Vlad Tenev

Now, legend has it, he was the first person in his village to see an automobile.

And when he saw it, he ran back into the village and said, there's a dragon out in the fields.

His son, my grandfather, was also a farmer that didn't venture too far from the village.

His son, my father, was the first in his family to go to the big city, Varna, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea coast, where I was also born.

There, he became a professor of tourism, which was certainly a job that my grandfather and great-grandfather never imagined.

If you think about it, most of our last names are from jobs that our families no longer do.

Potter.

butler, butcher, even the most common, smith.

Any Fletchers in the audience?

Anyone know what a Fletcher is?

I was going over my talk this weekend, and my son said, I know what a Fletcher is, Dad.

He plays Minecraft.

Everything old is new again, right?

A Fletcher is someone that makes and sells arrows.

So if you know someone with that last name, their relatives were arms dealers.

Now, my point in all of this is you can probably take any prediction that you see in the media of job disruption, and in the fullness of time, at some point, even that will be an underestimate.

Even that will be conservative.

And what we find is that job disruption is then an essential quality of human evolution.

We want work to disappear because it means that we're doing our jobs as humans, making our lives better and easier.

And when it comes to labor, we yearn to increase dollars earned per hour worked.