Editorial note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™.

The world loves breakthroughs in technology, not only for what they can do for society but also for what they have done and can continue to do for employment. According to McKinsey & Co., most historical technological breakthroughs have led to more employment, even if they displaced previous jobs. Unfortunately, we will not see that with artificial intelligence (AI).

Before we discuss the current state of AI, let’s look at the biggest technological breakthroughs over the past 250 years to see how different AI is when it comes to the relationship between investment, impact, and employment.

Starting with the Industrial Revolution, this era had two key periods that produced different breakthroughs.

According to Britannica, the First Industrial Revolution, from 1760-1830, was in Great Britain and brought about technological developments like the Spinning Jenny — a mechanical way to spin thread for clothing that was previously done by hand or manual spinning wheel — and the cotton gin, which was able to quickly separate cotton fibers from seeds, a task also previously done by hand.

Britannica reports that these breakthroughs led to job displacement but also created new jobs within the textile industry that did not exist before. These innovations led to the cotton boom in the U.S., with enslaved people producing over 2 billion pounds of cotton each year by 1860, per the National Park Service.

A similar pattern happened with the improvements introduced to the steam engine by James Watt in 1765. His improvements set the stage for American manufacturing, as the steam engine enabled the powering of more factories, trains, and ships, which led to more employment across the board in these industries. The modern manufacturing industry was born from this breakthrough, creating a need for more factory workers, machine technicians, engineers, and miners. There was also an increase in the need for railroad workers, from those who worked on the railroads themselves to those who ran the train stations. The First Industrial Revolution showed that breakthroughs can lead not only to increased investment but also to increased employment for people.

The Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914) was larger than the first when it came to the types of employment opportunities it opened up. These opportunities were created by breakthroughs in steel, electricity, communication, and transportation. In steel, the creation of the Bessemer Process introduced mass production of steel, which then created jobs in steel production, railroad construction, and commercial construction. The advancement of electricity via Thomas Edison inventing the light bulb created a variety of jobs, such as electrical engineers, electricians, power plant workers, and utility workers. The communication breakthrough with the telegraph by Samuel Morse, among other inventors, and telephone by Alexander Graham Bell created new roles for people as well. One of the notable roles was the telegraph operator. Telegraph operators were trained to send and receive information in Morse code and were usually found working for news stations, train stations, and telegraph offices. It was one of the higher-paid technical jobs created at the time. Less technical roles like messengers to deliver messages and linemen to build the physical infrastructure for the telecommunications industry were also created.

We hoped to see a similar pattern with AI and data centers, but the data centers that power AI only require a fraction of the people needed when compared to the telecommunications industry.

After the advancements of electricity and communication, the creation of the computer and later the internet prompted the Third Industrial Revolution where innovation spurred investment and increased employment, leading to the need for workers like software engineers, product managers, designers, and those in operational roles to run a tech company.

When looking at the past industrial revolutions, it is easy to see how AI will play out differently for the Fourth Industrial Revolution when it comes to increasing employment, partly because the goal of AI is to reduce human headcount, but also because the breakthrough of AI does not require a lot of employees to create and serve value to consumers or companies.

AI’s current impact on employment is not that it is replacing people, but that companies of all sizes are very cautious about hiring before figuring out how far they can go with AI alone. This has made software, which has been a growth industry for the better part of the last 20 years, no longer an industry where employment is abundant. I don’t see this being a short-term trend; I see this as the future of what working in software looks like. The tech industry has matured, and when an industry matures it becomes less likely to give people the outsized economic outcomes that people were used to seeing in the world of software and startups. Working in tech today is much different than it was yesterday, and everyone should understand that and navigate accordingly.