Vlad Tenev

I'm a technologist, not a historian, so with that caveat, let's go back in time to a world a 20-year-old would have known very long ago, tens of thousands of years ago, to be more precise.

The main occupations of this time, the Paleolithic era, are largely gone.

Hunters, gatherers, tool makers,

but they didn't disappear overnight.

Instead, they were subdivided into lots of other more specialized jobs.

So why don't we move forward to the Neolithic era?

Now here, humans have mastered a few new things, farming, keeping livestock, and this was a big transformation.

Actually, the invention of these things allowed us to spend more time doing what we consider creative work and less time on pure survival and subsistence.

And this opened up a lot of new jobs.

You had artisans like weavers, you had farmers, of course, potters, construction laborers, and these jobs, too, largely all gone.

So, in the US today, we should say farmers make up less than 2% of the workforce.

Let's move ahead through the changing jobs of the Bronze Age.

the Iron Age, one of my favorites, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and the Age of Exploration.

Too many jobs to count, a lot of them are gone.

Now, any blacksmiths or explorers in this room?

I didn't think so.

I would have loved to be an explorer.

How cool of a job would that be?

It might come back with space exploration.

My great-grandfather was a farmer in a village near Stara Zagora, Bulgaria.