Will Computers Put Us Out of Work?

Labor markets have adapted to past disruptions caused by technological change. Will they continue to do so? In 1996, a world chess champion was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue. Early in 2016 a human master of Go, a game considerably more complex than chess, lost to AlphaGo from Google’s DeepMind. As artificial intelligence (AI) improves, some predict that computers will be able to do any human task. The fictitious “steel-driving-man” John Henry died competing against his machine replacement. Will computers put us out of work? Opinions differ.