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If you are no longer in your 20s, do you remember what that time was like?
Do you remember a mix of possibility and panic when it came to your career?
In this talk, technologist Vlad Tenev takes us way back in the history of work and then rockets us forward through the massive tech revolutions that recent generations have lived through, one after another.
Throughout, he traces one sweeping pattern that might leave us rethinking everything we thought we knew about AI technology and the future of work.
Let's take a moment and reflect back upon our lives when we were 20 years old.
Think about where you were and the opportunities for work and career that lay in front of you.
I'm curious.
Tell me, how many of you had a pretty good idea of what you wanted to do for your career?
Okay, not too many.
How many were overwhelmed by all the options?
Okay.
I know I felt the same.
Well, buckle up.
It's only going to get more overwhelming.
When I was 20 years old, I was graduating from Stanford University with a degree in pure mathematics.
Nobody had sat me down to tell me that my pure math major wasn't going to be the most desirable qualification for prospective employers.
And I probably wouldn't have listened if they did.
So I went off along my default path a math PhD program at UCLA, buying at least one more year to figure out my career.
Now my first month in graduate school.
Lehman Brothers went under the start of the global financial crisis.
Most of my friends, particularly the ones that felt the most secure in their financial careers, found themselves packing up their cubicles out of work.
Some of us wondered whether the economy would recover at all or whether we were in store for another decade-long Great Depression.
But amidst the uncertainty, the pessimism, the malaise really, of that time, some of us found a source of optimism.
The iPhone, and in particular, the App Store, came out that very same year, 2008.
I still remember when the SDK, which was the instruction manual for how to build iPhone apps, was released.
I was at my parents' house, and I was up all night reading it, learning, trying to understand.
I saw an opportunity for a new level playing field.
And, if you think about it, pretty much everything I've done since then, the company that I created my professional career since that point, was a product both of the economic malaise but the technological optimism of the time as well.
But times have changed.
If the questions I'm hearing on the podcast circuit are any indication, the average 20-year-old today also has quite a bit of fear.
But this time, emerging technology is not the antidote to that fear.
It's the source.
And they're asking themselves, will that career I'm looking at even be around in 10 years?
Will humans still be writing computer software?
Will we even be writing books?
And I think one reason why it feels different this time is because AI, unlike the iPhone, is the first tool that we've built that's capable of leaving the toolbox, and we don't yet know its limits.
A few years ago, I founded another company with the mission to build mathematical superintelligence.
That's an artificial intelligence that can reason and solve problems better than any mathematician.
You know, when I grew up, I always thought of mathematics as the pinnacle of human intellectual activity.
If you could solve math problems, you could do pretty much anything.
So, a superhuman AI at mathematics could potentially be superhuman at everything.
And that's a bit of a scary thought.
So when you think about that, and I combine that with my day job, which is running a global financial services platform, it's led to me spending a lot of time pondering one very important question.
What do we do in a world where the vast majority of today's jobs are gone?
And I want to analyze this question rationally, without fear and hyperbole.
One way to do it is to look back through history and see if there's been a time where we faced this type of job disruption before, at anything near these levels, and how we as humans have navigated it.
I should... say one thing.
I'm a technologist, not a historian.
So with that caveat, let's go back in time to a world a 20-year-old would have known very long ago, tens of thousands of years ago to be more precise.
The main occupations of this time, the Paleolithic era, are largely gone.
Hunters, gatherers, tool makers, but they didn't disappear overnight.
Instead, they were subdivided into lots of other more specialized jobs.
So why don't we move forward to the Neolithic era?
Now here, humans have mastered a few new things farming, keeping livestock and this was a big transformation.
Actually, the invention of these things allowed us to spend more time doing what we consider creative work and less time on pure survival and subsistence.
And this opened up a lot of new jobs.
You had artisans, like weavers.
You had farmers, of course potters, construction laborers, and these jobs too, largely all gone.
So, in the US today, we should say, farmers make up less than 2% of the workforce.
Let's move ahead through the changing jobs of the Bronze Age, the Iron Age one of my favorites the Dark Ages, the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration.
Too many jobs to count, a lot of them are gone.
Now, any blacksmiths or explorers in this room?
I didn't think so.
I would have loved to be an explorer.
How cool of a job would that be? it might come back with space exploration.
My great-grandfather was a farmer in a village near Stara Zagora, Bulgaria.
Now, legend has it he was the first person in his village to see an automobile, and when he saw it he ran back into the village and said there's a dragon out in the fields.
His son, my grandfather, was also a farmer that didn't venture too far from the village.
His son.
My father was the first in his family to go to the big city Varna Bulgaria, on the Black Sea coast, where I was also born.
There he became a professor of tourism, which was certainly a job that my grandfather and great-grandfather never imagined.
If you think about it, most of our last names are from jobs that our families no longer do.
Potter. butler, butcher, even the most common, smith.
Any Fletchers in the audience?
Anyone know what a Fletcher is?
I was going over my talk this weekend, and my son said, I know what a Fletcher is, Dad.
He plays Minecraft.
Everything old is new again, right?
A Fletcher is someone that makes and sells arrows.
So if you know someone with that last name, their relatives were arms dealers.
Now my point in all of this is you can probably take any prediction that you see in the media of job disruption and in the fullness of time.
At some point, even that will be an underestimate.
Even that will be conservative.
And what we find is that job disruption is then an essential quality of human evolution.
We want work to disappear, because it means that we're doing our jobs as humans, making our lives better and easier.
And when it comes to labor, we yearn to increase dollars earned per hour worked.
And this creates the market for the ever-improving set of innovations that save us time and money.
So with AI, maybe it's not the job disruption itself that makes us so nervous, but the speed with which it's happening and the acceleration.
Maybe that's what makes us nervous.
So why don't we accelerate?
We're going to go right through the Industrial Revolution into the modern era.
So in the 20th century, a young person, in the wake of companies expanding and automating there was a lot of change would have found an entirely new menu of jobs that their parents never had access to.
So instead of working in a factory, they would have had the selection of a wide assortment of new office jobs.
And some of the parents were probably thinking, you sit in a chair all day.
That's not real work.
Now, let's go through the Internet era.
Most of us have lived through at least a portion of this, and we see all around us jobs that didn't exist before.
Some of us are probably in them, maybe most of us.
I know I am.
So where does all this leave our 20-year-old at the dawn of the AI era?
One feature that we found is recurrent throughout generations is this feeling of exceptionalism.
We'd like to think that somehow we're at a discontinuity, where history ends, and we're in a new world with no precedent.
And maybe it's true this time.
We really don't know if we're building a super assistant or an apex predator.
We don't.
And certainly all change and disruption brings with it a painful transition.
Jobs will disappear.
Perhaps they'll disappear at an accelerating rate.
But at the same time, what we've gone through here is tens of thousands of years of human history, and we see one undeniable trend there's gonna be new jobs and lots and lots of them.
AI researchers talk about this idea of a singularity, an intelligence explosion.
But what we see in the data is that we're also on a curve of rapidly accelerating job creation, which I like to call the job singularity.
A Cambrian explosion of not just new jobs, but new job families across every imaginable field.
Where the Internet gave people worldwide reach, AI gives them a world-class staff.
And so, if you look at this cloud of jobs, certainly there's going to be some jobs that we can't predict yet.
But I think we can make some predictions.
There's going to be a flurry of new entrepreneurial activity with micro corporations, solo institutions and single-person unicorns which, by the way, I don't think we're very far from.
Another defining feature of this job, singularity is that when you look into the future, the jobs will not look like real work.
Much like to our predecessors, our current jobs would have looked like leisure.
We have people getting paid to play video games, eat at restaurants, travel and talk to their friends on video.
Those last people we call podcast bros.
And we take our jobs very seriously.
Those of us that do well certainly wouldn't say it's easy.
But if you took someone from the 20th century, when people first started contemplating these problems and they could peek into our world today, they would think that all of the predictions around technological unemployment came true.
They'd say we don't have any more jobs, and I bet that we would feel the same about our descendants in the future.
So now what?
We've shown that there's going to be lots of jobs to choose from some would argue too many and that the jobs, along with the flurry of new entrepreneurial activity, will likely look like leisure to us, much like our jobs did to our ancestors.
And I can tell you with near certainty that a humanity that's capable of building a super-intelligent AI also has the creativity to navigate through this potential job.
Doom and gloom scenario.
Although we'll never stop worrying about it.
We'll never stop worrying about it because being hypervigilant about threats to our survival is a key part of our survival mechanism, also a key part of evolution.
What makes us human?
And although it'll take a lot of time to go into what kind of jobs are future-proofed, I can tell you that you shouldn't take predictions about future job disruption to keep you from doing something you feel very passionately about.
You know, when I was a kid in the 90s, teachers discouraged me from becoming a computer programmer.
I don't know if many else heard this, but back then it was a common thought that all those jobs would be shipped off to China.
Around the same time, if you guys remember, 1997, Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in chess.
That was the first time an AI succeeded in what was considered a solely human intellectual affair.
But now, the chess industry is booming bigger than ever.
So even where it seems obvious, sometimes our predictions of the future end up being completely off.
Humanity has always excelled at providing itself with meaning and purpose, even in the darkest and most uncertain of times.
So, if I had to guess, I feel very, very confident that the 20-year-olds of the future, perhaps in collaboration with AI, will continue to build new things which simultaneously, we're going to be scared of but also excited by.
Thank you for considering these ideas.
That was Vlad Tenev at TED AI in San Francisco, California in 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Christopher Fasey-Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
