Artificial intelligence won't steal your children's jobs

"Whatever your job is the chances are that one of these machines can do it faster or better than you can." No, this is not a 2018 headline about self-driving cars or one of IBM's new supercomputers. Instead, it was published by the Daily Mirror in 1955, when a computer took as much space as a large kitchen and had less power than a pocket calculator. They were called "electronic brains" back then, and evoked both hope and fear. And more than 20 years later, little had changed: In a 1978 BBC documentary about silicon chips, one commentator argued that "They are the reason why Japan is abandoning its shipbuilding and why our children will grow up without jobs to go to". If one types "artificial intelligence" (AI) on Google Books' Ngram Viewer – a tool that allows us to check how often a term was printed in a book between 1800 and 2008 – we can clearly see that our modern-day hype, optimism and deep concern about AI are by no means a novelty.