In 1945, "computer" was a job title.

A computer was a person, most often a woman with a math degree, who calculated artillery tables, insurance rates, and rocket trajectories by hand. There were thousands of skilled, credentialed professionals in seamed stockings who held this role. In fact, the informal unit of computational labor was the "kilogirl," which equaled a thousand hours of computing. The wartime ballistics teams at Aberdeen and Penn, the Manhattan Project's computing groups, Bletchley Park's operations, and NACA's pools (the Hidden Figures women from the 2017 Best Picture nominated movie) — all predominantly women.

In 1945, when ENIAC (the first general-purpose, programmable, electronic computer) needed programmers, all six recruits were women pulled from the human computer pool. Of course, this machine did their job faster and then took their job title away from them. Imagine losing your career to something that also renames the entire profession out of existence.

Oh, wait, that sounds familiar.

If the AI moment feels like something brand new is happening, I promise you it’s happened before.

Technology is always destroying jobs in thousands of small innovations you barely notice.

The ATM changed retail banking. Spreadsheets changed bookkeeping. Online booking wiped out most travel agents. Streaming ended the video store, along with the sacred teenage ritual of arguing over which movie to rent. Each one reshuffled real careers, and the economy absorbed it the way the ocean absorbs a wave. Normal waves are the background condition of modern life. Your grandparents surfed them. Your parents are surfing them right now.

But a few times in history, the wave is a tsunami: a technology so broad it doesn't just eliminate some jobs; it rearranges society. Here are four worth learning about.

The printing press (1450s) — Before Gutenberg, Europe's knowledge economy ran on scribes, elite literate professionals in a world where hardly anyone could read. A printing press could produce in a day what took a scribe a year to draft. The profession of scribe essentially vanished. But cheap books created readers, readers created demand for schools, and within a few generations the press supported more jobs for literate people than scribing ever did. The scribes who thrived became publishers, editors, and typesetters. The ones who insisted the world would always need their beautiful handwriting did not.

The power loom (1790s–1840s) — Handloom weavers were the skilled aristocracy of the world's biggest industry. They had seven-year apprenticeships. They became entrepreneurs who owned their own equipment and controlled their own hours. But the power loom didn't need their skill; it needed mere machine-tenders. In fact, child labor was often deemed sufficient. Weaver wages dropped by roughly three-quarters over less than a generation. More on how they reacted to this tsunami in a minute.

Mechanized agriculture (1800s–1900s) — This was the biggest killer wave ever. In 1800, roughly 80 percent of workers farmed. Today, in developed countries, it's fewer than 2 percent. Tractors and combines didn't just take farm jobs. They emptied the countryside and filled the cities. Nearly every job you've ever heard of exists because farming stopped needing everyone.

The office computer (1950s–1990s) — Office buildings were packed with typing pools, switchboard operators, file clerks, and human computers. Entire categories of respectable white-collar work were eliminated in record time. And in an interesting plot twist, some of the displaced human computers made a lateral move into a strange new field called “computer programming,” which was initially dismissed as low-status clerical work. That "clerical work" became one of the best-paid careers of the next 70 years. The people who took that demotion won the 20th century.

Related: The Bottom Rung Is Vanishing, But the Career Ladder Isn't

Now, let’s get back to those weavers. Between 1811 and 1816, skilled textile workers across the English Midlands began smashing the machines that were destroying their trade. They organized under a fictional commander, "General Ned Ludd," supposedly headquartered in Sherwood Forest like Robin Hood.

The British government did not find this General Ludd charming. Parliament made machine-breaking a crime punishable by death. At one point, more British troops were deployed against the “Luddites” than were fighting Napoleon in Spain. Read that again: the British Empire considered unemployed weavers a bigger threat than Napoleon, who conquered most of Europe.

Today "Luddite" means someone who fears technology, like your grandfather who prints his emails. That definition is almost perfectly backwards. The actual Luddites were the most technically skilled workers in their industry. They were watching years of skilled training get repriced to zero while higher profits went elsewhere. Their demands included things as radical as minimum wages and quality standards. It was a labor dispute conducted with hammers, mostly because unions were illegal and none of them could vote.

Here's why this history should matter to you. The Luddites correctly diagnosed what was happening. Their analysis was excellent. Yet their strategy, betting against the technology itself, failed completely, and some of them were even hanged for it.

Taking disruption seriously is smart. But trying to stop it has never been a viable plan.

Related: Stop Waiting, Invent Your Internship

Look across these stories, and some consistent patterns show up.

The skilled got hit first — We assume machines come for the "easy" jobs first, like the backhoe replacing the ditchdigger. But think about the math from the machine-builder's side: nobody spends a fortune building a machine to replace cheap labor. The payoff is in replacing expensive labor. Scribes, weavers, and human computers were the well-trained, well-paid ones. Their skill was exactly what painted the target on their backs.

The pain was real, and so was the recovery — Every tsunami eventually created more jobs, and better ones, than it destroyed. But for the people caught mid-career, that eventually often came after twenty or thirty miserable years. Both facts matter, and anyone who tells you only one of them is probably selling something.

Education got rebuilt afterward — The modern high school and college were invented in response to a tsunami. Mass public education, with its bells, grades, rows of desks, and standardized everything, was designed in the 1800s to turn farm kids into factory and office workers. You line up when a bell rings because factory workers lined up when a bell rang. You have been in industrial job training since kindergarten. Surprise! Which raises an obvious question about how school should change during this tsunami.

The winners moved early — In every case, the people who did best treated their old skill as a bridge to the new thing, not a fortress against it. The scribes who became publishers and the human computers who became programmers had a window of opportunity. It was real but short, usually a decade or less. The people who stubbornly fought or simply waited for certainty got certainty. It just wasn’t the kind they hoped for.

Related: The "Safe" Major Is a Crowded Trade (Why You Shouldn’t Let the Herd Choose Your Career)

AI fits the tsunami profile: it targets skilled cognitive work, it touches nearly every industry at once, and it's moving faster than anything before it. The weavers got fifty years to adapt. The typesetters who ran the printing industry's giant Linotype machines got twenty before desktop software ended them. You should probably not budget for either. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick puts the working assumption plainly in his book, Co-Intelligence: "Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use." Whatever the tools can do today is the floor, not the ceiling.

That sounds like ominous news. But for you, it mostly isn't.

Your structural advantage over every displaced weaver and scribe in this story is that they were mid-career when the tsunami hit, with decades invested in a skill the market stopped paying for. You're not even at the starting line yet — which, for once in your life, is the best possible place to be standing. You get to pick your skills with the tsunami warning already blaring, which is a luxury no Luddite had.

History's lessons for this moment are surprisingly clear and consistent: 

Discover more insights in my book, Indispensable: A Student’s Guide for Thriving in the Age of AI. 

Published by Damn Gravity, Indispensable takes a practical look at how students can develop the habits, skills, and mindset they'll need to thrive as technology advances.

Order your copy today.