This TED Talk features economist and author Daniel Susskind, recorded live at TED at Merck, KGAA, Darmstadt, Germany, 2017.

Automation anxiety has been spreading lately, fear that in the future, many jobs will be performed by machines rather than human beings,

given the remarkable advances that are unfolding in artificial intelligence and robotics.

What's clear is that there will be significant change.

What's less clear is what that change will look like.

My research suggests that the future is both troubling and exciting. The threat of

technological unemployment is real, and yet it's a good problem to have. And to explain how I came

to that conclusion, I want to confront three myths that I think are currently obscuring our vision

of this automated future.

A picture that we see on our television screens and books and films and everyday commentary

is one where an army of robots descends on the workplace with one goal in mind

to displace human beings from their work.

And I call this the Terminator myth. Yes, machines displace human beings from their work. And I call this the Terminator myth. Yes, machines

displace human beings from particular tasks, but they don't just substitute for human beings.

They also complement them in other tasks, making that work more valuable and more important.

Sometimes they complement human beings directly, making them more productive or more efficient at a particular task.

So a taxi driver can use a sat-nav system to navigate on unfamiliar roads.

An architect can use computer-assisted design software to design bigger, more complicated buildings.

But technological progress doesn't just complement human beings directly.

It also complements them indirectly, and it does this in two ways. The first is, if we think of

the economy as a pie, technological progress makes the pie bigger, as productivity increases,

incomes rise, and demand grows. The British pie, for instance, is more than 100 times the size it was

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