Champions of artificial intelligence talk of never-ending increases in productivity — a new world of superabundance in which the material constraints on our wellbeing, if not eliminated, are greatly softened. Even without the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, the expectation that automation will drive down costs across the economy and turbocharge profits has been enough to fuel today’s AI investment euphoria.

Regrettably, however, AI advocates do not present a clear vision of the AI future, or the economic transition by which we arrive there. In other major technological revolutions, as jobs were destroyed in one sector, they were created in another. The agricultural revolution displaced most of the large fraction of people working in the rural sector, on farms or providing services to farmers. But — with great difficulty and in many places long periods of unemployment or low incomes — they eventually got jobs in manufacturing. This time is different.

There is still much uncertainty surrounding the pace at which AI advances, a fact illustrated starkly this week when a top safety researcher at Anthropic warned that there was a greater than 10 per cent chance it could “kill all humans” within a decade. The scenarios I describe below are more optimistic, predicated broadly on the technological success of AI — sufficient success, that is, to be disruptive. But precisely because of this disruption, technological success alone is not going to suffice.