A London underground train passes a billboard for an AI company advertising AI employees.Chris J Ratcliffe/Reuters

Is artificial intelligence the salvation of mankind, or its downfall? Are markets justified in bidding up AI stocks as high as they have, or is it all a bubble? Will we look back on the hundreds of billions of dollars the AI titans are currently investing in capacity as having laid the foundations for a new age of prosperity, or as an especially destructive example of the herd instinct, this time among tech billionaires?

At the moment, the best answer to questions like these is: Yes. Nobody knows anything, but everyone is certain about everything. Oceans of hype wash across social media, whether hailing the coming revolution or bewailing it, sometimes written by the same people.

There is one thing, however, on which there is widespread, if not universal agreement: AI will lead to massive, extinction-event-level loss of jobs, especially in the knowledge economy – precisely the university-educated, service-industry, symbolic-analyst professions that were supposed to inherit the Earth, insulated from the fluctuations of inventory, immune to globalization.

And not only them. In the more extreme formulations, AI will kill every kind of job, not only the virtual but the physical as well – a world, literally, without work. AI will be smarter than we are, quicker, stronger – better at everything, at a fraction of the cost, without need of vacation, rest or employee health benefits. It will create great wealth for those who control it – for as long as they do – but will cost everyone else their livelihoods, and as important, a sense of purpose. Society will be consumed with redistributing income; individuals, with finding meaning in their lives.

And it will all happen so fast! This is the other thing on which there is widespread agreement. The world might have endured previous industrial revolutions, but they were neither so universal – every job made obsolete, not just some – nor so instantaneous: millions upon millions laid off, more or less at the same time. Even if an answer to the jobs problem could be found in the long run, the short run will be so painful, and costly, as to be overwhelming.

Mind you, there’s very little evidence of this happening, as yet. Unemployment across the OECD remains at about 5 per cent, where it has been for the last three years – and lower than at any time in the previous two decades. Still, there are reports, anecdotes, warning signs: a big law firm laying off hundreds of support staff here, a chemicals giant there.

The past couple of weeks have seemed especially portentous, with the release of upgraded versions of the two leading AI chatbots,........

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