The Good Farriers Kept Their Jobs: What the Car Tells Us About AI

Every few weeks someone tells me AI is a fad, or a toy, or that it's going to take all our jobs. Sometimes it's the same person saying all three.

I've heard this before. Not personally, I'm old but I'm not that old. I mean we have all of it in writing, because the last time a technology walked into daily life and scared everybody this badly, the newspapers took notes. So I went and read them.

New York ran on horses

In 1900 about 130,000 horses worked in Manhattan. Twenty years earlier New York and Brooklyn had 150,000 to 175,000 of them, dropping three to four million pounds of manure on the streets every day. In 1880 the city carted away nearly 15,000 dead horses. That's 41 a day.

A whole economy lived off those animals. The 1900 Census counted 226,477 blacksmiths, 361,770 teamsters and carriage drivers, and 64,929 hostlers and stable hands. Somebody had to shoe all those horses, and that somebody was a farrier. Horses need new shoes every several weeks whether the farrier is any good or not, so even a bad one had work.

Cars were a rich guy's toy

Early cars weren't a revolution. They were a hobby for people with too much money. A 1901 Columbia cost $3,500 when the average worker made $454 a year. That's almost eight years of pay. In 1903, the cheap bestselling Oldsmobile sold about 4,000 cars. That same year more than 900,000 people bought a buggy or a carriage.

The smart people of the day looked at that and drew the obvious conclusion. Here's the New York Times on January 3, 1899:

"There is something uncanny about these new-fangled vehicles. They are all unutterably ugly and never a one of them has been provided with a good, or even an endurable, name. The French, who are usually orthodox in their etymology if in nothing else, have evolved "automobile," which, being half Greek and half Latin, is so near to indecent that we print it with hesitation."

The Times thought the word "automobile" was too dirty to print. Hold on to that the next time someone complains about the word "agentic."

The Literary Digest, October 14, 1899:

"The ordinary type of "horseless carriage" is at present a luxury for the wealthy, and altho its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle."

"Of course." And in 1903, according to a 1922 Ford biography, a leading Detroit banker told Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest: "The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty - a fad."

People didn't just doubt cars. They tried to stop them.

Vermont passed a law in 1894 saying a steam vehicle couldn't use a public road "unless he sends, at least one-eighth of a mile in advance of the same, a person of mature age to notify and warn all persons." Mackinac Island banned cars in 1898 after the carriage drivers petitioned, and it never un-banned them. Nantucket kept them off the island until 1918. The Times reported in 1907 what the car owners said the real reason was: "to protect the lucrative livery stable business in which many residents of the island engage."

In November 1899 the New York Park Board held a hearing on whether to let automobiles into Central Park. The Times covered it. O. S. Bailey, who owned a livery stable, testified:

"It is dangerous for these horseless carriages to go through the Park. We ought to keep the Park for the driving of families."

And then: "Besides, they are too costly for the ordinary person." The lawyer for the hackmen's association, asked whether he'd never heard of a horse breaking down, said: "Yes, but I never heard of one blowing up."

It's unsafe, it's only for rich people, and it blows up. Said by the people whose income depended on the horse. I've read that exact thread on Hacker News.

It got meaner. A Times editorial in 1902 said a fast car on a public road was as out of place "as a Gatling gun introduced into a hotel for the purpose of killing cockroaches" and that the Automobile Club of America should "tear up its constitution, burn its by-laws, and disband." The New-York Tribune defended calling them "devil wagons." A stable keeper told the Times in 1903 that New York might have to do what Wisconsin farmers did "and pepper the offenders with buckshot, or rather pepper their tires."

The politicians joined in. Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton, as quoted in the Times on March 4, 1906:

"Nothing has spread Socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles. To the countryman they are a picture of arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness."

A man named Horace Phelps wrote to The Sun that October: "We are circulating petitions to our legislators urging them to make an effort to exclude the auto from the country highway."

My favorite is from July 13, 1913, under the headline "The Passing of the Horse Is Only a Motor Myth." The editor of a horse magazine told the Times:

"I believe that such a thing as 'the horseless age' is as remote as the millennium."

The number of horses on American farms peaked two years later and never came back.

Then the Model T showed up

Ford started delivering the Model T on October 1, 1908, at $825. Cars stopped being a toy when the price stopped being a joke. These are Ford's own numbers:

The moving assembly line started in 1913 and cut the time to build one from twelve and a half hours to 93 minutes. Here's what that did to the country, from the Federal Highway Administration's registration tables:

By 1912, traffic counts in New York showed more cars than horses. In 1915, 10% of American households had a car. In 1926 it was 54%. The last horse-drawn streetcar in New York ran in 1917.

None of the editorials, petitions, bans or buckshot moved that curve even a little. One guy at that 1899 Central Park hearing saw it coming. Charles E. Simms, a former police magistrate:

"It is the same old opposition to improvements. The locomotive, the cable car, the trolley, and the bicycle were all opposed, but they are all here and we are glad of it."

Now read it again with AI

ChatGPT came out on November 30, 2022. Here's the Stack Overflow Developer Survey since then:

Look at what's happening there. Every year more of us use it, and every year more of us say we don't like it. The Times nailed that mood in 1902, writing that the automobile was "at first an object of terror and then of widespread public aversion." There were 78,800 cars registered three years after they wrote it, and 2.5 million ten years after that.

It hasn't slowed down. By 2025 half of professional developers were using AI tools every day. GitHub says that as of September 2026, developers start more than 40% of pull requests with an agent. In March it was 17%. Gallup has 52% of all US employees using AI at work at least occasionally. The car took seven years to get from the Model T to one household in ten. This is moving faster.

And the opposition is hitting the same notes in the same order.

It's a toy. Ted Chiang in the New Yorker, February 2023: "Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web." Goldman Sachs' head of equity research in 2024: "People generally substantially overestimate what the technology is capable of today."

Ban it. New York City schools blocked ChatGPT five weeks after it launched. Italy banned it for a month. In March 2023 an open letter with more than 30,000 signatures said: "We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4." Eliezer Yudkowsky answered in TIME with "Shut it all down." This March, Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to pause building AI data centers.

It's going to take our jobs. Senator Richard Blumenthal at a 2023 hearing: "for me, perhaps the biggest nightmare is the looming new industrial revolution. The displacement of millions of workers, the loss of huge numbers of jobs." Fran Drescher on the SAG-AFTRA picket line: "We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines and big business."

I'm not making fun of these people. Some of them are right about real problems, the same way the Times was right in 1902 that rich idiots were running over children. Cars did kill people. They still do. But "this has real problems" and "this can be stopped" are two different claims, and only one of them has ever been true.

So what happened to the farriers?

Here's the part everyone's actually worried about. The Census counts, from Alba Edwards' occupation tables:

So yes. It took the jobs. Nine out of ten stable hands, three out of four teamsters, half the blacksmiths, in twenty years. Tacoma, Washington had 40 farriers in the early 1900s and three by 1920, according to the Tacoma Public Library's photo archive.

Now look at the bottom two rows. 333,000 teamster jobs disappeared and 926,000 driving jobs showed up. The guy who drove a wagon learned to drive a truck. The Census Bureau even complained that it couldn't cleanly tell the teamsters from the chauffeurs, which is kind of the whole point. Some blacksmiths made the same move. The Reading Times wrote in 1934 that "the blacksmith now earns his livelihood by straightening automobile axles, repairing broken springs and welding frames." The Fisher brothers' father and grandfather were blacksmiths who built carriage bodies. The brothers started Fisher Body in 1908 and built the bodies for Cadillac and Buick.

That same Reading article says the city had about 150 horses left and three men still shoeing them. Three, out of however many there used to be. Who do you think those three were? It wasn't the guy who quicked your horse twice last year and showed up late. When there's only enough work for three, the work goes to the best three.

And the trade never died. There are still about 27,500 farriers in the US for 6.6 million horses, down from 21.4 million on farms in 1915. A full-time farrier grossed an average of $135,736 in the latest American Farriers Journal survey. No license required. You just have to be good enough that people with expensive horses call you back.

"It's going to take our jobs" was true. It was a death sentence for the mediocre farrier, who went and found other work, mostly in the industry that replaced him. For the best ones it was a Tuesday.

It's already playing out the same way

Stanford's Digital Economy Lab has been tracking payroll data in a paper called "Canaries in the Coal Mine." Workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed jobs are employed 19% below where they'd otherwise be. And: "experienced workers show no comparable gap." It's happening through companies not hiring, not through layoffs. Indeed says 69.3% of software job postings in early 2026 were senior level. Entry level was 4.5%.

I want to be straight about what that data does and doesn't say. It measures age and seniority, not talent. Nobody has a payroll column for "mediocre." Software job postings were also falling for most of 2022, before ChatGPT existed, and the Stanford authors say themselves that AI isn't the only cause. So "the good ones are safe" is my read of the history, not a finding.

But I know which way I'm betting. The work that's disappearing first is the work that never needed judgment: the ticket anyone could close, the boilerplate, the report nobody reads. If that's all you do, you're a bad farrier in 1912 and demand has been covering for you.

What to do about it

If you're scared, good. That means you're paying attention. Here's what the farriers who made it actually did.

Get really good at the craft. Not at prompting. At the thing itself. Know why the system is shaped the way it is and what breaks when it's under load. One study in 2025 found experienced developers were 19% slower with AI tools while believing they were 20% faster. The tools have improved since, but the lesson holds: you can't tell whether the machine helped unless you could have done the work yourself.

Learn the new tool instead of fighting it. The teamsters who learned to drive a truck had jobs in 1930. The ones waiting for the horse to come back did not. You don't have to like it. You do have to be able to use it better than the person next to you.

Own the outcome, not the output. Anybody can generate code now. Very few people will stand behind it at 2 AM. I wrote about this when LLVM published its AI policy: if you submit it, you own it. The person who owns the result is the last one anybody cuts.

Move toward the thing replacing you. The Fishers went from carriage bodies to car bodies. The blacksmith in Reading went from horseshoes to axles. Your skills transfer further than you think, but only if you go while there's still time to learn on the job.

Stop waiting for someone to ban it. Vermont tried. Nantucket tried. Woodrow Wilson gave a speech. There were 8,000 cars in 1900 and 26.7 million in 1930.

Technology doesn't check whether we're ready. We've watched this exact movie, with the same arguments, the same op-eds and the same ending, and we have the box score. The horse didn't come back. The good farriers kept their jobs.

Be a good farrier.

-Sethers