By Renaud Foucart
Publication Date: 2026-01-21 17:27:00
People got used to living with AI pretty quickly. ChatGPT is barely three years old, but it has changed the way many of us communicate or deal with large amounts of information.
It has also raised serious concerns about jobs. Because if machines become better than humans at reading complex legal texts, translating languages, or presenting arguments, won’t these old-fashioned human collaborators become irrelevant? Surely there is a threat of mass unemployment?
But when we look at the big numbers of the economy, this is not the case.
Unemployment in the EU is at a historic low of around 6%, half what it was ten years ago. In the UK it is even lower at 5.1%, around the level of the booming early 2000s, and in the US it is even lower (4.4%).
The reason there are still so many jobs is that while technology is eliminating some human endeavors, it is also creating new types of work that need to be done.
It’s happened before. In the year 1800, for example…
