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Humans have always migrated, not only across physical landscapes, but through ways of working and thinking. Every major technological revolution has demanded some kind of migration: From field to factory, from muscle to machine, from analog habits to digital reflexes. These shifts did not simply change what we did for work; they reshaped how we defined ourselves and what we believed made us valuable.
One vivid example of technological displacement comes from the early 20th century. In 1890, more than 13,000 companies in the U.S. built horse-drawn carriages. By 1920, fewer than 100 remained. In the span of a single generation, an entire industry collapsed. As Microsoft’s blog The Day the Horse Lost Its Job recounts, this was not just about transportation, it was about the displacement of millions of workers, the demise of trades, the reorientation of city life and the mass enablement of continental mobility. Technological progress, when it comes, does not ask for permission.
Today, as AI grows more capable, we are entering a time of cognitive migration when humans must move again. This time, however, the displacement is less physical and more mental: Away from tasks machines are rapidly mastering, and toward domains where human creativity, ethical judgment and emotional insight remain essential.
From the Industrial Revolution to the digital office, history is full of migrations triggered by machinery. Each required new skills, new institutions and new narratives about what it means to contribute. Each created new winners and left others behind.
The framing shift: IBM’s “Cognitive Era”
In October 2015 at a Gartner industry conference, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty publicly declared the beginning of what the company called the Cognitive Era. It was more than a clever marketing campaign; it was a redefinition of strategic direction and, arguably, a signal flare to the rest of the tech industry that a new phase of computing had arrived.
Where previous decades had been shaped by programmable systems based on rules written by human software engineers, the Cognitive Era would be defined by systems that could learn, adapt and improve over time. These systems, powered by machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), would not be explicitly told what to do. They would infer, synthesize …