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Jeff Bezos asked a room to imagine going back a hundred years.
When almost everyone was a farmer.
And telling those farmers that in 2018 there’d be a job called “massage therapist.”
Bezos: “They would not have believed you.”
Then a friend took it further.
Bezos: “Forget massage therapist, there are dog psychiatrists.”
He looked it up.
Bezos: “Sure enough, you can easily hire a psychiatrist for your dog.”
The room laughed.
The point under the laughter wasn’t funny at all.
Every time a major technology shift hits, we do the exact same thing.
We count the jobs it will destroy.
We never count the ones it will create.
Because we can’t.
They don’t have names yet.
The fear is always specific.
AI will replace accountants. AI will replace radiologists. AI will replace drivers.
The fear has job titles and timelines and projections.
The opportunity has none of those things.
Because you can’t name what doesn’t exist yet.
A farmer in 1920 could understand losing his job to a tractor.
He could not understand gaining a career as a social media strategist.
Not because he lacked intelligence.
Because the entire chain of inventions between his world and that job hadn’t been built yet.
Radio. Television. The internet. Smartphones. Social platforms. Creator economies.
Every single link in that chain had to exist before “social media strategist” could even be a sentence.
That’s where we are with AI right now.
Everyone is staring at the tractor.
Nobody can see the thing seven inventions away that doesn’t have a name yet.
The fear is loud because it fits inside language we already have.
The opportunity is silent because it doesn’t.
Every technological revolution in history created more jobs than it destroyed.
Every single one.
Not because anyone planned it.
Because human needs expand faster than machines can fill them.
We didn’t need massage therapists when we were breaking our backs on farms.
We needed them after machines freed our backs and stress replaced labor.
The demand didn’t disappear.
It migrated somewhere no one was looking.
That is exactly what’s happening right now.
The jobs AI creates won’t make sense to us yet.
They’ll sound as absurd as “dog psychiatrist” would’ve sounded to a farmer in 1920.
Until someone is running a $200 hourly practice with a six-month waitlist.
The entire conversation right now is about what we’re about to lose.
Nobody is talking about what we’re about to gain.
Because the gains don’t have vocabulary yet.
A hundred years from now, someone will stand on a stage and describe the jobs we couldn’t imagine today.
And the audience will laugh.
The same way we just did.
English
