “discovery risk.” Dashboard dogs nod;
• What If the AI Lies?: Compliance asks about hallucination. IT says, “Only when prompted.” Marketing proposes “creative synthesis.” Legal says no, but takes a copy;
• Guardrails: A consultant draws a box labeled Policies, another Enforcement, and—flair—an arrow named Hope; and
• Prompt Engineering Is a Job: A junior types three sentences and delivers a week of work in an afternoon. VP asks if we can “standardize the sentence.” We call it a prompt library. The VP adds “Library” to the roadmap and takes credit with admirable sincerity.

The Great Unmasking of “Knowledge Work”

We’d confused documentation with intelligence, meetings with coordination, and polite email with progress. AI ate the parts of jobs that were procedures wearing cardigans. Ten slides became two and—worse—better. If your proudest deliverable was “detailed minutes,” the model produced action items and three ways to do them—one of which hurt your feelings.

Humans still win at trust, taste, tact, and teeth (courage) - but only if they remember those are the points. People who thrived:

• Automated themselves first (rogue scripts, gentle bots);
• Pivoted by verbs (persuade, design, decide, de-risk) not nouns (associate, analyst);
• Owned distribution (newsletter, network, niche); and
• Showed their delta (before/after charts like value confessions).

Occupational Obituary: Cashier (Human), 1916–2024

“Guardian of ‘Price check on 7’, savant of produce codes, rescuer of customers from their own barcodes. Cause of death: self-checkout, computer vision, and an app that charges you because you looked at a muffin. Survived by Cheryl, far register, hands of a pianist, patience of a saint. Services unattended; please scan to continue.”

ChatGPT made intelligence rentable. LLMs commoditized first drafts. Vision counted without eyes; robots turned lifting into an API; embedded payments made checkout a rumor. The moat shifted from what you know to how fast you learn and ship.

The most honest title of the AI era: Editor-in-Chief of the Machine.

Chapter IX — 2026 and Beyond

History never ends - it just sends a calendar invite:

Subject: Autonomy (Pilot → Policy)

RSVP: “Maybe—pending firmware and union vote.”

By 2026 the future stopped beta-testing in the back room and rolled down Main Street, bright as a dash display. The charm offensive was classic Silicon: safer, faster, cheaper, and—most beloved by CFOs—predictable. Gravity shifted from hire people and hope to deploy systems and measure.

2025–2035: When the Vehicle Becomes the Verb

Long-haul trucking on fixed corridors went driver-optional—nights first, fair weather next, then whenever the sky looked like a screensaver. Platoons drafted like geese with better counsel. The lead rig still had a human the way weddings still have priests; behind it, three unmanned trailers whispered about crosswinds.

Cities sprouted polite armies of sidewalk bots—coolers with graduate degrees. Dogs hated them; toddlers waved. Drones learned school zones and setbacks; burritos and blood samples got equal reverence. At airports, eVTOL shuttles hopped from terminal to rooftop—no visible pilot, just a calm voice from a county you’ve never heard of: “Welcome aboard; turbulence will be algorithmic.”

Call centers evolved from “press 1 for misery” to AI phone agents resolving 80% of routine issues with spooky competence. “Human escalation” became a premium like legroom—available, rationed, eventually auctioned. A retail bank A/B-tested “Speak to a Human for $2”. It won the fiscal quarter, lost the decade, and lives on as an ethics slide.

Professions compressed: contract review, claims processing, bookkeeping. One senior plus copilots did by noon what departments did by Thursday. The model’s gift wasn’t only that it wrote; it read—everything, fast—and surfaced the clause that would have ruined your weekend.

Labor fought back. Some fights slowed the curve and improved guardrails, with real money for earned time and retraining. Most didn’t change the curve. Pilot became policy like tide coming in while the board argued whether the moon looked committed.

Occupational Obituary: Human Taxi (Uber, etc.) Driver (1907–2031):

“From hail to fail. Master of shortcuts, keeper of a thousand stories. Survived by heat maps, sanitized playlists, and three dashboard cameras that never laugh at your jokes. Final request: signal before merging; tip in cash; tell the new thing it owes you its lane.”

2035–2050: The Great Unbundling of Work

We stopped asking what job? and started asking which verbs? “Triage, explain, decide” moved up; “search, summarize, format” moved down into machines:

• Health: AI triaged; imaging models saw micro-shadows; robots stitched with monk-like stoicism. Humans owned edges, trade-offs, and consent. Bedside math got automated; bedside manner got hired.
• Education: Mass personalization made “class average” sound antique. Teachers shifted from content firehose to facilitator, mentor, lifeguard. We finally hired for tact and theater—paid for it, too (not enough, but better).
• Knowledge: Infinite interns drafted, analyzed, simulated; humans curated, arbitrated, persuaded. Meetings got shorter (not short), decks tighter (not modest), and “deliverable” finally meant decision.
• Manufacturing: Micro-factories, design-to-print pipelines; neighborhoods with small, glowing shops where a few adults supervised many robots and a chorus of QC sensors. New factory smell: ozone, not sweat.

Regulation birthed new guilds: safety-case writers, prompt/capability architects, model auditors—half statistician, half priest.

Occupational Obituary: Paralegal (Routine), 1938–2039:

“Clause by clause, consumed by code. Survived by a senior with a fountain pen and a junior who never met a binder. Reception in the knowledge base; tag ‘precedent’.”

2050–2075: Domestic Automation & Social Repricing

Homes cleared their own throats. Affordable robots did endless dishes and laundry, plus the stubborn choreography of pickups and drop-offs. Eldercare became hybrid teams: one human, a brace of gentle helpers, and a logistics app that knows when Grandpa’s joke is a cry for help. Best win: fewer lonely Tuesdays.

Mobility turned into a subscription with taste packs—commute, scenic, podcast, “don’t talk to me.” Private car ownership cratered from math, not scolding. Streets breathed; curbs appreciated; cities remembered they had feet.

Sensors tamed infrastructure. Field techs shepherded swarms—drones, crawlers, minisubs—checking welds and seals while a human on a ridge with a tablet whispered, “Easy, kids.”

Status repriced itself. Titles felt like landlines. What counted: projects, patronage, public impact. “Who are you with?” yielded to “What have you shipped?”

New job roles? - Reality Compliance Officers (deepfake governance), Synthetic Data Wranglers, Human Experience Designers.

The philosophers smiled - taste is a skill again.

Occupational Obituary Personal Driver (1908–2058):

“Keys turned in; autonomy took the wheel. Witness to first dates, hospital runs, and broken silences. Survived by mobility-as-a-service and a glovebox of peppermints, bottled water, maps, and secrets”.

2075–2125: After the Job

Income decoupled from jobs for a large share of people—UBI/UBS variants became boring (the policy equivalent of success). Identity re-rooted in craft, care, civic contribution, creation. We discovered how much of ourselves we’d stapled to performance reviews.

New risks: a meaning gap big enough to swallow a decade; idle time as a public-health variable; boredom as conspiracy fertilizer. Better answers: Guilds of Purpose across care, climate, culture, cosmos—badges > titles, contributions that follow you like loyal dogs.

Occupational Obituary: The 40-Hour Workweek (1926–2094):

“Beloved for boundaries, resented for tyranny, famous for pretending Wednesday was halfway. In lieu of flowers, submit a ticket to DeepSeek, now managing most of your life.”

Chapter X — What Would Frank Do?

Kids, The future doesn’t kill work - it reassigns it with suspicious efficiency. Titles wilt, tasks migrate, tools multiply, and paid judgment endures. The safest job is the one you’re already changing.

Anything you repeat will be automated, moved, or melted into software. Anything risky, relational, or reputational stays human—then gains tools. Every job is a bundle of verbs. Don’t marry the title - marry your stack: domain fluency, honest contact with data, a few bendable tools, and a story that makes numbers behave.

For Sports Fans:

• Automate yourself first. If it makes you sigh twice, script it once. Tiny bots that file, fetch, label, summarize—free you for judgment;
• Pivot by verbs. Nouns park you (analyst, coordinator). Verbs pay you (analyze, persuade, design, decide);
• Earn the human premium. Trust (promises clear), taste (first drafts already good), tact (timing and tone), teeth (courage to say the necessary thing);
• Ship portfolios, not résumés. One artifact a month—post, deck, repo, demo—beats a perfect file no one sees;
• Join a guild. Communities that learn, place, and protect;
• Negotiate for learning. Time, budget, and data access are compensation;
• Make friends with metrics. Name your delta—revenue, cost, risk, hours saved—and sign the chart;
• Own distribution. Newsletter, network, niche = optionality; and
• Practice quitting. Every quarter: start one thing, stop one, scale one.

Parable: A talented ops lead at one of my tech clients wrote a 200-line script that erased Tuesday. After a quiet month of proof, she walked into the CEO’s with a graph and said, “I’d like Fridays for experiments.” - She left with Fridays and a promotion.

Automation didn’t replace her; it cleared its throat and asked what else she wanted to run.

On the subject of endangered job roles disappearing, why not consider these changes:

• Data entry → data quality stewardship.
• Tier-1 help desks → bot trainers + human escalation.
• Paralegal routine → lit-tech ops with audit trails.
• Bookkeepers → rev-ops controllers.
• Long-haul drivers → remote convoy pilots.
• Cashiers → trust ambassadors rescuing self-checkout.
• Schedulers → capacity orchestrators.

If the old job moved information, the new job assures the system that moves information—and takes responsibility when it doesn’t.

For Corporate Leaders and Boards:

• Declare an automation dividend (before the bot ships): a fixed share of realized savings returns as wages/time and paid upskilling;
• Publish a Job Heat Map (Create/Transform/Retire + dates). Rumor is a terrible HR policy;
• Design last-mile human roles where trust, consent, and consequence live. Put adults there on purpose;
• Rebuild rungs. We automated the beginner’s work; now build apprenticeships and pay managers for placements and time-to-proficiency;
• Make guardrails a job. Safety-case writers, bias auditors, red-teamers, incident leads—with receipts; and
• Retire zombie jobs kindly. Timelines, bridges, buyouts, honest obits. A job ends; a person continues.

Bosses: announce the rules before the magic; share the winnings; fund ladders; put humans at the last mile; fix misses in daylight. That’s how we keep jobs: not by embalming yesterday’s org chart, but by building tomorrow’s payroll on purpose.

Chapter XII — The Veritas Way: Governance & Pay in the Post-Job Era

The Veritas Way is a fair deal for the future of work: when machines help, people benefit—jobs are made, savings are shared, and risks are handled out in the open. No slogans, just plain math you can see at the kitchen table. If the machines earn through the night, the morning shows who got a raise, who got training for the next rung, and how we kept folks safe. And for jobs it means this: work doesn’t vanish, it changes shape. What’s left to us is the human part—the last careful check, the hard call, the watchful eye, the mending of trust when something breaks—and we fund the bridge so people can cross into those roles with dignity and a paycheck.

Here is how that promise becomes practice:

First, pay only for proof. Stock and long-term rewards should vest when promises turn into receipts—when independent eyes verify that automation truly saved money and that the people whose roles changed landed in new, decent jobs with real training behind them. If a tool cut costs, we show where the savings went. If a role retired, we show where the person arrived. When rewards ride on facts, the board book reads like an adult document, not a press release.

Second, share the winnings—on purpose and on time. Before a pilot starts, set a clear, public share of any savings that flows back to employees: half as cash or time, half as paid learning. Then actually pay the first check on schedule. That single on-time payout flips the culture; rumor drains out of the building, and ideas walk in on their own.

Third, plan in public. Keep a rolling map of the next five to ten years that says, in plain language, which jobs we’ll create, which we’ll reshape, and which we’ll retire—along with dates, bridges, and named owners. It lists the ladders, the rungs, and who’s installing them. Adults like calendars. Markets do, too.

Fourth, govern out loud. A board-level Tech & Talent Committee should report, in everyday English, on three things: the risks our systems carry, the people those systems affect, and how we shared the dividend. For every high-impact tool, keep a simple safety case: where it can fail, who could get hurt, how we’ll spot trouble within an hour, what we’ll do next, and how we’ll make people whole. If you can’t explain it to a reporter without a lawyer in your lap, you don’t have governance—you have hope.

Fifth, make vendors sign receipts. Contracts should carry ethics clauses with trails we can actually walk: where the data came from, how the system was tested, what changed during retraining, and where the off-switch lives. “Black box” belongs in a museum, not in procurement.

Sixth, rehearse the bad days. Run live-fire drills for model mistakes, cyber hits, worker backlash, and storms of public anger. Each rehearsal ends the same way: a timestamped timeline, a plain-spoken statement, a make-whole policy that isn’t a coupon, and published patch notes. Error is human; cover-ups are optional. Practice honesty before you need it.

Two small proofs show the difference. At one of my clients, a Fortune 100 Aerospace/Defense company, leadership announced a 30% gainshare—half wages or time, half upskilling—before the first robots ever rolled in. Resistance fell from quarters to weeks; suggestion boxes filled without pushing. Average calls that took nine minutes went to three. One employee lawsuit dissolved. The plan paid for itself. Guardrails weren’t overhead; they were jobs.

If you ever need a page to pin above the copier, pin this: pay fairly (for real productivity, real learning, and real trust), share the winnings, plan in public, govern out loud, and drill relentlessly. Do those five, and automation will behave like an economy, not a casino.

And the promise we keep is simple enough to say at supper: if machines earn at night, people share the morning—and everyone can see the ledger.

Epilogue — The Ghost Shift

Every economy has a night crew. You don’t see them on the org chart; you hear them in the vents. Hands and habits that kept showing up after we changed the signs on the building: the lamplighter’s patience hiding in a sensor network, the milkman’s punctuality reborn as a delivery window, the projectionist’s ritual disguised as autoplay that still freezes at the kiss. Call it the Ghost Shift—the part of us that keeps working after the job title clocks out.

We thought we were our jobs; we were our contributions. The title is a coat; the work is the weather. Coats go out of style; weather arrives anyway: care that finds a patient, craft that builds a bridge, courage that speaks up, and the stubborn choice to make meaning when the market no longer mandates it.

I carry many memories with me. My father’s metal lunch pail, empty by noon, clean by habit, shelved after nearly fifty years of building homes; he missed his team of skilled craftsmen more than the metal. Me, always in a rush but, always handing the cab driver a few dollars along with thanks big enough to make their day. The flicker of a projector in an empty booth, a ghost light for a trade that taught us to thread our stories through darkness and aim them through our hearts at a wall. The jobs ended. The muscle memory didn’t.

If this week’s Vox Populi has a villain, it’s not tech; it’s forgetting—the committee that confuses a pilot with a plan, a spreadsheet with a promise, a layoff with a strategy. We are better than our memos. When horses left, we learned engines. When engines left, we learned code. When code left, we learned to teach the code how not to be stupid near people. Every time, the Ghost Shift trained the daylight.

We laughed through it: at self-checkout declaring a watermelon an “unexpected item,” phone menus demanding we shout “REPRESENTATIVE,” at the Wang word processor we feared and the chatbot that now compliments our “writing voice” like it’s buying us dinner.

Humor keeps us human.

Here’s the turn: the human verbs persist. Care survives automation because consent isn’t a button. Craft survives scale because taste doesn’t travel by API. Courage survives optimization because there’s no shortcut to saying the necessary thing when it costs you. And choice survives everything.

Let’s hold baptisms alongside funerals: Trust Ambassadors who rescue self-checkout lines; Model Auditors who say “No” with footnotes and a smile; Experience Nurses who fix the trip, not the ticket; Reality Compliance Officers who spot fakes before they spot your mother. New names for old vows: keep people safe, seen, well-served. The Ghost Shift deserves payroll.

A small prayer for the undeleted:

"May your errors be reversible, your “Are you sure?” boxes honest, and your bosses allergic to euphemism. May your metrics measure what matters and ignore theater. May your guild answer on the first ring. May apologies arrive faster than press releases. May your children think “bring your whole self to work” refers to integrity, not unpaid performance art."

Final image: blue hour. A driverless taxi glides curbside. No meter, no small talk, no dispatcher saying, “I got something five minutes out if you can be nice about it.” A human opens the door for another human—not for a tip or rating, but for grace. They nod: we’re in this together, even if headed different ways. The passenger gets in. The car slides off. Somewhere a bot files a perfect utilization report. Somewhere a person calls their mother.

The real work continues. And so will we.

FBG