Fired alarm: AI hype versus labour-market history
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Why do many workers fear AI will cause massive job losses in the next five years?
The Economist. Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. And I'm Rosie Blore. Today on the show, why the scramble for Africa's minerals might be different this time and the latest in our World Cup contender profiles.
First up though.
Here's one definite thing that AI is affecting among American workers. The mood. The average person believes they've got about a one in five chance of losing their job in the next five years. Another poll found a similar fraction thinks that AI is very or somewhat likely to replace them in that same time. Who can blame these pessimists? That's what the big shots of AI are telling them. Dario Amade, the boss of Anthropic, says AI could push unemployment as high as that same one in five fraction.
Yes, people will adapt, but they they they may not adapt fast enough. And so they're they're you know they're
here's Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and general techie bellwether, casually telling a nightly talk show that fraction will be higher still.
I mean, will we still need humans? А на промос тинкс.
Okay, okay, we need to calm this down. Let's talk about what could happen, not will, and let's give it some historical context.
Advances in AI could totally reshape the global labour market. It could theoretically result in Millions of people being Put out of work. No one really knows what's going to happen.
Callum Williams is our senior economics writer and San Francisco bureau chief.
But what we do know from looking at the history Із да дип. It would in a very profound and fundamental way be unprecedented.
How does historical evidence from the Industrial Revolution temper AI‑driven doom forecasts?
Nothing even close to this. has happened in the past. And this is largely because new technologies never spread through the economy fast enough to put large numbers of people out of work for a long time.
And I suppose the example that people always lean on when they talk about technologies revolutionizing things is the industrial revolution. That certainly put a lot of people out of work, didn't it?
Well, not really. The Industrial Revolution is known by the general public to the extent that it is known as an extremely disruptive period. You had the invention in the seventeen sixties and seventeen seventies of steam engines that were good enough to power factories. the Dickensian notion of the Industrial Revolution is that this ushered in a period of blistering economic growth that appeared to coincide with real stagnation in real wages for the average person. And when you talk to people in Silicon Valley about what they expect to happen with AI, they often bring up the Industrial Revolution and say, this is gonna happen again. They point in particular to this period. From about seventeen ninety to eighteen forty, which is known as Engels Pause.
And there is some research which suggests that during this fifty year period, real wages for the average person in Britain didn't change at all. But there is a bunch of recent scholarship that really casts doubt on Engels Pause and provides a sort of more optimistic interpretation of the Industrial Revolution.
Okay, so a new view on this old story. Bring me to it. What do we understand now that we didn't before?
Okay, so there's a few planks to this. One is was it the case that these new technologies destroyed jobs? That quite clearly did not happen. Or to the extent that technology did destroy jobs, it created plenty more. If you look in the century after 1760, the number of Britons who were actually in work nearly tripled. And then you can look at how much job churn there was, how quickly were jobs. being created and destroyed. And really, you can measure this quantitatively. There was an increase in job disruption from about the 1850s, so almost a century into the Industrial Revolution. But before then, it was pretty low. And then we look at wage growth, which really is the crux of the Engels Poor's argument.
What did researchers discover about wages and job churn during the 19th‑century “Engels Pause”?
Yes, wage growth was slow, but it wasn't obviously slower than before the Industrial Revolution. And this actually reflects the fact that in the early part of the Industrial Revolution, productivity growth was actually pretty weak.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do many workers fear AI will cause massive job losses in the next five years?
0:03–2:16
2
How does historical evidence from the Industrial Revolution temper AI‑driven doom forecasts?
2:16–4:42
3
What did researchers discover about wages and job churn during the 19th‑century “Engels Pause”?
4:42–7:25
4
Why are new graduate unemployment rates rising even before the rise of ChatGPT?
7:25–10:07
5
What are the arguments behind AI leaders’ “catastrophic” predictions and are they credible?
10:07–13:23
6
Why is there suddenly a scramble for Africa’s untapped nickel and other critical minerals?
13:23–16:34
7
How are the United States and China competing over the Kabanga mine and African supply chains?
16:34–18:57
8
What makes Japan’s “Samurai Blue” squad a dark‑horse contender for the World Cup?
18:57–21:17