>The gloomy narrative, which says that an invasion of job-killing robots is just around the corner, has for decades had an extraordinary hold on the popular ima

>The gloomy narrative, which says that an invasion of job-killing robots is just around the corner, has for decades had an extraordinary hold on the popular imagination. This "gloomy narrative" first and foremost served well for decades to depress wages and wage expectations and ensure a considerable supply of cheap labor exists. The political argument was even spoken out quite freely from time to time, and it went like "well, if you [politicians] don't ensure labor is cheap, we [rich corporate owners] will simply automate away all the jobs and your voters will be left unemployed". The narrative of this development seemingly being "inevitable" and the necessary tech always being "just around the corner" for the automation of practically everything played so well into this, that it leads me to assume that interested circles knowingly pushed this narrative for exactly these political reasons. And a lot of technologists helped hugely in this push, often not because of political or economical gains (though quite some probably own tech stocks or work in the tech sector and thus stand to benefit potentially, but I also know tech enthusiasts for which these both don't apply) but because of tech fascination. The truth however is that automation is a hard and costly business with clear limitations, and even many simple jobs are probably not automatable for decades to come. Automation often just helps to make certain jobs more efficient, but the efficiency gain is immediately being consumed by extensions in service and/or complexity that would not have been possible before, but leave us with a net zero in the change for the need for human employees (or even an increase!). But that did not stop the automation zealots from pushing their political agenda, because it's just too helpful in ensuring that most of the monetary value of the efficiency gains ends up with them and their shareholders instead of the human workforce. So the newest paragraph in the book is "AI will automate away even all the complicated, brainy work!" and a surprising number of otherwise smart people fall for the same trap that has already been successfully used to "manage" the lower-paid untrained workforce for decades.