I fact-checked Sam Altman

Sam Altman once claimed that roughly 50 percent of all jobs become redundant every 75 years. I repeated it myself, more than once.

Then I checked it.

He first said it in 2019. When he repeated it in 2025, he prefaced it with: someone told me recently, I have no idea if this is true. I could not find the study behind it either.

But I did find a real one. A peer-reviewed paper by MIT economist David Autor found that about 60 percent of American jobs in 2018 were in specialties that did not exist in 1940.

Eighty years. The majority of work people do today had not been invented yet.

We are better at creating work after a change than predicting what it will look like before one. That has been true for a century. I see no reason to think AI breaks the pattern.

The next time you hear a big number about jobs disappearing, check the source. Then look at history. It tells a more interesting story than the headline.