Artificial intelligence is increasingly presented as the technology that may finally solve humanity's ancient economic problem: scarcity. Elon Musk has gone so far as to predict an "age of abundance" in which AI and robots make human labour largely unnecessary and money eventually loses much of its purpose. It is an extraordinary vision. But history should make us cautious. Technologies that solve economic problems often create political and social ones.

The Industrial Revolution offers an instructive precedent. Mechanisation enormously increased productivity. Agricultural productivity increased, transportation improved and industrial production outpaced previous eras. Yet industrialisation did not immediately produce prosperity for everyone. Alongside unprecedented wealth came overcrowded cities, dangerous factories, labour exploitation, unemployment among displaced artisans, colonisation and extraordinary concentrations of economic power.

The machine was not inherently unjust. The problem was who owned it, who controlled production and how the........

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