They Said the Internet Would Take All the Jobs Too

"Useful technologies destroy some jobs but tend to create many more. The eternal problem is that it's hard to imagine new jobs before they are created."

— The Wall Street Journal, May 2026

It's graduation season, and Erik is hearing the same anxiety almost everywhere he turns. Thoughtful, caring parents are looking at their kids, kids who worked hard, who got their degrees, and who did everything right, and they are afraid. Will artificial intelligence take their jobs? Will the careers their children trained for still exist in ten years? Is the world the next generation is stepping into fundamentally more hostile to human labor than the one we stepped into?

In this month's episode, dedicated to his son Max and to every parent and graduate feeling that anxiety right now, Erik makes the case for evidence-based optimism. The fear, while completely understandable, is pointing at the wrong thing. And history, including very recent history, has something important to say to every anxious parent and every nervous graduate watching this moment unfold.

The Good News, and the Honest Tension Behind It

Corporate America is performing extraordinarily well right now. S&P 500 profit margins just hit their highest level in at least 15 years, 13.1% in the third quarter of 2025, surpassing a 5-year average of 11.5%. Analysts project margins could reach nearly 14% by the end of 2026. Earnings growth for the first quarter of 2026 is running at roughly 27% year over year, the strongest pace since 2021. The S&P 500 just closed at all-time highs above 7,300. By almost any measure, the financial performance of American businesses is exceptional.

Now here is the complicated truth that sits right behind those numbers. A meaningful portion of this margin expansion is being driven by AI reducing costs, especially labor costs. Companies are doing more with fewer people. Workflows that required teams of analysts are being handled by software. Customer service departments are being restructured around AI assistants. Middle layers of white-collar work, exactly the kind of work a college graduate might have expected to start a career doing, are being automated at a pace that was impossible to imagine even five years ago.

So the good news for the investor and the anxiety for the graduate come from exactly the same source. That tension is real. We want to sit with it honestly before we tell you why we think history gives us good reason to be optimistic anyway.

A Hundred Years of the Same Fear

A few weeks ago, a research firm called Citrini Research published a report describing a hypothetical future in which AI causes mass job destruction by 2028. White-collar workers flood the labor market. Wages collapse. The consumer economy stalls. It painted a genuinely bleak picture, triggered a modest market selloff, and was covered everywhere.

Then The Wall Street Journal ran a piece pointing out something every anxious parent and every anxious graduate should read carefully. The headline: "Robots Have Been About to Take All the Jobs for 100 Years." The article cites a researcher named Louis Anslow, who has spent years cataloguing dire warnings about technology-driven job destruction. The collection is remarkable.

In 1928, as farm mechanization accelerated, a headline warned: "March of the Machine Makes Idle Hands." Today, less than 2% of Americans work in agriculture, and we have more employed people than at any point in our history. In 1940, the New York Times asked, "Does Machine Displace Men in the Long Run?" The number of jobs in the U.S. has roughly quintupled since then. In 1980, just before one of the greatest job-creation booms in American history, the Times announced: "A Robot Is After Your Job." Since then, the United States has added more than 60 million jobs and real wages have risen substantially.

Remember When the Internet Was Going to Take All the Jobs?

Cast your mind back to the late 1990s and early 2000s. The internet was transforming everything. Bookstores were going to disappear. Travel agents were already gone. Newspaper classifieds, an entire industry, were wiped out overnight by Craigslist. Bank tellers were being replaced by ATMs. The alarm was genuine and the disruption was real.

In the year 2000, when many of today's new graduates were being born, a young person walking out of college could not have gotten a job as a social media manager (Facebook wouldn't be founded for another four years). They could not have been an SEO specialist, because the field barely existed. They could not have worked as a mobile app developer, because the iPhone was seven years away. They could not have been a data scientist, a cloud architect, a UX designer, a content strategist, a podcast producer, an influencer, a YouTuber, or any of a hundred other roles that now employ millions of people and did not exist at all in the year 2000.

In the year 2000, you could not have imagined these jobs. Not because you weren't smart enough. Because they literally did not exist. The internet had not yet created the ecosystem in which they would grow. They were unimaginable, and then, within a decade, they were everywhere.

This is the eternal problem with predictions of technology-driven unemployment. It is hard to imagine new jobs before they are created. We can see clearly what is being automated. We cannot see clearly what is being born. The fear is always asymmetric: the losses are visible, the gains are invisible, and pessimism wins the argument in the short run even when optimism is correct over the long run.

To Max, and to Every Graduate of 2026

Yes, AI is going to change the jobs you might have expected to do. Some entry-level tasks that previous generations used to learn their craft, the first-year analyst work, the junior associate research, the early-career writing and summarizing, are going to be done differently. Some of them will be done by AI. That is real.

But here is what we also know, from 30 years of watching the economy evolve. The graduates who thrive will not be the ones who competed with AI. They will be the ones who learned to work with it. The ones who figured out how to use these extraordinary new tools to do in a day what used to take a week. The ones who brought the judgment, the creativity, the relationship-building, the ethical reasoning, the human context that AI cannot replicate, and combined it with AI's speed and scale to become extraordinarily productive.

The jobs Max's generation will have in 2036, the ones that will define their careers and their contributions, many of those jobs do not have names yet. They are being born right now, in the same way that "social media manager" was being born in 2004, in the same way that "app developer" was being born in 2008. We cannot see them yet, not because they aren't coming, but because they aren't here yet.

The Investor Habit in All of This

What does any of this have to do with the habits of great investors? Everything. The anxiety parents are feeling about their children's futures is structurally identical to the anxiety investors feel about their portfolios during periods of rapid technological change. The fear is the same: something powerful and new is disrupting everything I thought I understood, and I cannot see how it ends well.

The habit of the great investor is the ability to hold a long enough time horizon that the gains become visible, not just the losses. The investor who sold their portfolio in 2000 because the internet was going to destroy retail locked in a loss and missed one of the greatest bull markets in history. The investor who holds through transformation, who understands that creative destruction creates as much as it destroys, and usually more, is the one who benefits from the full arc of progress.

The same is true for the parent watching their child graduate. The parent who is frozen in fear, convinced that this time is genuinely different and the future is genuinely bleak, is making the same mistake as the investor who bailed in 2000 or 2008 or March 2020. They are extrapolating the visible disruption forward while failing to account for the invisible creation that always follows it.

Great investors are, at their core, optimists with evidence. Not optimists because they refuse to see risk, but optimists because they have studied enough history to know that human ingenuity, applied through the lens of new technology, has never failed to create more than it destroys. Not always quickly. Not always painlessly. But always, over time, with remarkable generosity toward those who stayed the course.

Helping those you care about

The purpose of our Great Investors series is to help you become an outstandingly successful investor by following the principles of patience and discipline required to prosper as an equity investor. No doubt, "Mr. Market" periodically tests that patience and discipline by subjecting investors to emotional swings, possibly causing many to make a big mistake. Only those who faithfully adhere to a rock-solid investing philosophy will pass those tests.

Successful investing, while always fundamentally simple, will never be easy. You may have a family member, colleague, or friend who perhaps has not fared as well recently, and who you feel might have benefited from the sort of advice you're receiving. Should that be the case, we would certainly appreciate your introducing us to them. We very much enjoy working with you and would welcome the opportunity to offer the same level of planning and service to the people you care about.