With the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), many are worried that we may all be put out of work, replaced by robots. We can stop worrying. We’ll run out of jobs when we run out of goods and services we desire. Which will be never.
What modern capitalism and the prosperity it brings have given us is a continuing expansion of what we consider core goods. At one time, human beings sought essentially three core goods — food to fill our belly, clothes on our back, and a roof over our heads. But once technology made it possible to meet these core tasks using a far smaller proportion of our population, we didn’t suddenly run out of things to do. The revolutionary modernization of agriculture didn’t leave farm workers idle. It made them available to work in the industrial economy. The post-industrial economy hasn’t made factory workers redundant, it has made them more essential than ever to the increasingly automated manufacturing and service economy.
As fewer people are needed to perform core tasks, more are available to perform ancillary ones. And ancillary tasks have a way of becoming core to people, or at least to enough of us to constitute a sufficient market to provide full-time work for many. A century ago, few people took a vacation. Now, when we tell people we haven’t gone away in a couple of years, we begin the sentence with “Believe it or not …” – creating jobs in tourism and travel. Decades ago, most workers toiling at their 12-hours-a-day, six-days a week jobs welcomed the opportunity of some free time at home. Now, we are sometimes embarrassed to admit we are taking a staycation – and spending our money in ways that foster other jobs. A century ago, who needed a gym membership? Now, some can’t do without it. It wasn’t that long ago that none of us had a cell phone, internet access or a computer. Now, they are seen as necessities. And they spawn new jobs that we wouldn’t have imagined 25 years ago.
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