We Have Seen This Fear Before

Screens changed the office long before AI changed work.

By Mustafa Tameez
CEO & President of Outreach Strategists
6/16/2026

Last week, I wrote about AI that can see, listen, and coach us in real time. That technology feels new because it is. But the fear around it is not new. Every generation of work has had its own version of this moment, the moment when a tool stops feeling like assistance and starts feeling like replacement.

AI is not the first automation shock. We have already lived through several versions of this story.

I started my career in 1989, and one of the first things I had to master was a calculator with a paper tape. I was working on 1099 payroll for a company called Broadcast Arts. They produced Pee wee’s Playhouse, the Post Raisin Bran commercials with the dancing raisins, and other work that made them a leader in animation. They hired hundreds of graphic artists who drew by hand.

My job was not glamorous, but I was proud of it. I learned to add paycheck information on that calculator without looking down. The paper tape would run, the numbers would print, and I felt like I had mastered a real tool of the office.

In my next job, I worked for Akzo America, which was acquiring companies across the country. I ended up working on executive compensation and was given an IBM PS/2 system. It had an 80 MB hard drive and a math processor. People from other floors would come up just to see it. They would look at the tower and say things like, “You’ll never use 80 MB of space. That’s too much.”

At the time, they were probably right. But they were also wrong in the larger sense. They could not yet see what was coming. None of us could.

I remember another moment from that era. In that second job, I had to meet one of the partners at a large law firm to drop something off. What struck me was that he had not one but two secretaries sitting outside his office. When I asked about it, he explained that one took dictation and was exceptionally good at it. The other handled legal research.

That world did not disappear all at once, but it did disappear. Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, email, databases, and eventually online research changed the structure of the white collar office. Typing pools disappeared. Secretarial support shrank. Legal research moved from rooms of books and specialized staff to searchable databases and then to every lawyer’s desktop. Today, if you walk into most white-shoe law firms, you would be lucky to find one admin supporting five partners.

Technology did not eliminate the work overnight. It changed how the work was done and how many people were needed to do it.

That was the beginning of the transformation of white collar work. The personal computer moved office work away from paper and into software. Then the internet connected those machines to each other. Work that once lived in filing cabinets, local offices, and human memory became data.

Looking back, I now see those office changes as part of the same story that had already begun on the factory floor.

The first automation shock was visible. It happened in factories, coal towns, steel towns, and manufacturing communities. Machines, trade, productivity gains, global supply chains, and corporate restructuring changed industrial work. In places like Appalachia and the industrial Midwest, the loss showed up in shuttered plants, declining wages, broken local tax bases, and communities still living with the consequences.

The second version was quieter. It happened in the office.

Y2K forced companies and governments to look inside their aging systems and spend heavily on programmers, consultants, and modernization. After the crisis passed, many of those systems did not go away. They became the foundation for a new generation of enterprise software.

ERP systems, customer databases, digital finance systems, HR platforms, procurement software, and workflow tools began standardizing the back office. They did not eliminate white collar work all at once. They made it more measurable, more centralized, more process driven, and easier to outsource or reduce. The office worker did not see a robot roll onto the floor. The office worker saw a new login screen.

In 2004, the year I started my business, the next shift was already underway. Facebook launched. Gmail made web based email feel like a real application. Salesforce went public and helped signal that business software was moving into the cloud. The office was no longer just being computerized. It was being connected to platforms.

Then, in 2007, the iPhone changed the boundary of work itself. The office was no longer just a place. It became a device. Email, calendars, approvals, sales calls, customer issues, media monitoring, documents, and decisions moved into people’s pockets. White collar work became portable, always connected, and harder to separate from personal life.

Then came the iPad in 2010. The screen was no longer something we only typed into. It became something we touched, swiped, carried, and handed to someone else.

Then Covid arrived, and Zoom became a way of life. Work moved out of the office not as a perk, but as a necessity. Meetings, sales calls, school, medicine, government, and family life all passed through the same screen. Even after people returned to offices, the old boundary had been broken. Remote work was no longer unusual. It had become part of the operating system of modern work.

The iPhone made work portable. The iPad made screens more natural. Zoom made remote work normal. AI may make work conversational.

That is the real lineage of AI. AI did not show up in a workplace that was standing still. It arrived after decades of turning work into files, screens, databases, logins, dashboards, alerts, video calls, and mobile devices. The factory worker saw automation first as a machine. The office worker experienced it first as software. Now both are seeing it as intelligence.

None of this means the earlier technologies were bad. The personal computer made many workers more capable. The internet opened markets. The iPhone put tools in our pockets that once required entire offices. Zoom kept institutions functioning when the world shut down. The issue is not whether these tools are useful. They are. The issue is that usefulness does not erase the disruption that comes with them.

Since I started writing this Substack, I have talked to people who are genuinely reluctant about AI. Some have opened up to me in ways that surprised me. Their concern is not just that they do not understand the technology. It is that they do understand enough to worry about what it could mean for their work, their careers, and their sense of control.

That is anecdotal, but it is not isolated. Recent polling shows that more than half of Americans fear AI could cost them or someone in their household a job, and nearly three quarters say they are uneasy about AI’s growing role. Pew also found in 2025 that 64% of the public believes AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years. The point is not that AI has already produced mass job loss. It has not. The point is that many people already believe they know how this story can end.

Last week, that anxiety had another contrast. SpaceX went public, and Elon Musk reportedly became the world’s first trillionaire on paper. That does not make SpaceX any less remarkable. It is one of the great technology stories of our time. But anxiety grows when the rewards of a technological future appear to concentrate among a few, while many workers struggle to see themselves in that same future. The fear is not only that new tools will change work. It is that the people expected to adapt to those tools may not share equally in the value they create.

The lesson is not that technology instantly destroys all jobs. The lesson is that technology changes where power sits, which workers become invisible, and how long it takes society to admit what happened.

The question with AI that can see, listen, and coach us live is not whether people will find uses for it. They will. The harder question is whether workers will feel strengthened by it or watched by it, helped by it or measured by it, coached by it or replaced by it.

That is why this moment feels so charged. We are not just meeting a new technology. We are remembering every prior version of work that technology changed. And whether people embrace AI may depend less on what the tools can do than on whether workers believe those tools are being built with them, or simply aimed at them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources and Further Reading

1. Pew Research Center: Public and Expert Predictions for AI’s Next 20 Years: Useful for understanding public concerns about AI, jobs, and long-term workforce change. Source link
2. Gallup and SCSP: American Perspectives on AI: Useful for broader public attitudes toward AI adoption, trust, regulation, and economic impact. Source link
3. NIST: AI Risk Management Framework: Useful for responsible AI adoption, risk management, governance, transparency, and trust. Source link
4. Stanford HAI: 2025 AI Index Report: Useful for AI trends, economic influence, policy context, and social impact. Source link
5. Recent reporting on AI, work, and wealth concentration: Useful for contextualizing the article’s discussion of technology rewards, investor value, and worker anxiety.

VP’s Take

VP’s Take: AI adoption will depend on more than technical capability. Organizations will need to communicate how new tools affect people, workflows, career pathways, and trust. For employers, workforce organizations, and public institutions, the real challenge is helping people understand change before fear becomes the dominant story.

– Sabiha Gire, VP Client Services

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