If you have read any of the dozens of reports into occupational exposure to AI produced of late, you will be familiar with the story: AI will destroy huge numbers of jobs in the knowledge economy, and we know this because of the particular tasks it is good at.
But history tells us that whether new technologies lead to falling, flat or even rising employment depends on a huge number of factors. These can be neatly illustrated by a walk through the different ways that one particular technological wave — the rise of the internet and software — has played out in recent decades.
An often overlooked question is whether there is such pent-up demand for a product or service that, when it becomes cheaper and more abundant, consumption rises at an even faster pace. Large increases in software productivity since the 1990s were accompanied by rising, not falling, employment in web development: the explosion in demand for software far outstripped the reduction in the amount of labour required for a given amount of code production.