Most economists think the ill-effects of automation are transitory, but a
growing minority of their colleagues and many technologists think the current
surge of technological change differs from anything seen before, for two
reasons.
First, tractors put only farmers out of work, and machine-tool automation
only factory workers, but smart devices and computer networks can invade
almost every job category involving computing, communicating or simple
deduction. They can fill out and check mortgage-loan forms and transfer
phone calls, and even allow cows to milk themselves without human
assistance at microcontrolled milkers. No technology has ever been as
protean, so unrestrained by physical limits, so capable of cutting huge swaths
through unrelated industries such as banking, power utilities, insurance and
telecommunications.
Second, the power of devices and networks run by microprocessors and
software is increasing at a rate never seen before, roughly doubling in
performance every 18 months or so. Among other things, this trend leads to
unprecedented reductions in the cost of microchip-based technology, allowing
it to be used much more widely and rapidly.19
This new twist in the fear-of-automation narrative around 1995 did not
immediately produce a recession. Most people were not moved to curtail
spending because of it, and the world economy boomed. The dominant
narratives in the 1990s seemed to be focused on the wonderful business
opportunities brought by the coming new millennium. The automation narratives
trailed off again in the 2000s, with the distractions of the dot-com boom, the real
estate boom, and the world financial crisis of 2007–9. But the automation
narratives are still with us, described by new catchphrases.

The Dot-Com or Millennium Boom in the Stock Markets
The Internet, first available to the public around 1994, launched a narrative of
the amazing power of computers. Before the turn of the century, the Internet Age
appeared to coincide with the coming of the new millennium in 2000, much
talked about when it was an imminent future event. Dot-com stocks were the
primary beneficiaries in the years leading up to 2000. During the market
expansion from 1974 to 2000, stock prices rose more than twentyfold.20 The
period marked the biggest stock market expansion in US history, and
descriptions of the expansion suggested exactly that. (This story is beginning to
be forgotten now, as it is being replaced by the narratives surrounding the mere
threefold expansion following the world financial crisis of 2007–9, which are
more contagious at the time of this writing.)
Discussions of the stock market expansion in the last quarter of the twentieth
century did not stress fears of being replaced by machines as a motive to buy
dot-com stocks. Why? People tend to speak more of the opportunity provided by
investments in information-age inventions than of their personal feelings of
inadequacy in the face of technological progress. But it appears that such
feelings may have driven people’s motivation to be part of the dot-com
phenomenon as the stockholders of tech companies.

Fears of the Singularity Gain Strength after the 2007–9 World
Financial Crisis
According to Google Trends, the latest wave of automation/technology-based
fears began around 2016 and continues unabated at the time of this writing.
How do we explain this recent surge in automation fears? To answer this
question, we must consider the advent of Apple’s Siri, the iPhone app launched
in 2011 that uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language
understanding (NLU) to (attempt to) answer the questions you’ve asked it.21 To
many, Siri’s ability to talk, understand, and provide information looked like the
advent of that long-awaited singularity when machines become as smart as, or
smarter than, people. That same year, IBM presented its talking computer
Watson as a competitor on the television quiz show Jeopardy, and Watson beat
the human champions who played against it. Now these are followed by Amazon
Echo’s Alexa, Google’s “OK Google,” and other variations and improvements
such as Alibaba’s Tmall Genie, LingLong’s DingDong, and Yandex’s Alice.
These inventions were amazing; the time prophesied by Star Wars, The
Transformers, and The Jetsons seemed finally to have arrived.
Apple bought Siri from its creator, SRI (Stanford Research Institute)
International, which had developed it with government funding from the US
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) between 2003 and
2008. These earlier projects did not go viral; 2011 was the year in which,
suddenly, people had a device in their pockets to talk with and to show off to
almost-unbelieving admirers. Siri, and its soon-to-follow competitors, seemed to
start the process of eliminating the need for human conversation. We might
imagine preferring Siri as a conversation partner to a human, because Siri’s
information is much more comprehensive and reliable. The idea that humans
were ultimately replaceable was a scary thought, and it is easy to imagine a
resulting loss of humanity’s collective self-esteem.
Around the same time, other inventions also attracted great public attention,
notably driverless cars, which, despite some worries about safety, are predicted
to replace many jobs. Though very few of us had actually seen a driverless car,
we all knew that prototypes were already on our highways. These autonomous
vehicles can already do things that we assumed were not programmable, like
slowing down when the car senses children running around near the street.