The move to the city

The comparison I keep coming back to is the move from the land to the city. The industrial cities of the nineteenth century were dense, dirty and short of everything, sanitation first of all; people got sick in them and died in them. The people still on the land did not want to go, and thought life was better where they were, and for them, in their own lifetimes, it often was. Over generations the move made almost everyone better off, and nobody now argues for going back; the long series is on Our World in Data’s page on urbanisation, below.

The thinking today has the same shape. The fear of what AI does to work is legitimate on the timescale of a life, and the long-run reading, that a democratised capability ends up better for everyone collectively, is probably also right. Both can be true, and the part that history does not make comfortable is the middle: the tumult in between.

References

• Our World in Data, Urbanization: the share of people living in cities over two centuries, by country.