You can hardly look at Twitter without reading something about the impending AI revolution: robots are coming for your job. I’m a skeptic. By that, I don’t mean to argue that IT and AI and all the other abbreviations and acronyms aren’t changing our world profoundly. They are. Tech affects everything — work, play, love, politics, art, all of it. But the maximalist version, where robots, equipped with artificial intelligence, are going to replace human workers, is way overdone. No doubt they will replace some. But not all.

Back in 1987, ancient history in tech time, the economist Robert Solow observed, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” That observation achieved cliché status, but unlike many of that breed, it was true. Productivity — measured as the dollar value of the output per hour of work, adjusted for inflation — had fallen below its long-term average in the mid-1970s, one of many signs of the end of the post-World War II Golden Age, and would stay there for twenty years. (See the graph below. Trend productivity in the graph is computed with a Hodrick–Prescott filter.)