Human common sense can be reduced to a list of signals to a driverless car,
which means that human common sense can be replaced.
Recent talk has stressed machine learning, in which computers are designed
to learn for themselves rather than be programmed using human intelligence. A
Google Trends search for Web searches for machine learning reveals a strong
uptrend since 2012, with the Google search index more than quadrupling
between 2004 and 2019. The narrative is propelled by recent stories. The highly
successful chess computer program AlphaZero is described as working purely
through machine learning—that is, without use of any human ideas about how to
play chess. This narrative describes a tabula rasa program that plays vast
numbers of chess games against itself, given no more information than the rules
of the game, and learns from its mistakes.22 In some ways, the machine learning
narrative is more troubling than computers running human-generated programs.
Historian Yuval Noah Harari describes this narrative as leading toward a
“growing fear of irrelevance” of ourselves and worries about falling into a “new
useless class.”23 If they grow into a sizable epidemic, such existential fears
certainly have the potential to affect economic confidence and thus the economy.

Of Jobs and Steve Jobs
The story of Steve Jobs is a remarkable narrative that ties into the fear of job loss
to mechanization. His story was told in many books that appeared around the
time of the 2007–9 world financial crisis. Particularly notable was the 2011 book
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, which sold 379,000 copies in its first week on
sale,24 became a number-one New York Times best seller, and has over 6,500
reviews on Amazon with an average ranking of 4.5 stars out of 5. Isaacson
specializes in biographies of geniuses (including Albert Einstein, Benjamin
Franklin, and Elon Musk), but his book about Jobs was by far his most
successful. Why did his book about Jobs go viral? Part of the answer was the
timing: the publisher wisely dropped it into the market just weeks after Jobs’s
death, allowing the news media narrative of his death to interact with the talk
about the book.
Interestingly, the Steve Jobs narrative makes it appear that Jobs, a real human
being with quirks that no one would program into a robot, was totally
indispensable for Apple Computer. Jobs’s own story therefore became appealing
to people who worry about their own possible obsolescence. He founded the
company but was forced out, the story goes, because drab managerial types
could not tolerate his eccentricities. When Apple began to fail, he was called
back and breathed new life into the company, which is today one of the most
successful in the world. The Steve Jobs narrative is a fantasy for people who
don’t quite fit into conventional society, as many people with inflated egos but
modest success in life may see themselves.

Economic Consequences of the Narratives about Labor-Saving
and Intelligent Machines
We have traced much popular attention over two centuries to narratives about
machines that will replace jobs. These narratives certainly affected, and continue
to affect, people’s willingness to spend on consumption and investments, as well
as their eagerness to engage in entrepreneurship and speculation. The economic
hardships created by a temporary recession or depression are mistaken for the
job-destroying effects of the machines, which creates pessimistic economic
responses as self-fulfilling prophecies.
Henry George’s solution to the labor-saving machines problem—and the
defining proposal of his book Progress and Poverty, published during the
depression of the 1870s—was to impose a single tax on land, to tax away the
labor-saving inventions’ benefits to landowners. George’s proposal assumed that
the sole purpose of the new machines was to work the land, which might be the
case if the economy is purely agricultural. This proposal is analogous to the
much-discussed “robot tax” that appeared in public discussion during the Great
Depression and has reappeared in the last few years. Taxing companies that use
robots, the argument goes, will provide revenue to help the government deal
with the unemployment consequences of robotics.25
George proposed to distribute part of the tax proceeds as a “public benefit.”26
His proposal is essentially the same universal basic income proposal that is
talked about so often today:
In this all would share equally—the weak with the strong, young children and
decrepit old men, the maimed, the halt, and the blind, as well as the
vigorous.27
Other incarnations of the universal basic income proposal were offered by
Lady Juliet Rhys-Williams in a 1943 book, Something to Look Forward To; a
Suggestion for a New Social Contract, and by Robert Theobald in a 1963 book,
Free Men and Free Markets. The Basic Income European Network (BIEN), an
advocacy group, was founded in 1986 and later renamed the Basic Income Earth
Network. The narrative that the future will be jobless for many or most people
has helped sustain support for a progressive income tax and for an earned
income tax credit, though in modern times it has not succeeded in producing a