It’s not just about stress at work or fears of job displacement; it's part of a broader cultural unease. Why are we suddenly cautious? Is it just worry or is something more fundamental happening?

AI Marx the spot. AI is closing the Engels’ Pause - the lag between a breakthrough innovation and its visible impact on mainstream productivity - at an unexpected pace, argues Andy Haldane, advisory board member of The Fora Institute of Work and former Chief Economist at the Bank of England. When Friedrich Engels first observed this phenomenon, the gap spanned 50 years. Electricity shortened it to 25. The digital revolution reduced the span to just 10 years. With AI, that window could be as little as 18 months.

You worthless fool. “Economists tend to say that whenever we have a new way of automation, the value of skills changes,” explains Joanna Bryson, professor of ethics and technology at the Hertie School of Governance. “There could be things that people spent decades or even generations getting good at and suddenly it has no value. It takes time to discover who the winners are and until then it disrupts our ability to demand wages. We are at the stage where no one can be truly sure how much they can ask their employer to pay them.”

You foolish fool. And letting technology do the heavy lifting is making us stupid, warns Haldane. “Measured IQs have been falling for several decades, due to our failure to exercise the muscle that’s critical thinking and problem solving,” he says. After climbing for nearly 100,000 years, the average person’s ability to reason and solve novel problems peaked in the early 2010s and has since been declining. Scientists at Microsoft Research found that as workers shift from executing tasks to overseeing AI’s output, they gain efficiency but diminish critical reflection.

But don’t be foolish. Most of the conversations about AI right now follow one of two false narratives, argues Professor Angela Aristidou at UCL School of Management, who describes herself as a pragmatic optimist.
Displacement argues that if AI can replace a core task, such as writing for journalists, then the entire profession is at risk. “That’s very reductionist because it doesn’t reflect the complexity of jobs. Journalists do more than write,” she says.

Automation and augmentation sees AI replacing tasks, such as filing expenses forms, while people get on with the rest of their jobs. “But that assumes jobs are modular,” Aristidou says. “If you automate a single task within a job, you introduce new disruptions, change the workflow and ultimately cause more trouble than the efficiency you gain.”

So what? What both narratives miss is that AI rarely removes the human altogether - it just reshapes the role the human is required to do. Either way, we're not going anywhere.
Your AI needs you. AI is very good at logistics, Bryson says. But even if you automate logistics tasks, you still need a human in the loop with accountability for the output.

You’re already safe. The difference in the Engels’ Pause this time around, Haldane says, is that part of it used to be about retraining and reskilling. “In AI’s case everyone’s a user, a consumer and a producer already, usually in their homes as well as work,” he explains. “There’s very little evidence that AI is a job killer. There’s much more evidence that it’s a job creator. It’s changed the nature of work, but not the quantum of work.