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Why people still matter in the AI era

As population decline accelerates, the big risk is labour shortages, not mass unemployment

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    • A robotic system supports archaeologists' work in Pompeii, Italy. There are signs that AI is raising output per worker, which could lower overall demand for human labour.
    • A robotic system supports archaeologists' work in Pompeii, Italy. There are signs that AI is raising output per worker, which could lower overall demand for human labour. PHOTO: REUTERS

    Ruchir Sharma

    Published Tue, Jan 27, 2026 · 06:30 AM

    EVERY tech revolution has inspired fears that innovation will destroy jobs. While those fears have never played out, artificial intelligence (AI) is cast as much more disruptive, because it has the potential to perform so many tasks the way people do – or better.

    Is the threat to human labour that different and dire this time?

    What the current obsession with AI overlooks is that another (counter) force is also advancing rapidly.

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