Artificial intelligence (AI) has created some enthusiasm and even more fear. The fears center partly on matters of privacy and the upending of social relationships, but mostly on job destruction.
Such concerns are far from new. They have emerged with every technological advance since the Industrial Revolution began in the late 18th century. They are an old story attached by today’s commentators to something otherwise very new. If this technological history has anything to teach, it is that both hopes and fears about AI are overstated.
The latest example of how job loss dominates commentary comes through the strike among Hollywood writers. The strikers are, of course, concerned with wages, but they also fear that ChatGPT and like AI applications will replace human writers. Surveys universally show similar concerns about AI applications in all industries. The prestigious investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts that AI will bring the loss or degrading of some 300 million jobs. Many attach such fears to warnings of mass unemployment and the need for a universal basic income to alleviate the ensuing poverty. Leaders in the tech sector seem especially concerned.
This is all reminiscent of reactions to past innovations, whether spinning and weaving machines more than two centuries ago or railroads, automobiles, telephones, computers, or automatic teller machines. But for all the fear expressed at each stage of technology’s advancement, the innovations, as they destroy jobs, have helped create at least as many jobs as were lost. And because the innovations have expanded productive capacities, these disruptive transitions have always occurred amid a greater material abundance than previously.
The fears, whether in response to AI in Hollywood today or the spinning jenny of the late 18th century, are easy to understand. Usually, it is obvious which jobs are vulnerable. But it takes imagination to see what new jobs will be created in response. When, for example, the computer eliminated thousands of clerical positions, no one could have imagined how the founders of Federal Express and similar firms would use the same technologies to create services that promise and track fast and reliable deliveries, an industry that now employs thousands, if not millions, at every level.
A bit of this history is worth recounting. When spinning and weaving equipment was introduced into English manufacturing in the late 18th century, workers, to protect their jobs, formed an organization called the Luddites that set out to destroy the equipment. They failed, but in a relatively short time, the equipment brought efficiencies and growth that enabled the hiring of many more than previously. Fast forward to the 1960s, when a group of prominent academics—some Nobel laureates—wrote that “new kinds of automation” had “broken” the once-secure “link between jobs and income.”
In that same decade, longshoremen fought containerization. The technology did eliminate jobs, but it also facilitated a 2,000 percent rise in world trade in only five years and almost as dramatic a rise in the number of jobs in shipping and cargo handling.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the widespread introduction of personal computers and word processing eliminated many clerical jobs, and the people who had been working them, mostly women, were thrown out of work. The innovations, however, increased the scale and scope of office work. Within a few years, the number of women in paid employment increased from before these innovations were introduced, absolutely and relatively.
There can be no doubt that AI will bring dislocation and hardship, in this case, to some who had previously thought they were immune. The inevitability of such pain gives every reason to help these people adjust. But because history makes clear that the innovation will create other, perhaps better, jobs, it warns against suppressing the technology.
