When the Pearls Collapsed: A Gulf Lesson for the Age of AI

In its entry for Pearling, inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2012, UNESCO describes the trade as the dominant one in the Gulf economy from the second century until the 1930s. It then records that the industry met a sudden and catastrophic demise in the 1930s, after Japan developed cultured pearls. Centuries of work at sea, then a single decade that overturned the accounts.

How did the cultured pearl arrive?

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Japanese Kokichi Mikimoto succeeded in the early 1890s in inducing oysters to form half-pearls, and his son-in-law Tokichi Nishikawa later perfected the production of fully spherical pearls. Sources differ on the year, between 1892 and 1893, which does not change the meaning: a product once extracted at great risk came to be made with technology.

As for profits, divers' shares and the names of merchants, these need documents we have not relied on here, so we have confined ourselves to what the cited sources establish.

Where does the comparison hold?

In two respects. First, dependence on a single livelihood makes a shock sweeping: when one craft dominates an economy, everyone connected to it feels its disappearance. Second, technology can produce cheaply what was precious and rare, and so change its value in the market.

And where does it fail?

It fails on a basic point. The cultured pearl was a product replacing a product. A job, by contrast, is a bundle of tasks, and AI enters some of them, not all.

A Harvard and Boston Consulting Group experiment with 758 consultants showed that a language model improves performance on tasks within its capability, and lowers the chance of reaching the correct solution on a task outside it by 19 percentage points. So the effect is neither a blanket displacement nor a blanket benefit, but a jagged map that needs a human eye.

What do the numbers say about jobs?

The World Economic Forum's 2025 report on jobs (The Future of Jobs Report), based on a survey of more than a thousand employers in 55 economies, estimates that by 2030 new jobs equal to 14% of current employment (170 million) will be created and jobs equal to 8% (92 million) displaced, a net gain of 78 million jobs. Employers expect 39% of current skills to be transformed or become outdated over the same period.

These are estimates, not promises. History gives them indirect support, though: researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and elsewhere estimated that about 60% of US employment in 2018 was in job titles that did not exist in 1940, and that the emergence of new work was linked more to innovations that complement labour than to those that replace it.

Three lessons

1. Diversify your skills. Do not hang your livelihood on one skill performed in one way.
2. Learn the tool before it imposes itself. Whoever gets there first knows its limits; whoever arrives late receives its results.
3. Retrain seriously. In the Forum's survey, 85% of employers say they plan to prioritise upskilling their workforce, and 50% intend to move staff from declining roles to growing ones.

A community whose members stand by one another, extending a hand to whoever loses work with training and support, is better able to cross a transition. Islamic teaching holds that we take the means while relying on God, and that we strive to earn a livelihood.

If the cultured pearl exposed the fragility of an economy built on a single source, the question AI puts to us is sharper: how many of our sources are spread out, and how many of our skills can renew themselves?