It’s easy to feel uneasy about artificial intelligence. Headlines shout about robots taking jobs, software replacing professionals, and algorithms doing work once thought uniquely human. Yet if you’ve lived through even a few decades of technological change, you’ve seen this story unfold before. Every new wave of innovation and technology brings disruption, yes, but it also brings opportunity, adaptation, and often entirely new types of work we couldn’t have imagined beforehand.

The truth is simple: technology has always changed the way we work, not whether we work. The current AI wave is no different.

Looking Back: When Technology “Ended” Jobs Before

We don’t need to look back as far as the Luddites destroying looms in the 1800s. Just rewind to the 1990s and 2000s — a period that felt, at the time, every bit as revolutionary as today’s digital transformation.

In the early 1990s, bank tellers were front-page news. Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) were spreading quickly, and many predicted the death of the bank teller’s job. By 1993, U.S. banks had eliminated nearly 180,000 teller positions. Yet within a decade, teller employment actually began to rise again — not because ATMs failed, but because banks adapted. The ATMs handled routine cash withdrawals and deposits, freeing staff to focus on customer service, small-business relationships, and promoting credit cards and house insurance. The role of front-of-house bank staff didn’t vanish; it evolved.

Around the same time, another career went through its own reckoning. The rise of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s upended the travel industry. Online booking platforms like Expedia and Booking.com allowed anyone to organise their own flights and accommodation without a travel agent. Many agencies closed their doors. But others reinvented themselves as specialists — experts in luxury, group, or adventure travel, or curators of complex itineraries that still required human insight and reassurance. Again, the basic job description changed, but the value of human expertise remained intact.

Manufacturing experienced the same kind of upheaval. Robotics began automating repetitive, physical tasks on factory floors. Some roles disappeared, but new ones were created in programming, maintenance, logistics, systems design and supervision. By the mid-2000s, the most successful plants weren’t those that resisted automation, but those that integrated it — retraining workers to collaborate with machines rather than compete against them.

In printing and publishing, the arrival of desktop publishing tools threatened to end careers for typesetters, prepress operators, and graphic artists. Instead, digital tools democratized the field, turning “print craftsmen” into digital designers. Postal workers watched email decimate letter volumes, but many postal systems evolved toward parcel delivery as online shopping exploded. Retail workers saw self-checkout kiosks introduced, but most large chains found they still needed humans for customer interaction, troubleshooting, and fraud prevention.

The pattern repeats like clockwork: each time technology takes over repetitive or easily codified tasks, humans pivot toward work that involves creativity, empathy, problem-solving, and trust. The task changes, the purpose remains.

The Lesson: Technology Doesn’t Destroy Work — It Redefines It

If you strip away the jargon, technology automates processes that can be standardized. That has always been its strength. The first spreadsheets in the 1980s removed the need for clerks to tally figures by hand; yet we didn’t lose accountants. Accounting just got faster and more accurate.   The internet destroyed the encyclopaedia business but gave birth to millions of digital content roles — writers, editors, designers, and web developers.

Every historical example teaches the same lesson: as one kind of work declines, another — often more interesting, more flexible, and more human — rises in its place.

Understanding the AI Wave

The computer programs and algorithms we call Artificial Intelligence (AI) are powerful because these tool mimics aspects of human cognition — pattern recognition, prediction, summarising, generating language or images. But it’s still bound by the data it’s trained on and the rules we give it. It excels at scale, repetition, and recall — not at judgment, empathy, or original thought.

That means AI will almost certainly reshape how work is done in many industries. Routine report writing, document review, and data entry will become faster and cheaper. Customer service chatbots will handle more front-end inquiries

But just as the ATM didn’t remove the need for human bankers, AI won’t remove the need for human oversight. Someone must interpret the results, ensure accuracy, and bring context. Someone must translate data into decisions and maintain trust. Those are inherently human functions.

The Opportunity for Workers — Especially Experienced Ones

There’s another important truth that rarely makes the headlines: experienced workers often adapt better to technological change than we expect. Wisdom, ethics, and contextual judgment — the things acquired only over time — are what AI lacks most.

In the coming years, industries will need people who can guide AI-driven processes, ask the right questions of data, and maintain ethical standards. Leadership, mentoring, negotiation, and client relationships will become even more valuable. Experience — particularly in understanding people, markets, and emotions — will remain irreplaceable.

For those of us who’ve navigated multiple technology waves already — from fax to email, from typewriter to word processor, from face-to-face banking to online portals — this is simply another chapter in the same story. The tools get smarter, but human value remains.

The Broader Economic Pattern

Economists have a term for this recurring cycle: “creative destruction.” Each major innovation displaces some jobs but eventually generates more productivity, new industries, and often higher living standards. Consider this:

• Between 1990 and 2020, the U.S. lost millions of factory and clerical jobs — but gained even more roles in healthcare, technology, design, logistics, and services.

• The digital economy now accounts for roughly 15% of global GDP, an entire sector that barely existed when the first web browsers appeared.

• In New Zealand, productivity growth since the 1990s has been strongest in sectors that embraced digital tools early — from logistics and tourism to professional services and finance.

The pattern suggests that AI, like previous innovations, will initially disrupt but eventually enrich the job landscape. The focus should be on adaptation and education, not fear.

The Practical Mindset: Adapt, Don’t Resist

For individuals and organisations, the healthiest response to technological change is careful investigation, not stubborn resistance.

In the 1990s, the companies that thrived were those that invested early in training their people to use new tools like email, PCs, and mobile phones. The same logic applies today. Learning to use AI tools, whether it's checking or drafting emails, summarising documents, or analysing data, increases efficiency. Refusing to engage with them does the opposite. The trick is to use AI as an amplifier of human skill, not a substitute for it.

What This Means for the Broader Workforce

There will be turbulence, as there always is. Some roles will be made redundant, some will shrink; others will expand. But the long-term trajectory is clear: work reorganises, it doesn’t vanish.

For Clients and Investors: Technology Creates Value Over Time

For financial advisers managing investments, and for you, our clients, the same lesson applies at the portfolio level. Technological disruption can cause short-term volatility, but historically it has driven long-term growth. The companies that embrace new tools usually emerge stronger. Productivity rises, costs fall, and new sectors emerge to absorb displaced labour.

From a long-term investor’s perspective, AI represents another step in the same progression that once brought us electricity, mechanisation, computing, and the internet. Each revolution looked threatening in the short run but proved transformative in the long run. The pattern of human adaptation — our ingenuity — is the constant.

Looking Forward with Confidence

It’s natural to feel unsettled by change. But the story of work is not one of disappearance; it’s one of reinvention. Every technology wave has forced us to redefine what’s valuable, and every time, humanity has responded by creating more meaningful, creative, and sophisticated work.

The AI revolution will be no different. It will change how we work, what skills we value, and where new opportunities arise. But it won’t end work — it will redefine it, as every innovation has done before.

So when you next read a dire headline about machines taking jobs, remember the bank teller, the coal shoveller, elevator attendant, leech collector, the typesetter, and the long list of other jobs impacted by technology. Those workers adapted, evolved, and found new ways to add value. The same story is unfolding again.

Colin Austin

Edited with AI