Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the great fear has always been that automation would create mass, permanent unemployment. The most famous early scare came shortly after James Hargreaves, a brilliant innovator, came up with a multi-spindle spinning frame in 1764. Hargreaves, one of an army of free-thinkers who drove an explosion in economic growth, was born near Blackburn, a cotton producing part of Lancashire.

The local textiles industry couldn’t cope with demand, and Hargreaves’ innovation allowed a massive increase in productivity. But our inventor kept his device secret, using it only for his own production. He was right to be prudent: after his output helped depress prices – and hence deliver consumers a windfall – angry textile workers eventually broke into his property and vandalised his machines, forcing him to flee to Nottingham.

But progress wasn’t to be stopped, and automation has gone hand in hand over the past 250 years with an explosive increase in wages and employment. The reason? Machines increase output per person, and thus the demand for labour and wages. New jobs are created to replace old jobs, and then as these are automated even newer jobs emerge to replace the next lot of losses, and so on, ad infinitum. The main problem is one of mismatching skills: the process of creative destruction requires capital and labour to adapt constantly.

Yet there are many today who doubt that this overwhelmingly benign process will continue, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence, robotics, self-driving cars, drones and a new generation of learning machines. They are convinced that this is a new phase, and that millions of middle class jobs are about to be wiped out, with nothing to replace them.

David Fuller's view

Allister Heath is one of the brightest, most upbeat and creative journalists out there.  I always read his prolific columns and often publish them. 

So, do I agree with this column above?  I think he will be right for the next few years, and possibly a decade or so.  However, the accelerating rate of technological innovation which I have written about for a number of years is clearly evident if you think about the changes you have witnessed over the last ten or twenty years.  Moreover, we are only in the foothills of this acceleration which has no natural ending.  In other words, it could continue indefinitely.   

Once intelligent machines have the capacity to develop and reproduce themselves, they will evolve much more quickly than our organic human brains.  The best projections suggest this will occur before the end of this century.

Don’t take my word for it – see what Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and many others are saying.  Here is a sample from Tech World. 

Here is a PDF of Allister Heath's article.