CONCEPT
Technological Unemployment
Keynes's 1930 coinage for unemployment caused by our discovery of means of economising human labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for it—named to be dismissed as a temporary phase and returned, a century later, as the central live question about artificial intelligence.
In the autumn of 1930, as the industrial world slid into the worst depression in its history,
John Maynard Keynes coined a phrase and then set it aside almost in the same breath. The essay was “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” and the phrase was technological unemployment: “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” He called it a new disease and named it a temporary phase of maladjustment, confident that the long arc bent toward abundance and that history would vindicate the optimism. For nearly a century the phrase sat dormant, a curiosity, because the compensation mechanism—the process by which displaced workers find higher-value uses for their labor in new tasks the machines created—kept delivering its verdict in the optimists' favor. The concept returned in earnest with
large language models,