The original call
Original year: 2008
2026 assessment
Scorecard verdict: Hit
Hit, and then some. The exact percentage was always meant to be provocative rather than precise, and plenty of people loved to argue about the number. But the underlying claim has aged beautifully. The kids who were in pre-school in 2008 are now in their early twenties, and a good chunk of them are working as prompt engineers, AI ethicists, cloud architects, content creators, data privacy officers and a hundred other roles that simply did not exist on a careers day in 2008. The specific job titles I floated were a mixed bag, but the core trend — that whole new categories of work would appear faster than the education system could name them — is now just the water we swim in.