Periodic technology panics have long been a source of public anxiety in developed countries. Remember the Millennium Bug? The advent of the year 2000 was meant to screw up computers, cause planes to crash and other assorted calamities.

The latest manifestation is the Robot Scare – jobs will simply disappear and, in the more elaborate versions, the robots will develop advanced artificial intelligence and will take over the world. They may already have taken over North Korea – those saluting and perfectly synchronised soldiers look suspiciously robotic.

Technological progress has been around forever – agriculture had to be invented, as did language and writing. The pace accelerated sharply with the industrial revolution but productive jobs have yet to disappear.

Out of every 20 agricultural labourers employed in Britain in 1871, 19 jobs have disappeared, replaced by tractors and electricity. In Ireland, the 1926 census revealed that 53% of the workforce was engaged in farming. But despite the employment losses, agricultural output has risen and there are five times as many people employed in professions like barbers and hairdressers in Britain today than there were in 1871.

Technology does indeed destroy jobs, but brings better living standards and higher consumer demand, including more jobs, often in services rather than in primary production. And technology creates jobs directly – today’s car mechanics would have been shoeing horses a century ago.

In the year 1900, there were about 60,000 people employed by the telephone companies in the United States, mainly in the Bell system, and they handled around 7.5m calls per annum. That’s not a lot – just 21,000 per day.

The system was primitive, requiring constant repairs and maintenance. There were very few subscribers and they needed to be wealthy. Telephone service was seriously expensive.

But the telecoms industry was at the forefront of technological change right through the 20th century and still is, so there are no longer any telephone operators.

Total call volume in the USA is currently estimated at 3bn per day. If automatic exchanges and cell phones had never been invented and the ratio of staff to calls prevailing in 1900 was still in place, today’s call volume would require 8.6bn staff, which exceeds the entire population of the world.

The introduction of automatic exchanges was, of course, resisted by those threatened with redundancy and opposition to new technology by the labour interest goes back to the dawn of the industrial revolution. But it never prevails, and living standards would never rise if it did.

No worries

Technological change has been such a constant feature for so long that the recent worries can safely be dismissed. If the jobs of truck and taxi drivers disappear as a result of driverless technology, on past form they will be replaced with something else.

Train drivers will in any event be the first to go – there are already driverless trains in operation on London’s Docklands Light Railway and in numerous inter-terminal airport shuttles around the world. And these things take time – decades rather than months; there will be no sudden destruction of existing employment on any wide scale.

It is worth recalling that the biggest and quickest destruction of employment in recent Irish history had nothing to do with technology at all. From the peak in the middle of 2007, construction employment fell by 170,000 in just over four years, entirely the result of a home-grown and self-inflicted credit and housing bubble, the worst piece of economic mismanagement ever seen here. There are no technological innovations on the horizon with the potential to wreak such havoc.

Impact

But the fears of technological unemployment, however unsupported by economic history, are already having impacts on politics and on policy. The Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the Trump victory in the USA, the standout events of 2016, owed something to the uncertainties created by economic change, including the impacts of globalisation and technology. That both have been exaggerated by populist politicians is water under the bridge. There is now a danger of a drift away from free trade and resistance to labour market flexibility.

Here in Ireland, the strikes – actual and threatened – in the public services have been appeased by Government, which has already made costly concessions and agreed to an accelerated review of the Lansdowne Road Agreement, which was meant to prevail until 2018.

Politicians in many developed countries seem under extraordinary pressure to deliver short-term responses to the immediate concerns of voters, spooked by stagnant incomes since the downturn and uncertain about job security. The lesson of history is to ignore the technology scares.