But AI doesn’t take jobs, and even if it does, no impact.

There is a pessimistic tradition of technological determinism for society, going back to the easy lives of the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which are contrasted with those of the dark, subterranean, post-proletarian Morlocks. AI and the Internet serve the academic and professional groups who invented and developed them very well, but it is not yet clear that they yet serve the majority of the population as well, beyond cheap holidays and pornography.

Many prognosticators claim that up to half of all current jobs will be automated by AI within a few decades, not just those of truck drivers but also doctors and journalists: the labour component in car production has fallen from 70 per cent to 48 per cent in a decade. But what new jobs will be created, and can all those displaced become state employees with titles like ‘compliance officer’? A World Economic Forum report suggests that twice as many jobs will be created as are destroyed, and a glance at standard UN figures shows that the countries with the highest level of robot installations also have the lowest unemployment. So, there is much evidence to be found on the optimistic side, as is the simple historical fact that all previous phases of automation have been followed by masses of new jobs: in 1830 the majority of the British population worked in agriculture, though now it is a mere couple of percent. Our ancestors could not have imagined the non-agricultural future most of us enjoy, free of harvests and backbreaking work. There also seems to be a general understanding that if profits continue to accrue mostly to the owners of AI capital – machines and software – much of that will have to be recycled to the rest of the population, employed or not, if developed societies are to remain stable. The Universal Basic Income is one suggestion for doing that. On the other hand, total hours worked have fallen in developed societies, and the alternative possibility that the non-working population will continue to grow cannot be ruled out.