Artificial Intelligence is not going to cause mass unemployment

The final argument of the pessimists is that automation is "hollowing out" the workforce by replacing the jobs of the middle-skill professions, so we will be left with a world of hedge-fund managers and their maids. There has been some disproportionate losses of middle-income jobs in America and Europe since 1980, but as the MIT economist David Autor argues, it's as much to do with competition from China as automation per se. And he thinks it is running out of steam anyway. Journalists, he says "tend to overstate the extent of machine substitution for human labor and ignore the strong complementarities between automation and labor that increase productivity, raise earnings, and augment demand for labor."