The writer is chair of Rockefeller International. His latest book is ‘What Went Wrong With Capitalism’
Every tech revolution has inspired fears that innovation will destroy jobs. While those fears have never played out, artificial intelligence is cast as much more disruptive because it has the potential to perform so many tasks the way people do — or better. Is the threat to human labour that different and dire this time?
What the current obsession with AI overlooks is that another (counter) force is also advancing rapidly. In the past four decades, the number of countries in which the working age population is shrinking has risen from zero to 55, including most of the major economies. This collapse is accelerating now because families are having even fewer children than expected.