India, Sept. 1 -- 'Fast forward frugal swadeshi enabled AI-powered super computing technology'

A seventeen-year-old asked me recently whether there was any point in choosing a course at all. Whatever she studied, she said, would be obsolete before she finished it. Her parents were in the room, and they were nodding.

The fear is genuine, and it is not stupid. It is also built on a misreading of what the technology in question actually does.

Economists who study this properly do not ask whether a machine can replace a job. They break the job into tasks and ask which of those tasks a machine can do. The honest answer for most white-collar work is a large minority: perhaps a third, in some roles a little more. What follows from that is the...