Why this exists.
I built Future History because no one should have to guess how their own job is changing. There's no shortage of confident takes about AI and work, and almost none of them show you where the numbers came from. This is the opposite of that: drag a slider across two centuries of any profession, and every figure resolves to a source you can open and check yourself.
What I'm promising
The viewer is free, forever. No account, no paywall, and no newsletter you have to dodge. A profession's history shouldn't be something you rent.
Dataset last updated 11 October 2026.
Who makes this
Future History is built and run by one person, Mash Prime. You can reach me through the contact page.
Each deep profile is researched against real sources: employment and wage history, the tools each era actually used, cited forecasts and where they disagree, and the adjacent paths people have taken when a role shifted under them. When sources conflict, I show the conflict rather than splitting the difference and hoping you don't notice.
The citations are the whole product. If a number here is wrong, I want to know. See below.
How the research is done
I use AI research agents (Anthropic's Claude) to find sources and draft the history behind each job: past employment and pay, the tools each era used, and what forecasters say. Each drafted claim names the source it came from, and a separate AI pass is meant to check it against that source before it goes live.
That checking has not caught everything. An audit in October 2026 found researched claims that their cited source does not fully support, so the older research is being re-checked, and anything that does not hold up is corrected or removed.
Official statistics are handled differently. US employment and pay since 2003, the BLS ten-year projections, and the Australian, UK and Canadian figures are copied by code straight from each agency's own files, with no AI drafting (AI helped match each US job to the closest occupation code abroad, and that match was checked). The methodology page explains which content is which and how each kind is checked.
Claude is made by Anthropic, and some pages name Anthropic's tools or cite its research alongside other companies'.
Support the work
Future History is free, ad-free, and independent, and it stays that way. Keeping it free, ad-free, and growing takes real, ongoing work. If it's been useful to you and you'd like to help, you can support the work directly. Entirely optional. Nothing here is ever gated behind it.
Support the workFound something off? Tell me
Corrections, missing professions, ideas for what would make this more useful: it all helps. Leave your email only if you'd like a reply.