16 Jun 2026
250 years of automation, and record employment
US payrolls held 30 million jobs in 1939.
Today they sit near 159 million (BLS).
Five times the jobs, after a century that automated farms, factories & a good chunk of the office.
The loom, the steam engine, the assembly line, the computer.. each one was meant to be the one that finally left us idle.
Each one was wrong.
Worldwide it's the same picture. Around 3.5 billion of us in work, the most ever, with global unemployment near 5% in 2024 (ILO) - close to its pre-pandemic low.
So after 250 years of building machines to do our jobs for us, more people are working than at any point in human history (says the guy who sells AI for a living..).
The caveat: "more jobs overall" is cold comfort to the person whose specific role just went, and I don't want to dismiss that, and the pain caused at individual level.
But overall, every technology has "increased the pie" instead of just replacing slices in the existing one.