Labour displacement is normal

The argument

Those who doubt that artificial intelligence will leave humans without work appeal to the shape of the historical record rather than to any particular forecast. Fears over the changing role of technology in work have recurred with every major shift in how things are made, and on this account they have always proved to be unfounded. The creation of industry, of factories and of the production line was widely thought to lead to mass unemployment, on the reasoning that machines doing what people had done must leave those people idle. What followed instead was a whole new society with a lot more work to be done than before. The reason the pessimistic forecast keeps failing, proponents argue, is that it mistakes the destruction of particular jobs for the destruction of work itself. Technology has never permanently ended work; it has merely transformed it and displaced it from one sector to another. A task that is automated does not simply vanish from the economy. It becomes cheaper, which releases labour and resources for activities that were previously not worth anyone's while, and the machinery that performs the task must itself be designed, built, maintained and supplied. The loss is concentrated, immediate and easy to count; the gain is dispersed across sectors that do not yet exist and is therefore invisible in advance. That asymmetry, not any real change in the underlying pattern, is what makes each generation mistake displacement for disappearance. The advent of automation is likely to be extremely similar. The comparison offered is the replacement of horses as transport with motor vehicles as transport: the older arrangement was superseded completely, and yet the change did not shrink the quantity of work available but multiplied it, and it could lead to many, many more jobs than it removes. If labour displacement is the normal pattern rather than the exception, there will always be jobs for humans.

Context

From the development of industrialised farming, to factory mass production, and the growth of the service industry: the system always adapts

Premises

Counter-arguments

The replacement of horses with motor vehicles did end a type of work - but only for horses. That's exactly what automation will do, but this time it's humans being replaced.

Rejecting the premises

Automation is unlike all other technological transformations, and will in fact replace human labour by transforming society.