Your fourth-grader shouldn’t be worried about AI | Allison Schrager:

When I was in fourth grade, everyone in my class had grand ideas about what they wanted to be when they grew up: a professional basketball player, a firefighter, a professor (I grew up in a college town), a farmer (that was also in the country).

I can’t say anyone wanted to be a retirement economist. That came later for me.

I recently spoke to a fourth-grade teacher who told me her students say that when they grow up, they are worried there won’t be any jobs. This is just an anecdote. But considering the persistent narrative that the job market is about to crater, it is not surprising. More than half of Americans fear AI will take their job.

But should fourth-graders worry? No one knows for certain what the future holds, and AI does things we never imagined machines could do. The same was true of the power loom and the combine harvester. Historically, technology did displace some jobs. But it also created many new ones — and they were safer, more pleasant and better-paying.

The transition can be messy. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution, many small-scale artisans and farmers lost jobs. For many good reasons, they did not want to move to a large town or city for grim factory work. And for the first few decades of industrialization, wages did stagnate, though the population also grew as people lived longer.

It took more than a century for the labor market to adapt, but it did. And it increased living standards and wealth in ways that could never have been imagined.

So far, AI-related job loss has been minimal. Hiring, especially for entry level jobs, has slowed, but that may be due to other factors such as a cooling labor market or the prevalence of work from home. Even for jobs that AI would seem to do well, like translating or writing software, firms so far are hiring actual humans. And companies that adopt AI are hiring more, not less. So far, the Jevons Paradox is holding: AI is increasing productivity, creating more demand for labor instead of less.

A bad recession will be the real test. Companies looking to cut costs will be tempted to use AI instead of people. Then some jobs may disappear, and hiring may be slower to recover. But downturns also can be great for innovation. AI is fueling a boom in self-employment because it reduces the prices of services that are required to start a business, such as web design and legal advice.

For understandable reasons, the jobs that will be lost get all the attention. But AI may create new industries — creating jobs that are now beyond our comprehension. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr once told me: Imagine telling someone in 1910 that, one day, only 2% of the population would work in farming — but a lot of new jobs would be in cybersecurity.

Of course, AI might be different than all other technologies. But that seems unlikely. Even if AI takes off quickly, a survey of super forecasters, economists, AI experts and the general public found that unemployment and labor force participation won’t be much different a few decades from now compared to in the past. Economists also expect new jobs in services, and that white- and blue-collar jobs will still exist — though they might be different.

The big difference today is the speed of change, which will cause bigger disruptions. Even so, doomerism could be self-fulfilling. If children don’t expect good jobs, they might think, why learn skills? Why bother doing the work to read, write or solve math problems if AI can do it for you?

The answer is, no one knows what the jobs of the future will be. But you’ll stand a better chance in the labor market if you can complement AI and have excellent critical thinking skills. The future is not a world without jobs. It is one that will reward creativity, hard work and adaptability. And if this technological revolution is anything like previous ones, the new jobs will be better than the old ones.

Today’s fourth-graders have toys that their grandparents couldn’t have imagined. They will probably have jobs like that, too.