Bret Stephens: Americans are growing hostile to artificial intelligence. I've warned that letting AI write for you can be brain-eating, soul-destroying, even democracy-undermining. There's also a bipartisan backlash against data centers. Plus a widespread conviction that AI is going to destroy most jobs. Not to mention dark fears--especially from its very creators --that it could go rogue and lead to the destruction of a large chunk of humanity itself.

So, of course, the knee-jerk contrarian in me now finds myself warming to AI, thinking it will create more jobs than it will destroy, generate medical and scientific breakthroughs that will save and prolong lives, and allow humanity to discover new skills and achieve previously unimaginable goals.

Help me out, Frank: Which side of my brain is wrong?

Frank Bruni: Medical and scientific advances--absolutely. That side of your brain is working just fine. And I can buy the idea that AI won't be quite the jobs apocalypse that many people fear.

But I see no arithmetic by which it doesn't diminish the overall number of jobs. And the popular notion among AI evangelists that such job elimination will free people in joyless careers to wander rhapsodically through the flowery meadows of creativity: If they don't need their wages, why aren't they wandering now? How will they suddenly be able to afford their wandering when a bot has replaced them?

Would you support some version of universal basic income? Because not everybody will get rich off AI stocks; according to a Gallup survey last year, more than 40 percent of American adults aren't in the market at all, and stock ownership is predictably concentrated among the most affluent.

Bret: So far the best economic research doesn't back up the idea that AI is eliminating jobs, even in industries that have been early AI adopters. That stands to reason: Productivity-enhancing technologies like AI are typically revenue-enhancing, and new revenues typically mean more jobs. A lot of types of work will doubtlessly be ended by AI--secretarial and paralegal work, for instance, or traditional coding. But many more jobs--whose work might seem even stranger to us now than, say, the description of an airplane mechanic of the 1940s would seem to a train engineer of the 1890s--will come into existence.

As for universal basic income, I think it's a terrible idea; an invitation for people not to work, which creates a million personal and social problems in its turn. And since we already have $40 trillion in national debt, it would also speed the way to total fiscal collapse.

Frank: Leaving UBI aside for the moment, I have a problem with the........

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