The economist who predicted abundance also worried about displacement. He was only half right.

Writing during the Great Depression in 1930, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) pushed back against what he called a “bad attack of economic pessimism.” In his famous essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” he predicted that within one hundred years, rising productivity and compounding growth would usher in a new era of leisure, marked by 15-hour work weeks and plenty of time left over to pursue passion projects.

In a strange sense, he worried that leisure itself might prove the harder adjustment. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes wrote, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.”

Today, AI is on the cusp of realizing Keynes’s seemingly dystopian vision. It’s worth asking, as he did in 1930, whether techno-pessimism is warranted. His fear was that the increase of “technical efficiency” (what we might today call productivity) would be so great that government would need to step in to help displaced workers find meaning in a fully automated world.

Those concerns follow the same logic as today’s growing fears that AI will displace work and disrupt society — fears that are fueling heavy-handed approaches to AI governance that could hamper this life-enhancing technology for decades.

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