There is a kernel of truth here, and that is exactly what makes the myth so persuasive. Throughout history, new technologies have displaced workers from old tasks while creating new ones, and labor has repeatedly found fresh roles alongside the new machines. Economists call this the reinstatement effect, and it is the main reason mass technological unemployment has not materialized in the past. In the near term, the same pattern will hold for AI and humanoid robots. For perhaps a decade, they will largely fill demand that humans are not meeting today and act as productivity multipliers for people already in jobs, which will make the whole thing look like a story of empowerment rather than replacement.

But this reassurance mistakes a temporary phase for a permanent law. The reason past disruptions created new work is that each new technology could only perform some tasks, leaving the rest for humans, so people stayed complementary to the machines. AI and humanoid robots break that logic because they are general-purpose. Yes, the disruption will create new jobs. The problem is that AI and robots will be able to do those new jobs too. Once the machine can perform the new task as well as a person, there is no longer any reason to keep a human in the loop.

We have already watched this play out in miniature. For a brief period after IBM's Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, the strongest chess entity on Earth was a human grandmaster paired with a computer. That advantage did not last. Within about two decades, chess engines became so strong that the human partner only got in the way. Human-and-machine teams in the workplace may beat machines alone for a few years at the start of the disruption, and then they will not.

The deeper issue is that jobs is the wrong unit of measurement. A job is a bundle of tasks, and this disruption operates at the level of tasks. As machines absorb more and more of those tasks, the handful of roles that remain genuinely human, such as certain kinds of leadership, diplomacy, or care, will not be numerous enough to employ a global workforce of billions. By the 2040s, our analysis indicates there will be virtually nothing a person can do that a machine cannot do as well or better for a tiny fraction of the cost, and this holds even if no individual robot is ever given fully sapient artificial general intelligence.

So AI will create new jobs, and for a short and fortunate grace period it really will look like it is creating more than it destroys. The danger lies in believing that window will stay open. It will not. The responsible course is to use the grace period to prepare for a transition in which work becomes something machines do, rather than to take false comfort from a historical pattern that is already breaking down.

Explore the evidence...

• "AI will create more jobs than it destroys" is one of the exact reassurances RethinkX Director of Research Adam Dorr confronts in our blog The Painful Truth about AI & Robotics, where he explains that the rise of AI and robots will indeed create new jobs, but that AI and robots will then do those jobs too. Read the blog here or watch Adam Dorr present the argument in this video.

• The early appearance of "more jobs, not fewer" is real but temporary. Our 15 insights into humanoid robotics explain that an enormous latent demand for labor will be filled first, creating a fleeting grace period before displacement begins in earnest, after which the complementarity between people and machines comes to an end. Read the full set of insights here.
• Evaluating a robot as a simple one-to-one replacement for a single worker fundamentally misunderstands how disruptions unfold. They create entirely new system architectures rather than swapping like for like. Watch Adam Dorr explain how the shift to humanoid robotics rewrites economics.

• For the bigger-picture economics of what happens when robot labor scales across the economy, costs fall and output explodes. Watch The Robot Revolution Is Closer Than You Think with Adam Dorr.

Witness the transformation

In the span of just fifteen years, the working horse went from providing the vast majority of road travel to a tiny fraction of it. The automobile had arrived, and the fate of the horse was sealed. We are now on the cusp of a disruption every bit as swift and complete, except this time, we humans are the horses.

A convergence of sensors, computing, actuators, and batteries now gives humanoid robots the capability to perform both cognitive and physical work. AI is already taking on cognitive tasks once reserved for people, and humanoid robots are bringing the same capability to physical tasks. For the first time, the supply of available labor can expand as fast as machines can be built and trained. These systems are already approaching cost parity with human labor across much of the global economy, and their cost will keep falling while their capability keeps rising.

This is about far more than cheaper labor. Robots will create an entirely new and vastly larger labor system in which the marginal cost of labor approaches zero. The result will be a sweeping tide of falling costs, rising quality, and explosive productivity that forms the foundation of an era of superabundance. The nations, industries, and individuals who recognize this early, and who choose to protect people rather than jobs, will be best positioned to navigate the transformation and capture its extraordinary benefits.

Learn more about the disruption of labor and its implications for jobs, society, and the economy.