Does Technological Progress Mean Mass Unemployment?

Will AI take all of our jobs? We don’t know. What we do know is that smart people have repeatedly claimed throughout history that technological progress will create long-run mass unemployment, and yet that has never become become reality. In this episode, we dig into the debate over technological unemployment and the history of this concept. We conclude by providing users with a toolkit for better assessing claims about whether technological progress will cause mass unemployment. Show Notes CNN clip: “AI company's CEO issues warning about mass unemployment” Dario Amodei fearmongering in Axios article: “Behind the Curtain: A white-collar bloodbath” Other Media: * The Majority Report is warning about an AI Job Crisis * The New York Times is discussing a possible AI Job Apocalypse * Meanwhile, the Economist is saying “any jobs-pocalypse seems a long way off” and the WSJ just ran an op-ed titled “No, AI Robots Won’t Take All Our Jobs” NYT: “Job Market Is Getting Tougher for College Graduates” NY Fed: The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates BLS Projections "A world without work: technology, automation and how we should respond" with Daniel Susskind Wikipedia entry on “technological unemployment” Paul Krugman on Technological Unemployment A graph of the unemployment rate over time: “The fear of technology-driven unemployment and its empirical base,” from the Centre for Economic Policy Research Change in Occupational Structure, 1860 to 2015 The Rise of Services “Hours of Work in U.S. History”, from the Economic History Association How many workers are there in the US? * 163 million Number of unemployed workers? * 7 million How many layoffs and discharges were there in April? * 1.8 million layoffs and discharges Also: * 5.6 million hires * 3.2 million quits Mass Layoffs Credits Theme music by our youngest brother Tate. Cover art by Arthur Santoro. Get full access to The History Onion at historyonion.substack.com/subscribe