The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

by Erik Brynjolfsson

John Maynard Keynes was less confident that things would always work out so well for workers. His 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” while mostly optimistic, nicely articulated the position of the second camp—that automation could in fact put people out of work permanently, especially if more and more things kept getting automated. His essay looked past the immediate hard times of the Great Depression and offered a prediction: “We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labor.”15 The extended joblessness of the Great Depression seemed to confirm Keynes’s ideas, but it eventually eased. Then came World War II and its insatiable demands for labor, both on the battlefield and the home front, and the threat of technological unemployment receded.