AI Summary
5 min read“The average person believes they've got about a one in five chance of losing their job in the next five years.” That is the mood among American workers, fed by dire predictions from AI executives like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Bill Gates, who casually told a talk show that humans will not be needed “for most things.” But according to Callum Williams, The Economist’s senior economics writer and San Francisco bureau chief, this fear rests on a misunderstanding of history. If AI were to put millions out of work permanently, it would be “in a very profound and fundamental way unprecedented.” Nothing close has ever happened before.
The Industrial Revolution was not a job-killing disaster
The standard Silicon Valley story goes like this: the Industrial Revolution caused the “Engels Pause,” a roughly fifty-year period from 1790 to 1840 when real wages for the average British worker stagnated even as the economy boomed. AI, the argument runs, will do the same thing but faster and worse. Williams pushes back hard. Recent scholarship casts serious doubt on the Engels Pause narrative. For one thing, the new steam-powered technologies did not destroy jobs overall. In the century after 1760, the number of Britons in work nearly tripled. Job churn — the rate at which positions were created and destroyed — was low until the 1850s, almost a century into the revolution. Wage growth wa
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:13) **AI Anxiety Among American Workers** - Polls show workers believe they have a one-in-five chance of losing their job to AI in the next five years, a fear amplified by tech leaders like Dario Amodei and Bill Gates making dire predictions.
- 2 (03:25) **Introducing Callum Williams and the Historical Thesis** - Callum Williams, The Economist's senior economics writer and San Francisco bureau chief, argues that mass technological unemployment would be historically unprecedented.
- 3 (04:08) **Debunking the Industrial Revolution Myth** - The Industrial Revolution is often cited as a period of mass job destruction, but Williams argues this is a misreading of the historical record.
- 4 (06:07) **Why Wage Growth Was Slow (But Not a Disaster)** - Slow early wage growth during the Industrial Revolution is better explained by weak productivity growth and rapid population growth than by technology destroying livelihoods.
- 5 (07:05) **The Slow Pace of Even Transformative Change** - Economies take an extraordinarily long time to adjust to new technologies, with agriculture providing the clearest example of a centuries-long transition.
- 6 (08:25) **The Current Graduate Job Market Is Not an AI Story** - New graduates are struggling, with unemployment rates higher than the overall average for the first time, but this trend predates ChatGPT.
- 7 (09:24) **What to Watch For If AI Really Is Different** - Williams lays out specific, measurable economic signals that would indicate AI is breaking historical patterns of technological change.
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Show Notes
Perhaps the AI “boomers” are right about a sweeping labour-market revolution. But a careful look at history shows just how unprecedented their bullish scenarios would be. Africa’s bounty of minerals has drawn tremendous recent interest; will the continent see the benefits this time around? And our World Cup profile series continues with a look at Japan’s squad.
Guests and host:
- Callum Williams, senior economics writer
- John McDermott, chief Africa correspondent
- Jon Fasman, senior culture correspondent
- Rosie Blau, co-host of “The Intelligence”
- Jason Palmer, co-host of “The Intelligence”
Topics covered:
- AI, labour market, economics, history
- Africa, critical minerals, investment, development
- World Cup, Japan
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