What will AI do to employment? It is, after "will it kill us all?", the most important question about the technology, and it's remarkably hard to pin down – even as the frontier moves from science fiction to reality. At one end of the spectrum is the slightly Pollyannaish claim that new technology simply creates new jobs; at the other, fears of businesses replacing entire workforces with AI tools. Sometimes, the dispute is less about end state and more about speed of the transition: an upheaval completed in a few years is destructive for those caught in the middle of it, in a way that one which takes two decades may be survivable. Even analogies to the past are less clear than we might like.