We are told that:

Artificial intelligence could displace between 1m and 3m private sector jobs in the UK, though the ultimate rise in unemployment will be in the low hundreds of thousands as growth in the technology also creates new roles, according to Tony Blair’s thinktank.

Between 60,000 and 275,000 jobs will be displaced every year over a couple of decades at the peak of the disruption, estimates from the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) suggest.

It described the figure as “relatively modest” given the average number of job losses in the UK has run at about 450,000 a year over the past decade. More than 33 million people are employed in the UK.

The aim of economic advance is - always - to kill jobs. Or, to enable us to gain the output without the use of human labour. That’s the same statement. For that means that we can now have that output from the machines, without labour, plus the new output that we devise that newly freed up human labour to. It’s that new output which is how much richer the machines have just made us.

So, when people say that a revolutionary technology will only kill off a couple of hundred thousand jobs that is to insist that the technology’s not, in fact, all that revolutionary.

As we - to excess perhaps - like to point out the tractor is what gave us the NHS. Before the tractor, the basic mechanisation of agriculture, 90% of the population had to work in the fields to feed the 100%. That 10% not up to its knees in mud is what gave us the Navy, cathedrals, the law, books and all the rest. Now we have tractors and only 2% work on the land. That means 98% of the population can work on not-food things - ballet, the NHS, a change of clothes for all and yes, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. The wealth created by tractors is exactly that we’ve the human labour available to now staff the NHS.

“Only a few jobs destroyed” is exactly what proves that the new tech is a bit of a damp squib.

But then this is an estimate from the Tony Blair Institute after all. They’re not even aware that new tech doesn’t, in fact, mean unemployment in the first place. It just means that the newly displaced human labour goes off and does something else - like the NHS.

Tim Worstall