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A technology that gives you instant access to every book that has ever been writtent… must surely have something going for it.

Who can say, but I can’t help thinking this internet thing might turn out to be something big. The printing press is generally regarded as something of a revolution, and what did that give you? The chance to own a book — two, if you were very wealthy. If so, a technology that gives you instant access to every book that has ever been written — all of human knowledge, wherever you are, whenever you want it — must surely have something going for it.

At any rate, Gordon’s death of innovation theory rather conflicts with that other great anxiety of our times: the notion that technological innovation, far from fading, threatens to run ahead of our ability to control it, or at least to benefit from it. Artificial intelligence, we are told, if it does not altogether enslave us, will at the very least make us economically obsolete. Already it has started to replicate tasks previously thought the preserve of the human mind, from legal drafting to investment advice. Call it the Robots Will Take Our Jobs theory.

In one sense this is undoubtedly true. Technology has been replacing human labour since at least the days of the knitting machine. All that has changed of late is the nature of the labour that is being replaced: instead of low-wage physical labour, now it’s those fancy-pants “symbolic analysts” whose jobs are on the line: lawyers, bankers, maybe even, heh heh, journalists. (I joke, of course. That’s impossible.)

Where the RWTOJ thesis falls down is not in the idea that there will be jobs lost, but in its unstated corollary, that there will be no jobs created in their place. Economists call this the “lump of labour” fallacy: the assumption that there is a fixed amount of work to be done in any economy, and no more, such that any reduction in the demand for labour, as through automation, must inevitably leave some permanently out of work. The same is often claimed about increases in labour supply, as through immigration. Just so many jobs to go around, after all.