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.

In the future, machines will replace humans in jobs. This is not controversial: it's what machines have done since well before the start of the industrial revolution. Petrol pump attendants were replaced by automated pumps, secretaries were replaced by Microsoft Office. This is what economists call the substitutive effect of automation: humans are substituted in jobs by machines. From time to time, fears have been expressed that humans would run out of jobs entirely. I first wrote about this concern back in 1980, and like many other people at the time, I under-estimated the resilience of what economists call the complementary effect of automation.

I felt that there were several ethical dilemmas regarding questions of liability and moral responsibility when it came to self-driving cars. Although the questions didn't have answers yet, given the likely financial might of the companies that will end up building and operating self-driving cars, the answers that will be drawn up for those dilemmas will definitely not be in the favor of the general public. For example: A person is injured by self-driving car due to a misclassification error by an embedded computer vision model, which usually has a 99.99% accuracy rate. The autonomous car companies will have lobbied to have that type of event classified as a freak statistical occurrence to avoid being held liable for ensuing damages and injuries. After all, in today's world, no hardware manufacturer is expected to achieve 100% reliability with their products, and a Convolutional Neural Network is just another technological artifact. On the other hand, a human driver who for the last 30 years has never run red a light because he has never mistaken it for being green, but who for the first time today accidentally misclassifies the color of the crossing signal, and ended up hurting someone in the process, won't be able to claim that his red classification accuracy has been 99.9995% so far, and this was just a freak statistical occurrence.

The term "technological unemployment" was popularised in the 1930s by the celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes. Fifty years later, another renowned economist called Wassily Leontief warned that jobs for humans might follow the same path that jobs for horses did in the early 20th century. So the idea has a respectable economic heritage, but economists are still arguing about whether it will actually happen. The latest contribution comes from Daniel Susskind, a member of an unreasonably talented family of lawyers, economists and academics. His economic credentials are strong: previously an adviser at Number 10, he is now a fellow at Balliol College, Oxford.

Oscar Wilde dreamed of a world without work. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) he imagined a society liberated from drudgery by the machine: "while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure … or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work." This aesthete's Eden prompted one of his most famous observations: "Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at." In Wilde's day the future of work was the first question that every aspiring utopian, from Edward Bellamy to HG Wells, needed to answer.

Roger Bootle is not afraid to think and say unconventional things. He is that rare phenomenon: a professional economist who thinks that Brexit is a Good Idea. Indeed, he belongs to a group called Economists for Brexit, now renamed as Economists for Free Trade, which argues for a no-deal Brexit. Whatever you think of that, the economics consultancy that Bootle founded, Capital Economics, has been very successful financially, and in 2012 it was awarded the £250,000 Wolfson Economics Prize, the second most valuable economics prize in the world after the Nobel, for a proposal that EU member states who wanted to exit should default on a large part of their debts. A book on tech unemployment from such a high-profile economist is to be warmly welcomed.

There is now widespread anxiety over the future of work, often accompanied by calls for a basic income to protect those displaced by automation and other technological changes. As a labour economist, I am in favour of more efficient redistributive taxation through the application of refundable tax credits, which amounts to an income-tested basic income or negative income tax. But I am more skeptical about the spectre of a future without work. And if the future isn't scarred by massive, widespread technological unemployment, a basic income would be neither outrageously expensive nor the be-all and end-all of the policy measures that society needs. The reasons for my skepticism about a future without work rests in the evidence to date.

Many innovations come in the shape of machines that replace workers. We hear of cars that drive themselves, of robots that perform more and more tasks, and of how artificial intelligence can replace smart jobs. These technological developments cause alarm among many, and this has intensified since the last recession that began in 2008. The recovery from the recession has been slow, and especially in creating new jobs. That is why many have called it'a jobless recovery.'

In 2013, an algorithm determined Eric Loomis' six-year prison sentence in Wisconsin for attempting to flee a traffic officer and operating a motor vehicle without the owner's consent. No one knew how the software, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, or COMPAS, worked--not even the judge who delivered the sentence. Analyses conducted by ProPublica later found the predictive artificial intelligence used in this case, which attempts to gauge the likelihood of an offender committing another crime, to be racially biased: A two-year study involving 10,000 defendants found that the A.I. routinely overestimated the likelihood of recidivism among black defendants and underestimated it among whites. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Eric Loomis' case, so the sentence stands. Increasingly, A.I. has the power to alter the course of people's lives.

New technologies bring innovations, in business, and change the course of the work being done. But does a technical revolution bring shift in employment patterns too? The Industrial Revolution which began in the 18th century was a transition to new manufacturing processes characterised by new inventions. The industrial revolution effectively increased the output levels and also saw improved systems of transportation, communication and banking. But the Industrial Revolution also took some key sacrifices, the change destroyed traditional jobs, but it also created new ones.