Once again, what once seems like abundance will instead be over-supply: The machines may invent their makers out of work.

Last week, I spoke with Avent about his book, how his theories might help to explain the 2016 election, and the future of working. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

Derek Thompson: In classic Economist style, your title, The Wealth of Humans, is doing double or triple duty. First, it’s a play on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and indeed there’s a lot of Smith in here. Second, it’s a book about the most common definition of wealth, money, and how it might be earned and distributed in the future. Third, it’s about Merriam-Webster’s second definition of wealth, which is a surfeit, a surplus, and your argument is that we may be entering a world with too many workers. Anything I’m missing?

Ryan Avent: Those were the ones I had in mind. There may be others lurking.

Thompson: There is an ongoing debate about whether technological growth is accelerating, as economists like Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (the authors of The Second Machine Age) insist, or slowing down, as the national productivity numbers indicate. Where do you come down?

Avent: I come down squarely in the Brynjolfsson and McAfee camp and strongly disagree with economists like Robert Gordon, who have said that growth is basically over. I think the digital revolution is probably going to be as important and transformative as the industrial revolution. The main reason is machine intelligence, a general-purpose technology that can be used anywhere, from driving cars to customer service, and it’s getting better very, very quickly. There’s no reason to think that improvement will slow down, whether or not Moore’s Law continues.

I think this transformative revolution will create an abundance of labor. It will create enormous growth in [the supply of workers and machines], automating a lot of industries and boosting productivity. When you have this glut of workers, it plays havoc with existing institutions.

I think we are headed for a really important era in economic history. The Industrial Revolution is a pretty good guide of what that will look like. There will have to be a societal negotiation for how to share the gains from growth. That process will be long and drawn out. It will involve intense ideological conflict, and history suggests that a lot will go wrong.

Thompson: Even I would admit that is a weird time to predict the end of work, considering that the unemployment rate has been at or under 5 percent all year, the private sector in the U.S. has created jobs for record-high 77 consecutive months, and wages are actually rising at their fastest rate since the Great Recession.

So what is the best evidence that your prediction is plausible?