This TED Talk features futurist Martin Ford recorded live at TED 2017.

I'm going to begin with a scary question.

Are we headed toward a future without jobs?

The remarkable progress that we're seeing in technologies like self-driving cars

has led to an explosion of interest in this question,

but because it's something that's been asked so many times in the past,

maybe what we should really be asking is whether this time is really different.

The fear that automation might displace workers and potentially lead to lots of unemployment

goes back at a minimum 200 years to the Luddite revolts in England.

And since then, this concern has come up again and again.

I'm going to guess that most of you have probably never heard

of the Triple Revolution Report.

But this was a very prominent report.

It was put together by a brilliant group of people.

It actually included two Nobel laureates.

And this report was presented to the President of the United States,

and it argued that the US was on the brink of economic and social upheaval

because industrial automation was going to put millions of people out of work.

Now, that report was delivered to President Lyndon Johnson

in March of 1964.

So that's now over 50 years,

and of course, that hasn't really happened.

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