Computers taking our jobs is not a new concept. Visit any advanced manufacturing plant, anywhere in the world, and you will see many people, but yes, also, computers doing jobs once filled by humans. In some cases, they are doing work that humans could never have done, in others a job that would once have taken a lifetime to complete is now being done in seconds.
What we don’t yet know is whether the advent of AI will be part of that same old story, in which machines wipe out some jobs, create some new ones and complement others, or if it will be a revolution that destroys careers without creating anything in the way of replacement. For the little it is worth, my bet is that it will be more like the railways: a technological boom that revolutionised our society, but one in which most of the benefit went to the people using the railways, not the companies that built them, some of which lost their shirts.
Still it is worth thinking about a world in which AI destroys most or all jobs because it is a useful way to think about the value of work. One long-mooted policy response to this — advanced by some on the libertarian right and some on the left — is the introduction of a universal basic income.