Technology · Society

AI's Impact on Employment: Historical Parallels and Future Concerns

As artificial intelligence rapidly advances, historical patterns of technological disruption are being re-examined, with experts debating whether AI will lead to mass unemployment or foster new opportunities.

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Will We Control AI—or Will AI Control Us?

By Salman Ghouri - Sep 04, 2026, 4:00 PM CDT

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The world is undergoing a transformation driven by the exponential growth of artificial intelligence (AI)—a pace of change unprecedented in human history. Consequently, many people fear massive unemployment, along with other implications that could affect their livelihoods and quality of life. Is this truly the case? Yes—or perhaps not entirely.

The purpose of this short article is to explore the potential benefits of AI and its implications for human society. It is still too early to fully assess the potential benefits of AI, but they could be enormous.

A Brief Look Back

History shows that technological inventions have continuously improved economic productivity, efficiency, and quality of life. Many inventions that were once considered luxuries eventually became essential parts of everyday life. Electricity, automobiles, airplanes, refrigerators, washing machines, medical technologies, farming equipment, and countless household devices have all contributed to greater comfort, efficiency, and convenience.

Consider the invention of the typewriter in the 18th century, which transformed business communication. In the 1960s, pocket-sized electronic calculators emerged, followed by computers and laptops. When we were graduate students in the late 1970s, our professors—many of whom had been trained in the United States—would proudly demonstrate regression results generated by computers in seconds, replacing hours of manual calculations.

Did these innovations create mass unemployment? Or did they enhance human productivity and quality of life?

The answer appears clear: they improved our lives. While some occupations disappeared or declined, workers generally moved into other sectors and new occupations emerged.

Modern inventions such as smartphones, the internet, and applications such as WhatsApp and Facebook have made communication instantaneous and inexpensive. They have even reduced the need for travel, allowing people to see and speak with loved ones almost whenever they wish.

Every time humanity experienced a major technological breakthrough, people often believed that we had reached the peak of progress. Yet progress continued—and it will likely continue for generations.

Should we expect the same from AI?

The Rise of AI

AI itself is not new. Its foundations were established in the 1940s and 1950s, with significant advances occurring in later decades. However, investment and development accelerated dramatically in the 2020s, driven by advances in computing, transformer architectures, and large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT.

These systems demonstrate capabilities that increasingly resemble aspects of human intelligence, including language understanding, reasoning, pattern recognition, information synthesis, and, in some cases, creativity. As a result, AI is rapidly becoming integrated into countless sectors of society.

This exponential growth has generated both excitement and concern.

Many fear that AI could lead to mass unemployment, reducing consumer spending and potentially slowing economic growth. Yet history suggests that technological innovation does not necessarily destroy employment permanently. Agricultural innovations increased productivity while shifting labor into other sectors. Industrial automation eliminated some occupations while creating others. Medical advances increased life expectancy and improved human productivity.

The important question is whether AI will follow the same historical pattern—or whether it represents something fundamentally different.

Will AI Be a Game Changer?

Some argue that AI is fundamentally different from previous inventions and could cause widespread unemployment. We cannot realistically stop the development of AI, nor should we necessarily try to. However, policymakers, economists, philosophers, educators, and academics must urgently consider how society should manage its economic, social, psychological, and cultural consequences.

AI is already performing tasks once handled by receptionists, telephone operators, analysts, writers, programmers, and many other professionals. Autonomous vehicles, drone delivery, robotic automation, and AI-assisted decision-making are advancing rapidly.

The potential impact could be far greater than anything we have experienced before.

Consider something as simple as ChatGPT. Ask a question and, within seconds, you can receive an enormous amount of organized information. If you want to improve your writing, you can copy and paste your text and ask AI to edit it. You can ask it to prepare a birthday message, a condolence message, a business letter, or almost anything else you can imagine. In seconds, you may receive several formal or informal versions of your original thoughts.

This is only the beginning.

More sophisticated AI models are being developed for energy forecasting, refinery optimization, environmental analysis, medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, finance, and virtually every other segment of society.

Imagine, for example, a strategic planning department in an oil and gas company. Today, a team of senior professionals may spend months developing forecasting models, key performance indicators (KPIs), business plans, and refinery optimization strategies. In the future, sophisticated AI systems may perform much of this work, perhaps requiring only one or two professionals to supervise, interpret, and implement the results.

The same principle could apply to education.

If AI can provide highly personalized instruction, explain complex subjects, generate study material, evaluate assignments, and assist students individually, will we still need traditional classrooms and large numbers of instructors in their current form?

Perhaps not.

And the same question can be asked across almost every sector.

This is where the unemployment concern becomes much more serious. In previous technological revolutions, displaced workers could generally move into other sectors that were less automated. But what happens if AI simultaneously transforms most sectors of the economy?

Will there be enough new occupations to absorb displaced workers?

It is difficult to know.

Therefore, policymakers must begin thinking beyond traditional economic solutions. If AI significantly reduces the need for human labor, society may need entirely new approaches to income distribution, education, employment, taxation, and social protection.

We may need to think outside the traditional economic framework.

Why AI May Be Fundamentally Different

My assessment is that AI is fundamentally different from many previous inventions.

In the past, we delegated physical labor and deterministic calculations to machines, but we generally did not delegate cognition itself. There were an input and an expected output, and humans understood and controlled the process.

That may no longer be the case.

We are entering an age in which machines can increasingly analyze information, generate ideas, recognize patterns, write, communicate, make recommendations, and perform tasks that once required human judgment.

For the first time, humanity may be developing an entity that could eventually become more capable than humans in an increasing number of intellectual domains.

That is something humanity has never experienced before.

In fact, many of the technological innovations we have adopted in recent years have already incorporated elements of AI, often without us consciously recognizing that we are interacting with intelligent systems.

Consider the devices in our homes. We may ask a voice assistant to play with the white noise or set a cooking timer or ask Siri to do certain tasks. Smart lighting systems automatically turn lights on and off. Irrigation systems can skip watering when rain is detected. Thermostats learn our habits and schedules and automatically adjust heating and cooling to maintain our preferred level of comfort.

Even our entertainment systems increasingly anticipate what we might want to watch.

Have you ever discussed something at home and then opened your phone or YouTube and noticed remarkably similar recommendations?

Whether this results from AI-based recommendation systems, search behavior, advertising algorithms, or other forms of data collection, the broader point remains: intelligent technology has already become deeply embedded in our daily lives.

How AI Models Learn

Consider a simple example.

I recently watched a television segment in which an artist was painting on the street while other playing music. People from a technology company approached the artist and asked how much he earned each day. They reportedly earn approximately $200 daily.

They offered them $500 a day if they would wear special gloves while continuing to paint and play music.

The gloves captured their hand movements and transmitted the data to a computer system. After collecting this information over time, the system could begin learning the relationship between the artist’s movements and the resulting artwork.

Eventually, AI could potentially reproduce similar movements and generate similar images and play similar music.

This is a simple illustration of a much more complicated process.

Developing sophisticated AI models requires enormous amounts of data, extensive computing power, testing, validation, and continuous refinement. This is already occurring in fields such as energy, refinery operations, environmental modeling, weather and demand forecasting, industrial production, agriculture, medicine, and many others.

The more relevant and high-quality data a system receives—and the better it is trained and evaluated—the more capable it can become.

AI: The Convergence of Human Progress

What makes AI particularly remarkable is that it appears to converge with many of the innovations that came before it.

Humanity has accumulated centuries of knowledge about how things work, how products are designed, how businesses operate, how diseases are treated, how energy is produced, how agriculture is managed, and how societies function.

AI has the potential to bring much of that accumulated knowledge together into systems capable of analyzing and applying it at extraordinary speed.

With time, as more data is collected, processed, evaluated, and incorporated into increasingly sophisticated models, AI may become an extraordinarily powerful tool for improving human life.

This is both exciting and frightening.

The Real Danger

The convenience of technology has already come with considerable costs.

Unlike previous revolutions, AI may also challenge the unique role humans have traditionally played in thinking, analyzing, and making decisions. We have experienced that if something is asked for or edited by ChatGPT or any other AI model we generally immediately accept the outcome produced by AI. That’s mean we are compromising our own abilities. Trust me as AI became more advanced we as humans most likely will become slaves of AI and lose our self-confidence and dignity.

Our memory capacity, for example, appears to be less actively used than in the past. We once memorized telephone numbers, spelling rules, directions, grammar, and other information. Today, we rely heavily on smartphones, search engines, GPS, and digital assistants to store and retrieve information.

Without realizing it, we have become dependent on these technologies—sometimes to the point where we may not even remember our own phone numbers.

More troubling is the potential erosion of independent human thinking.

We increasingly rely on technology for quick answers, analysis, recommendations, and even decision-making. If we stop exercising our own cognitive abilities because machines can do everything for us, those abilities may gradually weaken. I think very rightly Mayor of New York city Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced a one-year moratorium on student use of generative AI in public schools, effective for the 2026–27 school year, affecting nearly 600,000 students in grades 2–K through 8th. I think it is a good decision and hopefully other States to follow soon.

The danger is not simply that AI becomes smarter.

The danger is that humans may become less capable because they stop thinking for themselves.

A major technological failure, cyberattack, systemic error, or malfunction in a highly interconnected AI-dependent society could have consequences far beyond anything we have experienced before.

Can We Control the Pace?

A moderate and balanced approach to AI development could allow society to adapt gradually rather than react in panic.

But uncontrolled development could create serious risks.

AI is advancing at extraordinary speed; billions of dollars are invested in data warehouses. At some point, its capabilities may exceed our ability to fully understand, predict, or control its behavior.

Science-fiction movies have long imagined machines becoming powerful enough to threaten human civilization. Those stories are fictional, but the underlying question is no longer purely fictional:

What happens when the systems we create become more capable than the people who created them?

We do not yet know the answer.

Perhaps humanity will adapt, as it has adapted to every previous technological revolution. Perhaps AI will become one of the greatest tools ever created for improving human civilization.

Or perhaps we will discover that intelligence itself is the most powerful technology humanity has ever developed—and therefore the one that requires the greatest responsibility.

Conclusion

AI should neither be feared blindly nor embraced uncritically.

Its potential benefits are enormous. It can improve productivity, accelerate scientific discovery, enhance medicine, transform education, optimize industries, improve resource management, and make everyday life easier.

But the risks are equally significant.

The possibility of widespread displacement of human workers, increasing dependence on machines, erosion of independent thinking, concentration of economic power, misinformation, privacy concerns, and loss of human control must all be taken seriously.

The objective should not be to stop AI.

Instead, humanity must learn how to develop, regulate, and use AI responsibly.

The central challenge may not be whether AI will change the world. It almost certainly will.

The real question is:

Will we control AI—or will AI ultimately control us?

Is this how the world ends?

Or will humanity, as it has done throughout history, adapt to a new reality and continue striving for a better and more comfortable life for future generations?

Only time will tell.

And, somewhat ironically, this article was also edited with the help of AI.

By Salman Ghouri for Oilprice.com

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