Josh's instinct is always to reach for a matching disaster from history. He thinks that's a trap, because by the time you pick the analogy, you've already picked the answer.

He found the proof in a New York Times episode his wife sent him. The chief economics correspondent Ben Casselman laid out two futures for AI. One matched the internet, which displaced travel agents slowly enough that most just aged out. The other matched the China shock, which flattened entire manufacturing towns overnight.

Josh traced where these comparisons actually come from. Mary Daly at the San Francisco Fed reaches for electricity, because for a central banker the moral has to be patience. Journalist Brian Merchant reaches for the Luddites, because the real history is nine years of factory workers petitioning Parliament before anyone smashed a loom. Neither side is lying. They're just telling you what they think their job is by which wreck they pick.

Josh built a timeline of these disruptions for a talk in Seattle and checked every date against a source. Three of the most repeated stories turned out to be folklore. He kept them in anyway, labeled, because a myth people keep reaching for still tells you something true about what they're scared of.

Follow The Job Sh*t Show investigation at https://joshlevine.substack.com

About The Job Sh*t Show

The Job Sh*t Show is an investigation into how finding, keeping, and doing work is changing faster than anyone is admitting — and what that actually looks like for real people on the ground. The Sh*t List is a paid Substack for leaders who want to stay ahead of what AI is doing to the workplace — and actually do something about it. Every other week, subscribers get a new AI Manager Skill: one practical, field-tested move for leading your team better in an AI world.