The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday edition that not everyone foresees an employment apocalypse in an artificial-intelligence-driven future. The Globe's guest columnist Chris Gay writes that AI could serve merely to supplement existing work, or even increase employment. "I think there will be some job losses and some job gains, probably netting each other out," says New York University economist Robert Seamans. Some argue that AI will prove no more disruptive than previous watershed technologies, and that today's handwringing is just the latest in a long history of doomsday hysterias, from Malthusian impoverishment to the "population bomb." But it may be prudent to expect the worst outcome, not an ideal one, if only because AI is a species for which history may offer scant guidance. The loom and the printing press displaced workers, but they weren't capable of recursive self-improvement or general intelligence, and they couldn't easily infiltrate the entire industrial landscape. "The adoption of these technologies is the fastest we've ever seen because the adoption cost is so much lower," says International Labour Organization's Ekkehard Ernst. He says, "Anybody can open a ChatGPT account without much cost."