Do jobs go extinct´-or-just return from the museum?

I often find myself mentally reconstructing the complete workflow of my early career as an engineering programmer over four decades ago. It was an era before computing power became ubiquitous. We relied on small, black handheld calculators to add, subtract, calculate roots and solve the differential equations governing the design and fabrication of high-pressure vessels and heat exchangers. We deconstructed engineering blue-print-s mentally and mathematically, translating them into stacks of papers and drawings before turning them into raw iron and stainless steel in the workshop. Because engineers frequently suffer from an operational blindness regarding their own errors, protocol dictated that one colleague rigorously audit another’s calculations. It was a time of mental clarity, paper, pencil and the rhythmic clicking of manual calculators.
Today, what once took us days of gruelling auditing is completed by artificial intelligence in a matter of minutes. Yet, has the role of the engineering programmer gone extinct? Far from it. The job has merely reinvented itself. The engineer has evolved from a mechanical calculator of plate areas and pipe dimensions into an auditor of machine intelligence, a human firewall standing between data inputs and algorithmic outputs to protect industrial infrastructure from machine “hallucination.”
This evolution raises a fundamental question governing the trajectory of labour history: How are professions born in the first place? And where do new jobs come from when old ones wither away?
We must travel nearly 240 years back in time to Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations, ” where he identified the primary engine of occupational birth: specialisation and the division of labour. Jobs, in their essence, are merely bundles of tasks. As markets expanded and swelled, those task bundles fragmented into narrower, hyper-specialised trades. Historical trade registers in Britain document how the humble profession of “watchmaker” in 1550 had, two centuries later, fractured into over thirty distinct trades, giving rise to watch engravers, gilders, balance-spring makers, and gear cutters.
Yet modern technology is currently playing a reverse game that Adam Smith never foresaw. Artificial intelligence does not merely invent new niche roles, such as “prompt engineer”´-or-“machine ethics analyst,” it actively executes a process of task re-aggregation. Algorithms have eliminated relatively modern professions like photo developers, switchboard operators, typists and typesetters, consolidating their -function-s into a single smartphone application. The crisis of human expression deepens further when music no longer requires a composer´-or-an instrumentalist-;- algorithms step forward with historical audacity, crushing the composer and performer to compose and play music without human hesitation´-or-modesty.
The true threat of artificial intelligence lies not merely in its capacity to devour jobs but in its ability to clone the concept of specialisation itself. It transcends Smith’s practical division of labour to offer “hyper-assembled knowledge.” The machine no longer acts as a mere substitute for a worker in a specific task-;- it swallows the entire bundle, from analysis to execution. This leaves the human element with a binary choice: either ascend to the level of a “critical superviser” who steers the machine´-or-regress entirely toward primitive, tactile trades that technology fails to replicate.
This brings us to the most striking paradox in the history of human labour: professions do not always advance through futuristic technological leaps-;- sometimes, they rebound straight out of the museum under the crushing weight of scarcity.
In the novel “No Questions, No Answers” by the late Iraqi author Fuad al-Takarli, we witness how trades long thought dead re-emerged on the streets of Baghdad under the brutal economic embargo of the 1990s. No one had imagined that the “pottery and glass mender” would rise again, with citizens restoring broken teapots,´-or-that the cobbler would become a lucrative economic pillar simply because torn shoes could no longer be discarded.
This real-world resurrection is not mere literary nostalgia-;- it is a cold economic law visible today in Gaza, Sudan and Yemen. Conflict and scarcity have revived trades like the itinerant water carrier, the tent repairer and the manual battery charger manufacturer.
Nor is this phenomenon confined to crisis zones in the Global South. In the heart of the developed world, supply chain disruptions and the rising cost of living have summoned extinct trades under sleek new labels. The electronics repairer has returned under Europe’s “Right to Repair” movement-;- Western societies have embraced the furniture -restore-r to combat inflation-;- and the high-tech sector itself has been forced to hunt down retired programmers fluent in COBOL, a legacy language from decades past, to fix archaic banking systems whose intricacies AI fails to grasp.
This remarkable rebound reveals a truth absent from technocratic literature: a profession does not die by technological decree-;- it dies by the coefficient of necessity.
Artificial intelligence and the economics of abundance always assume a linear path of technological progress. Yet crisis and scarcity continuously rebuild the economy, forcing human hands back to basic tools of maintenance. Extinct jobs are, in reality, a strategic reserve for human endurance, summoned back by societies the moment digital safety nets collapse.
Waves of technology will continue to sweep away old livelihoods while promising shiny new horizons. But history whispers a different truth: professions never truly die. They merely ---sleep---, waiting for a spark, woken either by a smart algorithm redefining specialisation,´-or-resurrected by a cruel scarcity that -restore-s the human hand to its original value: mending what is broken.

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