The Economist recently ran a cover entitled “Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse,” citing widespread fear among the American public of artificial-intelligence-induced job losses. Such fearmongering is far from new. Information technology breakthroughs have led to many such announcements over the last few decades.

In the 1990s, we had the computer scare, prompted by best-selling authors such as Jeremy Rifkin and Viviane Forrester. More recently, in 2013, we had the robot menace, when an Oxford study estimated that 47 percent of jobs in the United States were at risk of computerization. At both times, such prophecies coincided with mass unemployment, not caused by technology but by economic recessions driven by financial instability and austerity policies. Yet such stories helped to naturalize and depoliticize unemployment. READ MORE