A new Commission on AI and the American Workforce joins recent efforts to understand AI's impact on jobs. However, history shows past "future of work" commissions consistently failed to predict job changes accurately. Decades of California commissions, from the 1960s to the present, predicted large-scale job loss due to automation or deindustrialization, only for the economy to rebound in unforeseen ways, often creating more jobs. These failures stemmed from the inherent difficulty of predicting complex interactions between technology, policy, and consumer preferences. The new Commission seeks a different approach.