Creeping anxiety about AI-driven job loss has spilled into public consciousness.

A decade ago, there were conversations at Silicon Valley house parties about universal basic income as a fix for the impending wave of automation. A year ago, computer scientists began elaborating their predictions not just on the open-access archive arXiv but as elegantly formatted self-standing websites, such as Situational Awareness (recommended by Ivanka Trump) and Gradual Disempowerment, followed by AI 2027 (read by J. D. Vance).

This past month, from Barack Obama’s X feed to Time magazine to the New York Times, AI job anxiety has gone mainstream. Faced with the sensation of being atop a roller coaster about to pitch into the unknown, normal responses include emotionally detaching — or chalking the grand predictions up to hype. It is of course the business model of these tech companies to promise their products can save money by replacing labor; they need us to believe it.