Artificial intelligence will give us richer lives and shorter working days. I might have said the same about all previous technological advances, though they, too, were decried at the time as harbingers of mass unemployment. In the event, they all elevated the human condition for the same reason that AI will.

Let’s leave aside, for a moment, the question of whether AI might exterminate us. Quite an omission, admittedly, but the idea that we will be wiped out, Terminator-style, has always belonged to science fiction.

The associated concern that AI might enable disturbed teenagers to poison the water supply is more realistic. But we can anticipate it by programming in Asimov-style laws that mandate respect for sentient life. Nick Bostrom, the Oxford philosopher whose 2014 book Superintelligence first popularized the potential dangers of AI, is in no doubt that the benefits, provided we put checks in place, vastly outweigh the risks.

So let’s stick to the more prosaic concern that AI will destroy jobs. According to Gallup, three-quarters of Americans take this view, and their worries are shared by most academic economists.

You can see why. AI isn’t simply the latest form of automation, like spinning jennies or cash machines. This time, people with expensive educations can see their skills becoming obsolete. Lawyers, economists, composers — even, egad, newspaper columnists — might find themselves being outsmarted by pulses of inanimate thought.

But the logic of every past technological advance still holds. Losses to some producers are dwarfed by gains to all consumers. These gains allow for the creation of entirely new industries, improving life for everyone.

When agriculture was first mechanized, it was widely held that the result would be armies of unemployed scavengers. These newfangled “factories,” clever men averred, would never sustain enough jobs to compensate for those lost on the land. In the event, America has moved from 95% of adults being involved in food production in colonial times to 3% today, while the standard of living has risen continuously.

The same argument was made when the United States moved from manufacturing to services. The “real” jobs, we were told, involved making things. But it turned out that, when machines made more things, human beings got better jobs.

Don’t fall for the Trumpian nonsense about America’s industrial base being “hollowed out.” U.S. industrial output today is twice what it was in the 1980s and nearly five times what it was in the 1950s, the imagined golden age of the factory worker.

What happened to those workers? Are they lining up at soup kitchens? Of course not. Some went into jobs that no one had bothered to invent before because 1950s America wasn’t wealthy enough to sustain them. They became fitness instructors, event organizers, IT support staff, life coaches, reflexologists, air conditioning technicians, drone operators, chefs.

Others stayed in the same industries but moved up the production chain, working in design, research, and marketing rather than on the factory floor. The productivity gains that made some jobs redundant created others.

Consider banks. In 1990, there were 100,000 ATMs in the U.S. and 500,000 bank tellers. In 2010, those numbers had risen to 400,000 and 600,000. Why? Because the efficiency savings brought by ATMs allowed banks to open more branches. Bank tellers, released from the task of counting out notes, specialized more, and their salaries rose commensurately.

Let’s suppose, though, that AI goes further than previous technologies, making almost all human endeavor redundant. Elon Musk says that AI will eventually outsmart us so comprehensively that “there will come a point when no job is needed.” Would that be the end of the world?

To make an obvious point, prosperity does not exist to sustain jobs. Rather, jobs exist to make us prosperous. If we could be equally prosperous while working a shorter day, so much the better.

The idea that the task of politicians and economists is to “create jobs” is widespread, but a moment’s thought reveals the fallacy. The early 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat called it “Sisyphism” after the mythical Greek tyrant who was sentenced by the gods to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a hill.

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In our domestic lives, we recognize the advantages of labor-saving devices. No one laments the work “destroyed” by their dishwasher. But extend the same argument to industry and the same people turn Luddite.

Today’s children will be the first generation to be able to live without drudgery of any kind. They will, in effect, return to Eden. Though, human nature being what it is, I can tell you now that they will complain about it endlessly.