My wife will tell you, I can quote about 4 movies, all of which are my favorites, and I replay them in my head every day. Today's movie is Moneyball. It has so many different messages intertwined throughout that it's hard for me not to love it.
Today I am going to touch on something that a lot of people are concerned about. AI taking their livelihoods and wondering when the axe is going to fall. There's a scene in Moneyball that fits almost perfectly with this exact situation.
A room full of baseball scouts with decades of knowledge. Men who had dedicated their lives to looking for talent, watching past games, trusting their gut. And they are sitting there watching their entire framework get dismantled by Jonah Hill with a spreadsheet.
They weren't wrong about baseball. They were good at what they did and loved the game. But things were changing, in REAL time right before their eyes. Their pattern recognition built over careers, tied to their identity, the thing that made them valuable, was suddenly being replicated faster and cheaper by statistics. Something they weren't going to end up being part of. Billy Beane can be seen dropping the axe right in front of the entire group. "This is not a discussion." Then he proceeded to essentially demonstrate what was replacing them. Sound familiar?
Here is what nobody in the current AI panic wants to acknowledge.
We have seen this film before. Many times. Going back centuries. And it always ends the same way.
In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press. The scribes of Europe, a professional class whose livelihood depended on hand-copying texts, whose skill had taken years to develop, whose identity was wrapped in their craft, faced extinction almost overnight.
What followed was the Renaissance and no, I'm not talking about the hotel chain. New professions emerged that nobody had imagined. The world became almost incomprehensibly better, and faster than anyone predicted.
In early 19th century England, textile workers known as the Luddites were so terrified of mechanized looms that they organized rebellions and smashed machinery. The British government sent in the military to stop them. The Luddites weren't wrong that their specific jobs were being eliminated. What they couldn't see was that the textile industry was about to employ more people than ever before, at higher wages, and clothe a global population at a fraction of the cost.
When electricity arrived in the late 1800s, lamplighters watched their profession evaporate, or should I say extinguish. Lamplighters smashed electric lamps in protest. Today electricity runs the entire world and the jobs it created are too numerous to count.
Every single time a new technology came around, people acted the same way. The fear of being replaced, which was completely rational. Now we read about it in textbooks, which I was told by my niece they don't use anymore, or on the school issued computer. See what I did there?
Why This Time Feels Different
The fear cuts deeper this time, and there's a real reason for it.
Every previous disruption I just described threatened physical labor. Machines took the lifting, the weaving, the lighting, the riding. What they did not threaten was the knowledge worker. The lawyer, the analyst, the strategist, the advisor.
AI threatens cognition. For people who built their careers, their identity, and their sense of relevance on thinking for a living, that is unsettling in a way that a mechanical loom never was for a professional class.
I get it. I've spent 15+ years in investment management. I know exactly what it feels like when your differentiator starts to look like a commodity.
But look at what is actually happening when organizations deploy AI against knowledge work. Capgemini (I have no idea who Capgemini is) surveyed 1,500 senior executives across 15 countries earlier this year. Two thirds reported that human-AI collaboration led to measurable improvements in productivity and decision quality. Not replacement. JPMorgan's AI platform saves 360,000 legal work hours per year, which means JPMorgan's lawyers are doing different work, not less work. Walmart saved 4 million developer hours through AI coding tools. Their technology team is larger than ever.
I used AI to help craft this post, and why not? I spent the time gathering more data than I would have been able to on my own. It increases the amount of information I can use to identify trends, potential risk, and in this case the fear of replacement.
For most roles, AI is currently automating somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of tasks. Which means humans still own 70 to 80 percent. The nature of the job changes. The job doesn't disappear.
The scouts didn't disappear from baseball either. The ones who adapted became more valuable than before because they could combine decades of contextual judgment with tools that could process what no human brain could handle alone. The ones who refused to adapt lost relevance not to the machine, but to their own resistance.
The Pattern Is the Point
Here is what strikes me most when I look across 600 years of this.
The fear is not irrational. Every person who smashed a loom, picketed against electricity, or sat in that Moneyball scouting room had legitimate reasons for their anxiety. The disruption was real. The short-term loss was real.
But the long-run outcome has been the same every single time across a millennium of evidence. The technology creates more than it destroys. Human beings find new ways to contribute. The standard of living rises. Work evolves rather than disappears.
Betting against that pattern doesn't make you a realist. It makes you the scout who walked out of the room.
The game changed from swinging for the fence to getting on base. The game didn't die. People adapted like they always do.
Chad & Claude