My paternal great-grandfather, Peter Turner, born in 1878, was the son of a shoemaker in the remote village of Ardfern on the west coast of Scotland, about six miles north-east of the Isle of Jura (where Orwell hid himself away to write 1984) and fifteen miles south of the port town of Oban. Generations of Turners had worked the land in this quiet corner of Argyllshire, living the hard, simple existence that defined most rural life in the 18th and 19th centuries.
By 1905, Peter had left Ardfern and was employed as a gardener and groundskeeper at a large stately home in Ayrshire; by 1909, he was doing the same for a wealthy Glasgow family at their Stirlingshire country retreat, Ballochneck House. According to the 1911 census, barely two years later, his occupation was no longer “gardener” but “chauffeur,” a change that presumably came the day one of the first motor cars in rural Scotland pulled up at the foot of Ballochneck's front steps.
His son Alfred, my grandfather, born in the servants’ quarters there, followed suit, beginning his working life as a chauffeur and later a car mechanic (all early chauffeurs would also have been mechanics by necessity). My dad, also Alfred, went into the car repair business in turn.
Three generations of employment, an entire branch of a working-class family’s economic life, flowed from the moment a single car arrived at one wealthy family's door sometime around 1910.
The automobile didn’t just displace horses, carriages and the people who tended them. It created mechanics, fuel retailers, road builders, traffic police, driving instructors, insurance underwriters, ambulance crews, parking wardens, and eventually the vast logistics infrastructure that underpins modern commerce. None of that was predictable in 1910. The people who lost work to the motor car could be named and counted, but the people who would gain from it were invisible, because the jobs didn’t yet exist.
This is how technological disruption has always worked, and there’s no reason to think the future will be any different.