When we talk about artificial intelligence today, the conversation often revolves around massive tech breakthroughs, sudden displacement of labor, and unpredictable economic shifts. But history has seen this exact movie before—not in Silicon Valley, but on the loading docks of Newark, New Jersey, in the 1950s.

In a recent episode of the KPI Fireside Podcast, host Keith Norris sat down with Marc Levinson—historian, economist, and author of The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger—to explore how a simple metal box revolutionized global trade, shifted entire economies, and what its history teaches us about surviving the AI wave.

1. The Pre-Container Friction: “Break-Bulk” Shipping

Before the container, ocean shipping was extraordinarily slow, labor-intensive, and expensive. Under the traditional “break-bulk” system, every piece of freight was handled individually multiple times:
  • A factory in Indiana built custom wooden crates for each engine or pump.
  • Laborers loaded the crates onto a truck or train car.
  • At the port, workers unloaded the crates onto the pier, cataloged them, and moved them into a warehouse.
  • When the ship arrived, longshoremen lifted each crate by winch into the cargo hold and manually shoved it into place.
“It could easily take a couple of months to export this engine or water pump or whatever it happened to be to a customer in Europe. It was a slow process, it was very expensive because there was so much labor involved… transportation costs were, you could think of them as a barrier to trade just in the same way tariffs are.”

2. Standardization Is Always the Hardest Nut to Crack

The idea of putting freight in reusable boxes wasn’t brand new—railroads had experimented with containers back in the 1920s. However, every rail line built proprietary containers that only fit their own equipment to lock in customers, making cross-network transport impossible.

When container shipping re-emerged in the 1950s, a similar battle erupted over container sizing:
  • Sea-Land (Malcolm McLean): Used 33-foot (and later 35-foot) containers based on highway length limits in New Jersey.
  • Matson: Opted for 24-foot containers for Pacific routes between California and Hawaii.
  • Grace Line: Planned for 17-foot containers for South American trade.
Real progress required 10 years of grueling international negotiations through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to settle on uniform lengths, widths, and structural corner fittings.
“Standardization is really a tough nut to crack. Everybody has their vested interests, everybody has put money into something that meets their standard, and the idea that you’re going to throw that out and adopt somebody else’s standard is pretty painful.”
The major breakthrough came when pioneer Malcolm McLean freely released his patented corner-locking mechanism to the world so that any crane in any port could lift any container.

3. Disruption Reshapes Economic Geography

One of the most profound insights from Levinson’s research is how physical innovations redraw economic maps:
  • Decentralization of Industry: Pre-container factories had to sit right next to ocean docks (e.g., Brooklyn or East London) to minimize handling costs. Once cheap container freight decoupled location from proximity, factories moved to suburban and rural areas where land was far cheaper.
  • The End of Vertical Integration: Manufacturers no longer needed giant, all-in-one complexes like Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant. Inexpensive transit meant component parts could be built across disparate, highly specialized facilities across the globe.
  • Unpredicted Economic Effects: In the late 1950s, a prominent Harvard economist predicted containerization would save New York City’s garment district by lowering transport costs to southern U.S. markets.
“He says it’s going to be great because it’s going to be cheaper to get your garments down to the South and you can sell more of them. It hadn’t remotely occurred to him that it would also be great at bringing garments in from Asia, manufactured at much lower cost, and would actually put an end to the garment district in New York.”

4. First Movers Don’t Always Win

Technological shifts create dynamic market reshuffling where early innovators often bear the heaviest capital burdens without reaping long-term profits:
  • Pioneer Risk: Many pioneering shipping lines went bankrupt because they bought the wrong ship designs or over-leveraged capital during the transition. Malcolm McLean himself suffered one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S. history when his later venture, United States Lines, folded in the 1980s.
  • The Fast Followers: Today’s dominant container carriers (such as MSC, CMA CGM, and Evergreen) were either late entrants or startups that entered after the initial infrastructure standards were established.
“The leaders, the people who were the pioneers, were generally not the ones who made money out of this. The ones who made money out of this were people who had very sharp pencils and they looked at what was going on in the shipping industry and said, ‘We can come into this and we can do it better, and we’re not burdened by traditional thinking about how to run a ship line.'”
  • Ancillary Opportunities: Enormous value was created in brand-new adjacent industries—such as third-party logistics (3PLs), supply chain management software, and digital container-tracking IoT sensors.

5. Lessons for Navigating AI Disruption

Keith Norris and Marc Levinson drew direct parallels between the 20th-century freight evolution and today’s rapid AI expansion:

Accept That Structural Adjustments Take Time

Transitions are rarely seamless. When waterfront jobs disappeared in Brooklyn during the 1960s, it took until the 1990s for the local economy to fully recover and revitalize.

Take Personal Responsibility for Reskilling

Job roles rarely stay static over a multi-decade career. Workers in every industry must actively observe emerging trends and acquire transferable skills rather than expecting legacy roles to remain unchanged.
“You have to accept that your job may disappear, and you have to take it upon yourself to know where your industry is going and what the future might look like and how you can prepare yourself for that… You need to be watching for signals about where the next big thing is going to be, what the trends are, and do the best you can.”

Invest in Safety Nets and Training

Nations that managed the shipping transition best provided displaced workers with temporary income support paired directly with mandatory retraining programs.
“There are countries that have a combination of benefits for people who’ve lost their jobs and training requirements… It puts some burden on the worker to accept that there’s change, to accept that they need to learn to do other things, but it also solves the immediate problem of how am I going to feed my family tonight.”

Catch the Full Episode

To dive deeper into the conversation—including Marc Levinson’s upcoming biography on UPS founder James E. Casey (The UPS Man)—watch the complete interview on YouTube: