There’s little to fear from Frankenstein

Automation’s progress will be slow and uneventful. It will hurt some professions but create others

To stay alive when the robots come for us, you will need a special kind of camouflage. Called Hyperface, it is made of strange, broken forms that intelligent cameras misrecognise as faces. You will need to combine it with lens-dazzling make-up and vary your gait as you walk. Finally, you must learn at least five programming languages, to stop them from taking your job.

The fear of automation is everywhere. There is a cottage industry of futurologists and consultants who tell us that artificial intelligence will do to white-collar jobs what mechanical automation did to blue-collar ones. The End [of work] is Nigh, their sandwich boards proclaim. Yesterday, at the Labour conference in Brighton, that became a justification for Jeremy Corbyn to use higher taxes to fund a National Education Service.

We have always fantasised about machines in revolt, from Frankenstein to the Terminator. They overwhelmed us with raw, clomping power when factories were changing, became cold and calculating when computers began infiltrating our homes, and today, in the age of the algorithm, they watch and enslave us en masse, like the machine overlords in The Matrix.

The strangest form of modern AI fear involves “the singularity”, a hypothetical future event in which self-improving machines evolve overnight into something like a god. For converts to this way of thinking, formulating an ethical framework which could compel such beings to protect us rather than recycle our atoms therefore becomes the most important task on Earth. Naturally these people are concentrated in Silicon Valley, and include powerful people such as the Spacex founder Elon Musk.

Yet the threat to employment is more sober, and must be taken seriously. We are living through an unprecedented explosion in more humble forms of intelligence: no gods yet, but many locusts. The list of industries being transformed by machine learning is now too long for humans to read. If tasks involving analysis and judgment become cheaper to automate than to pay wages for, professions like lawyers and accountants could be decimated.

That might happen in future, but there’s no evidence it’s happening yet. If it were we would expect to see productivity and unemployment rising in advanced economies, where in many places they are pinned to the floor. We would also expect to see capital investment boom as companies plough money into new technologies; in the US such investment has grown more slowly since 2002 than at any time before the Second World War.

This is not to say automation won’t be transformative, but it is likely to be slower and less cataclysmic than some presume. The machines that Luddites smashed in the 19th century did not render humans obsolete but created new forms of labour with new armies of bureaucrats to organise it. More recently, the economist James Bessen has shown how cash machines actually increased the number of bank tellers by making it cheaper to open new branches. Meanwhile, a recent LSE study across 17 developed countries found that robots did indeed reduce the hours of lower-skilled workers, but not the total hours worked by all humans – and that they actually increased average wages.

So while automation will hurt specific professions and industries – often marginally over several decades – it will create and bolster others. Of 271 occupations listed in the 1950 US census, only “elevator operator” has been obviated completely.

This will still have sweeping social effects. The industrial age created the union movements and mass literacy that enabled modern politics, and we are already seeing what happens to that politics when we write off large numbers of people as superfluous. Yet the redundant coalworkers who helped to propel Donald Trump to power were not put out of work by automation but by globalisation and the shift towards services.

That said, we should be thankful to even the most fervid prophets. Their predictions may not come true but we need to be thinking about them; they inoculate us from unseen disasters, force us to plan. We will also continue to find them and apocalyptic messages perversely thrilling.

My prediction? The job of doomsayer will always be secure.