Will machines really take our jobs this time?

200 years ago the Luddites probably weren’t the first people to worry that new ways of working would threaten their livelihoods.

Since then, the industrial revolution has come and gone; we’ve got automatic telephone exchanges, robots in factories, computers, modern newspaper presses, the internet, no newspaper presses.

Yes, there aren’t many blacksmiths around these days, but if you look at historical unemployment rates they don’t seem to reflect these job-killing innovations.

There are ups and downs of course, but aren’t these mostly caused by politics and macroeconomics? Or are those forces ultimately influenced by underlying technological change in the first place?

Maybe this time it’s different, but there seems a certain hubris in believing we are living in special times. Are we overestimating our own importance? Or are the times really a changin’?

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Sources (UK data):

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotinwork/unemployment/timeseries/mgsx/lms

https://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-trends--discontinued-/volume-111--no--3/a-century-of-labour-market-change--1900-to-2000.pdf