In 1978, secretaries were the backbone of American business, with one in five workers employed in clerical roles. Every memo, phone call, and coffee run passed through human hands. This wasn't just tradition—it was necessity. Senior managers couldn't interact directly with the office machinery, making secretaries the unavoidable interface between leadership and productivity.

Then came the personal computer. What started as crude duplication of filing cabinets evolved into automation that transformed administrative work. By the early 1980s, bosses began typing their own memos, dismantling the feudal system where secretaries gave status to bosses and vice versa. The shift happened seemingly overnight, as my mum discovered when she returned from maternity leave in 1982 to find everything changed.

Today's AI revolution mirrors this transformation. Just as computers unbundled the secretary role, AI may rebundle it—but through machine interfaces rather than human ones. The promise of a workless world proved hollow before, and similar predictions about AI eliminating white-collar jobs likely overstate the case. Instead, we'll see messy, confusing changes that take decades to fully play out, just like the last automation wave that still left 45,000 typists in the US workforce.