There’s a version of the conversation around AI that feels very new. The language is new. The technology clearly is. The speed probably is as well.
But the underlying concern isn’t. It’s the same question that comes up whenever something changes the way work is done.
What happens to people?
If machines can do more, it’s not a big leap to assume people will be needed less. Push that far enough and you end up with the more extreme versions of the argument – that large parts of the workforce becoming unnecessary.
But there’s a useful way of looking at this that flips it slightly.
If I told you a new technology would lead to 40% unemployment, it sounds catastrophic. If I told you the same thing would lead to a three-day working week, it sounds like progress.
Same number of working hours. Very different reaction. That’s the point that’s being missed.
The idea that large parts of the workforce simply become “unnecessary” has been predicted before. It hasn’t played out that way. What has happened, repeatedly, is that work changes.
If you go back far enough, people worked far more than they do now. In the US, annual working hours have fallen from somewhere close to 3,000 hours a year in the late 1800s to around 1,800 today.
That didn’t happen because there was less to do. It happened because technology made people more productive. The same effort started to go further.
People didn’t disappear. The shape of work changed. Life adjusted around it.
And, very importantly, it didn’t feel like progress at the time either.
None of that happened automatically. It was a combination of economics, policy and expectation. Shorter working weeks, longer retirements, more time outside work altogether.
In other words, the benefits of increased productivity were shared.
That’s the better way to think about what’s coming. Not whether AI changes work. It will. But how the outcome of that change is experienced.
Because the gap between something feeling like progress and something feeling like loss isn’t always that large. Sometimes it’s the same outcome, just seen differently.
We’ve seen this before.