Will AI create or destroy jobs?

More than two centuries have passed since the Luddites destroyed machinery threatening their jobs, and parallels are often drawn between the Industrial Revolution and our age of automation to suggest English textile workers were wrong in trying to halt the adoption of machines. While it is true that labor-force participation rates have trended upward since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the Luddites didn’t benefit. For them, mechanization led to what historian Duncan Bythell has called “the largest case of redundancy or technological unemployment in our recent economic history.”