The AI panic is 65 years old

This week I read an article about technology destroying jobs.

Workers were being displaced. Companies were producing more with fewer people. Office jobs were starting to disappear. Experts were worried retraining wouldn’t work if there were no jobs waiting at the end of it.

AI is coming.
We’re all doomed.
Learn to weld.

Except the article wasn’t about AI.

It was published by TIME on 24 February 1961.

Sixty-five years ago!!

The scary technology was automation.

And honestly, if you swapped the word “automation” for “AI”, half the article could run on LinkedIn tomorrow without anyone noticing.

TIME reported that chemical production had risen 27% while production jobs fell. Steel plants could produce more with fewer workers. Banks expected new machines would let them dramatically expand without increasing staff.

Then there was this cracker.

At the US Census Bureau, 50 people were doing work that had required 4,100 statisticians a decade earlier.

Imagine LinkedIn in 1961.

“STATISTICIANS ARE FINISHED.”

But buried in the article was the line that matters most.

Congressman Elmer Holland said:

“One of the greatest problems with automation is not the worker who is fired, but the worker who is not hired.”

Now THAT is the bit we all should be paying attention to.

Because technology doesn’t have to wipe out an entire profession to change the labour market.

A company doesn’t need to sack 500 people and replace them with ChatGPT.

It might simply hire three people instead of five.

It might not replace the junior who leaves.

It might decide one experienced employee with better technology can handle work that previously needed a small team.

That matters enormously for people trying to get into an occupation, particularly graduates and career changers who need someone to give them the first shot.

And before anyone gets too comfortable, the 1961 article also warned that the new jobs being created required different skills from the jobs disappearing.

Sound familiar?

This is why I’m deeply suspicious of both sides of the AI argument.

“AI will take all the jobs” is lazy.

So is “people panicked about automation before and everything turned out fine”.

Both skip the messy bit in the middle.

Jobs change. Hiring changes. Some roles shrink. Other roles grow. New ones appear.

And people still get caught in the transition.

We’ve been doing this for decades.

The lesson from 1961 isn’t that we should ignore AI because automation panic is old.

It’s that technological change rarely arrives as one giant job apocalypse.

It shows up quietly in headcount, hiring decisions, skill requirements and the work companies decide they no longer need humans to do.

So don’t spend your energy trying to predict whether your job will exist in 2035.

Look closer.

What parts of your work are becoming easier to automate? What skills are becoming more valuable? And if your employer could suddenly do more with fewer people, why would they still need you?

That’s a much more useful question than:

“Is AI taking my job?”

Turns out we’ve been asking the wrong question since 1961.

~Lisa

Your Q&A

Show Your Working

Hi Lisa,

I’m interviewing for a senior people leader position at a tech company. They sent me tips for the interview process, and one of the things to be included was a “Problem Solving Process”. Do you know what a problem-solving question could look like?

The information I have so far is:

• Interviewers will be evaluating your problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. There may not be any right answer; they are mostly curious about how you think, approach challenges and come up with solutions.
• They want to ensure that you are capable of identifying the problem, using data to narrow down possible solutions, presenting a detailed but concise solution, and following up on how to measure if solution was/will be successful
• Think of this like solving a math problem and showing your work. Definitely talk through your thought process, so the interviewers can follow along.
• Be sure to ask clarifying questions to ensure you fully understand the question being asked and be comfortable making assumptions.
• It’s more important to take a moment, pause and gather your thoughts before answering the questions so you can give a full but concise answer as it helps limit scattered thinking and fluff

Thanks, Debbie

Hi Debbie,

I suspect they’re using a combination of General Cognitive Ability (GCA) and Role-Related Knowledge (RRK) questions.

Which sounds fancy.

For a senior people leader role, I’d expect scenarios around things like scaling a team quickly, resource allocation, competing priorities, a budget freeze, poor performance data, or the classic corporate favourite: “We need to do more with less.”

And this is one of those occasions where AI is genuinely useful for interview preparation.

Feed it the position description, the interview guidance you’ve been given, and ask it to create realistic problem-solving scenarios for a senior people leader using GCA and RRK-style questions.

Then practise answering them out loud.

The biggest clue, though, is sitting right inside the information they’ve already given you:

• Identify the problem.
• Use data to narrow the options.
• Present your solution.
• Explain how you’ll measure whether it worked.

That maps very neatly onto the SAO framework:

Situation: What is actually going wrong?

Action: What information do you need, what assumptions are you making, and how would you decide what to do?

Outcome: What would success look like and how would you measure it?

And yes, pause before answering.

Five seconds of silence feels much longer to you than it does to the interviewer.

It’s certainly better than thinking out loud for seven minutes and accidentally taking everyone on a guided tour of your brain.

Thanks for writing in.

~Lisa