It began, for many people, with a relatively ordinary fear.
AI will take our jobs.
There is nothing particularly strange about this claim.
Machines have taken over tasks before.
Industrial machinery replaced some forms of manual labour. Computers automated calculations and record-keeping. Software transformed clerical work. Robots changed manufacturing. Entire occupations have disappeared, while others have been created.
So when a new technology appears to perform something humans have traditionally been paid to do, it is reasonable to ask what will happen to the people who currently do it.
But notice the wording.
We don't usually say:
“AI will automate some tasks.”
We say:
“AI will take our jobs.”
The machine has acquired a verb.
It will take.
And that changes the story.
A job is not a thing sitting on a desk waiting to be removed. It is a social arrangement: a collection of activities, expectations, skills, relationships and economic institutions through which people exchange their labour for a livelihood.
When a technology changes what can be done by a machine, it does not automatically determine what happens to that social arrangement.
Some tasks may disappear.
Some may become cheaper.
Some may be reorganised.
Some may become newly valuable.
New tasks may appear because the technology exists.
The number of people employed in a particular occupation may rise or fall.
The occupation itself may change.
And the distribution of the benefits and costs may depend upon decisions made by employers, governments, workers, consumers and institutions.
“AI will take our jobs” compresses all of those possibilities into a single event.
The machine arrives.
The human leaves.
It is a remarkably simple story.
Perhaps too simple.
There is another reason the phrase is interesting.
It treats a technological capability as though it were an economic intention.
A machine that can perform a task does not thereby have an interest in performing it.
A calculator did not want accountants' jobs.
An industrial robot did not want factory workers' jobs.
A spreadsheet did not want clerks' jobs.
The economic consequences of those technologies were produced through the interaction of technical possibilities with human institutions.
The same distinction matters with AI.
An AI system may make it possible to perform some task with fewer human workers.
That is a claim about capability.
Whether an employer actually uses that capability to reduce employment is a claim about organisation and incentives.
Whether society permits or encourages that change is a claim about institutions and policy.
Whether the result improves or worsens people's lives is a claim about social consequences.
Those are four different questions.
“AI will take our jobs” makes them sound like one.
There is another complication.
What exactly is a job?
A job is rarely a single task.
A teacher does not merely transmit information.
A doctor does not merely retrieve medical knowledge.
A journalist does not merely generate sentences.
A lawyer does not merely produce text.
A programmer does not merely write code.
An occupation is usually an organised bundle of activities, many of which depend upon relationships, responsibilities, tacit knowledge, institutional roles and the particular circumstances in which work occurs.
So a technology can automate part of a job without replacing the job.
It can also transform the job without reducing the number of people doing it.
And sometimes the automation of one task creates demand for another.
The history of technology is full of such transformations.
None of this means that employment disruption is imaginary.
It isn't.
People can lose jobs when technologies change the economic value of what they do.
Industries can contract.
Skills can become obsolete.
Transitions can be painful and uneven.
The fact that technological change does not have a single predetermined outcome does not make its consequences harmless.
It makes them contingent.
And contingency is important.
If AI takes someone's job, the immediate cause may not be “AI” in isolation.
It may be an organisation deciding to restructure.
It may be a market changing.
It may be a business deciding that a task can be performed more cheaply.
It may be a customer changing what they expect.
It may be a policy environment that rewards one form of organisation over another.
AI may be the enabling condition.
It is not necessarily the agent.
This distinction becomes especially important as the rhetoric escalates.
Once we say that AI will take our jobs, it becomes very easy to imagine the next step:
If it can take our jobs, perhaps it can take our roles.
If it can take our roles, perhaps it can replace us.
If it can replace us, perhaps it can displace us altogether.
The machine has quietly changed from a technology that alters what humans can do into an actor that competes with humans for existence.
That is a considerable conceptual leap.
And perhaps that is why the language of replacement is more revealing than the language of automation.
Automation asks:
What can a machine do?
Replacement asks:
What happens to the human whose role has been organised around doing it?
Those questions are related.
They are not identical.
The first concerns capability.
The second concerns social organisation.
And once we begin to treat the machine itself as the thing doing the replacing, another question appears.
What does the machine want?
At the beginning of this series, that question sounds absurd.
AI doesn't need a job.
It doesn't receive a salary.
It doesn't need a promotion.
It doesn't resent the people it replaces.
It doesn't wake up on Monday morning and decide to take somebody else's position.
Yet the language of “taking our jobs” gives us a story in which it almost seems to.
Perhaps that is harmless shorthand.
Perhaps.
But it is worth noticing what happens when shorthand becomes a way of thinking.
A machine that can perform a task becomes a machine that takes the task.
A technology that changes an occupation becomes a competitor.
A competitor becomes a rival.
And eventually, perhaps, a rival becomes an enemy.
That progression is not inevitable.
But it begins with a remarkably ordinary sentence:
It will take our jobs.
The question for this series is what happens to our description of machines after we start saying it.
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