What if robots don’t take all the jobs?

I T IS HARD to believe now, but a little more than a decade ago people were seriously worried about robots taking all the jobs. Back in 2018 the chief economist of the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, gave a warning that “large swathes” of the population would become “technologically unemployed”. He argued that the “fourth industrial revolution” of automation and artificial intelligence would create even more disruption to people’s working lives than the previous three. Bestselling books predicted dystopian outcomes in which society split into a wealthy, robot-owning plutocracy and an unemployed underclass, and repressive governments would be needed to rein in social discontent. But robots did not take all the jobs—and today, in 2030, much of the world faces the opposite problem as populations age and workforces shrink.