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I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

If you are no longer in your 20s, do you remember what that time was like?

Do you remember a mix of possibility and panic when it came to your career?

In this talk, technologist Vlad Tenev takes us way back in the history of work

and then rockets us forward through the massive tech revolutions that recent generations have lived through one after another.

Throughout, he traces one sweeping pattern

that might leave us rethinking everything we thought we knew about AI, technology, and the future of work.

Let's take a moment and reflect back upon our lives when we were 20 years old. Think about where you were and the opportunities for work and career that lay in front of you.

I'm curious. Tell me, how many of you had a pretty good idea of what you wanted to do

for your career? Okay, not too many. How many were overwhelmed by all the options?

Okay, I know I felt the same. Well, buckle up. It's only going to get more overwhelming.

When I was 20 years old, I was graduating from Stanford University with a degree in pure mathematics.

Nobody had sat me down to tell me that my pure math major wasn't going to be the most desirable qualification for prospective

employers. And I probably wouldn't have listened if they did. So I went off along my

default path, a math PhD program at UCLA, buying at least one more year to figure out my career.

Now, my first month in graduate school, Lehman Brothers went under, the start of the global

financial crisis.

Most of my friends, particularly the ones that felt the most secure in their financial careers,

found themselves packing up their cubicles out of work.

Some of us wondered whether the economy would recover at all or whether we were in store for

another decade-long Great Depression.

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