I admit, we’ve heard it all before. Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialize to take their place. After all, if you look at the year 1800, some 74% of all Americans were farmers, whereas by 1900 this figure was down to 31%, and by 2000 to a mere 3%.19 Yet this hasn’t led to mass unemployment. And look at Keynes writing in the 1930s about the “new disease” of “technological unemployment” that would soon be making headlines; when he died in 1946, everything
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