Technological Change and Family Career Trajectories Across Generations: A Historical Review From Industrialization to the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Technological change has long been a central driver of transformations in work, social structure, and economic organization. While extensive scholarship has examined the effects of industrialization, mechanization, and, more recently, digitalization on labour markets, less attention has been paid to how such changes reshape family-level career trajectories across generations. Drawing on insights from family history, economic sociology, and labour economics, this paper develops an interdisciplinary review of the ways in which technological change reconfigures intergenerational occupational mobility and skill transmission within families. Situating contemporary developments in artificial intelligence (AI) within a broader historical continuum, the paper traces shifts from pre-industrial systems of occupational inheritance to modern patterns characterized by education-mediated mobility and increasingly fragmented career paths. Through a systematic synthesis of existing literature, the study highlights the evolving role of families as mediating institutions that both reproduce and transform economic opportunity over time. The paper contributes to family history research by integrating technological change into analyses of kinship, mobility, and inequality, and proposes a multi-level conceptual framework linking macro-level technological shifts to micro-level family outcomes. Implications for understanding the future of family adaptation in the age of AI are discussed.