Why one of history’s most famous “job creators” should be front of our mind when looking at AI as a Labour Technology
Everyone celebrates the typewriter as a technology that created opportunities for women. By 1891, 75,000 women worked as professional typists – jobs that hadn’t existed 20 years earlier.
But nobody talks about what the typewriter destroyed.
The Career That Disappeared
Before the typewriter, “clerk” was a respectable male profession. Young men would start as clerks – copying documents by hand, maintaining records, handling correspondence. It was hard work, but it was also an apprenticeship.
You learned the business. You built relationships with senior management. After five years as a clerk, you might become an office manager. Ten years, perhaps a junior partner. When men were clerks in the pre-typewriter era, that job was an entry-level stepping stone.
The clerk role was a ladder you could climb.
What the Typewriter Changed
Then came mechanical typing. The work could be done faster, cheaper, and by people who didn’t need to understand the business. Just type what you’re given.
Typing became women’s work – and it was explicitly not a career. Women were expected to be “girls – not women” who would leave and get married. Typing was as far as it would generally go.
The typing pool emerged: rows of women doing monotonous, strenuous work, assessed by words-per-minute rather than ability. No relationship with management. No understanding of the business. No pathway up.
A generation of young men lost their entry point into business. The role that had trained future managers was replaced by dead-end jobs where you could start as a typist and leave as a typist 30 years later.
The Brutal Economics
This wasn’t just about technology. It was about redesigning work around a cheaper workforce. Female typists earned £8-12 per week while male clerks had earned £16-20 for similar work.
The typewriter didn’t just change how work was done. It changed who did it, how much they were paid, and whether it led anywhere.
Why This Should Worry Us
Look at what’s happening in professional services today:
Junior associates do research, draft documents, analyse data. They’re learning the business. In five years they’ll be senior associates. In ten, perhaps partners.
AI can now do that research. Draft those documents. Analyse that data.
What happens to the junior roles?
“They’ll do higher-value work,” everyone says. Just like typists would do “more creative” work once the mechanical typing was handled.
But typing was as far as it would generally go. There was no “higher-value work” waiting. The pyramid collapsed. The career ladder disappeared.
The Pattern Repeating
We’re already seeing it:
- Law firms discovering they need fewer junior associates when AI does legal research
- Consulting firms questioning their leverage model when AI handles analysis
- Accounting practices realising the traditional “apprentice to partner” path doesn’t work when AI does the apprentice work
The work still gets done. The business still functions. But the pathway from junior to senior evaporates.
The Questions Nobody’s Asking
If AI does the work that junior professionals currently do:
- How do future partners learn the business?
- Where does institutional knowledge come from?
- What’s the career path for people entering the profession?
- How do you train judgement if you never do the groundwork?
These aren’t technology questions. They’re structural questions about how professions reproduce themselves.
The Uncomfortable Truth
The typewriter created jobs – tens of thousands of them. But it destroyed a profession.
It replaced skilled workers on a career path with cheaper workers in dead-end roles. It collapsed the ladder between entry-level and management.
And it took 50 years before anyone really noticed what had been lost.
AI Won’t Take All The Jobs (Neither Did Typewriters)
This isn’t a story about mass unemployment. By 1930, women made up 52.5% of clerical workers, up from just 2.5% in 1870, and the clerical workforce had ballooned in size.
The typewriter created lots of jobs. They just weren’t the same jobs. And they didn’t lead where the old ones did.
AI will create jobs too. Lots of them probably. But ask yourself:
- Will they be on a career ladder or in a dead-end pool?
- Will they develop future leaders or just handle tasks AI can’t do yet?
- Will they pay what professional roles paid, or what AI-supervision roles will pay?
What This Means for Your Organisation
You have two choices:
Option 1: Optimise for cost Let AI eliminate junior roles. Keep only senior people. Save money.
In 10 years, discover you have no mid-level talent. No pipeline to senior roles. No one who learned your business from the ground up.
Option 2: Redesign the ladder Deliberately create learning roles that survive AI. Design pathways from junior to senior that don’t depend on work AI can do.
This costs more upfront. But it preserves the pipeline that creates your future leadership.
The Uncomfortable Question
When the typewriter came, society chose optimisation over development. Cheaper workers doing narrower work. Dead-end jobs instead of career paths.
We’re making that choice again with AI.
Except this time, it’s not manual copying being automated. It’s the analytical work that creates professional judgement. The research that develops expertise. The groundwork that builds institutional knowledge.
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes
The typewriter showed us what happens when technology deskills work, collapses career ladders, and creates a permanent underclass doing low-value tasks.
We celebrated it as progress – look at all those new jobs!
Only decades later did we realise what we’d lost: a generation of people who could have learned businesses from the ground up. Career pathways that developed future leaders. The structures that turned juniors into seniors.
AI offers us the same choice.
We can optimise for cost and efficiency, eliminate junior roles, and discover in 15 years that we’ve destroyed the pipeline that creates expertise.
Or we can learn from history and deliberately design career ladders that survive AI – roles that develop judgement, build institutional knowledge, and create future leaders.
The typewriter taught us this lesson 140 years ago.
Let’s not be stupid enough to learn it again.
How OcovAI Can Help
At OcovAI, we help organisations treat AI as what it actually is: labour technology, not information technology. That means looking beyond productivity gains to ask the harder questions: What happens to your career pathways when AI eliminates entry-level work? How do you maintain institutional knowledge when junior roles disappear? Where do future leaders learn the business if AI does the groundwork?
We work with leadership teams to design AI transformation that preserves what matters – your talent pipeline, your institutional knowledge, your culture – while capturing the efficiency gains. This isn’t about slowing down AI adoption. It’s about implementing it in a way that strengthens your organisation rather than hollowing it out. Because the typewriter taught us this lesson 140 years ago: job creation technology can simultaneously destroy career structures. We help you learn from history instead of repeating it.
