People are worried that AI will take everyone's jobs. We've been here before.

In 1930, the prominent British economist John Maynard Keynes had warned that we were "being afflicted with a new disease" called technological unemployment. Labor-saving advances, he wrote, were "outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour." There seemed to be examples everywhere. New machinery was transforming factories and farms. Mechanical switching being adopted by the nation's telephone network was wiping out the need for local phone operators, one of the most common jobs for young American women in the early 20th century.