Is AI Replacing Jobs? What Electricity Can Teach Us

Is AI replacing jobs? Some, yes. But history shows new technology rarely just erases work.

The people who come out ahead are the ones who know how to do the new version of the work, and education is how they learn it.

This summer I spent some time studying what past inventions did to the workforce. I wanted a better question than "will AI take our jobs?" The one I landed on is this: what happened the last time a technology changed everything, and what did schools do about it?

This is the first post in a four-part series on AI & Digital Readiness. Here's what I found.

Is AI replacing jobs? History says it depends

Every new technology brings impact, but that impact isn't always what people expect. A few examples:

• ATMs. Everyone expected tellers to disappear. Instead, the machines made branches cheaper to run, so banks opened about 43% more of them. Teller employment actually grew, from roughly 500,000 to 600,000.
• Spreadsheets. Since 1980 there are about 400,000 fewer bookkeeping clerks and roughly 600,000 more accountants.
• Switchboards. Automatic dial switching went the other direction entirely. It cut the number of young women working as operators in later cohorts by 50 to 80 percent after a city converted, in what had been one of the most common jobs for women in America.
• Power looms. The machines took over about 98% of the labor needed to weave a yard of cloth. Factory weaving jobs still grew for decades, even while handloom weavers working the old way fell from roughly 250,000 to 7,000.

Some jobs grew. Some shrank. Some changed shape completely.

That impact can change livelihoods and economies for generations. I believe it is the job of both the private and public sector to drive innovation while also protecting livelihoods, specifically through education.

Why AI and the future of work look a lot like electricity

When I compare notes with what 2026 feels like, I keep coming back to the example of electricity.

A factory in 1890 ran on one big steam engine. Belts and shafts along the ceiling connected every machine to it. The building was several stories tall, and machines were placed by how close they needed to be to the engine, not by the order of the work.

Then electricity arrived, and factory owners reacted in two ways:

1. Most factory owners swapped the engine and changed nothing else. They pulled out the steam engine, dropped in a large electric motor, and hooked it to the same belts. Productivity barely moved.
2. A smaller group redesigned the building around electricity. That meant a small motor on each machine, a single-story plant, and machines lined up in the order the work happened. It took over 30 years to spread, until the 1920s. Then electrification accounted for about half of all productivity growth in American manufacturing that decade.

Same invention. Two very different results.

The bottleneck wasn't the technology. It was people.

Stanford economist Paul David argues the second approach could not have happened faster, because it required people who knew how to do the new work. Someone had to train the factory architects and electrical engineers who understood this new way of building. And workers making more decisions on the floor needed more training than before.

What held back the electricity revolution was not electricity. It was people who knew what to do with the new innovation.

AI is moving far faster than electricity did. That makes the people problem more urgent, not less.

How education closes the change gap

Education is what closed the gap with training up people who knew how to do the new work with electricity.

Higher education responded first:

• MIT started offering electrical engineering courses in 1882, the same year Edison opened his first power plant.
• Cornell followed in 1883 and graduated the first electrical engineers in 1885.
• Missouri built the first full department in 1886.
• At Lehigh, enrollment went from about 40 students to 144 in four years.

K-12 changed too. Employers wanted workers who could read a manual, handle algebra, do mechanical drawing, and understand electrical basics. Between 1910 and 1940, the share of American teenagers enrolled in high school went from 18 percent to 71 percent. The share graduating went from 9 percent to 51 percent.

In thirty years, we went from a country where most kids did not attend high school to one where most kids finished it, largely because of what the new industry demanded.

What this means for students today

I think most of the world is in the first factory right now. We're pulling out the steam engine and dropping in a motor. We're adding AI to what we already do without asking what it would look like if we designed around it from the start.

So I keep coming back to the same questions:

• What will employers ask for that they are not asking for today?
• Which skills hold up over twenty years?

We built the high schools once, when the machinery changed and we needed a generation who could work with it. Many argue the education system hasn't changed enough in the past 100 years. It appears we have the catalyst to change it now.

Where schools and states can start

We don't have forty years this time. The good news is that the moves that worked last time map directly onto AI:

• Build the pipeline early. Embed AI skills into CTE pathways, or consider an Emerging Technologies Pathway, and feed it with quality K-8 computer science and AI education. That's today's version of MIT's first electrical engineering courses. (New to CTE? Start with what career and technical education is.)
• Raise the floor for every student. Require computer science standards from kindergarten through 12th grade, with incentives for industry certifications, and make an AI and computer science course a graduation requirement. That's today's version of the high school boom.
• Train the people who train everyone else. Help every current and future educator earn a micro-credential in AI, and work with higher education on AI literacy for pre-service teachers.

Skill Struck's role is to make these shifts possible in real classrooms. That includes AI building tools in high-impact CTE areas like computer science, AI, cybersecurity, and data science, plus micro-courses for other CTE subjects on how AI is changing their industries.

AI is replacing jobs. Let's make sure students are ready for the new ones.

AI replacing jobs is a real concern, but it doesn't have to be the end of the story. Factories didn't change because electricity was invented. They changed when enough people understood it well enough to rebuild the work around it, and that took schools.

Ready to build AI & Digital Readiness in your district, from kindergarten to career? Get a demo and see how Skill Struck fits your grade bands.