Yes, we have roughly 200 years' worth of economic history and technological change throughout that period that we can study in detail. Throughout that history, there has never been a technological change that has not created more jobs than it has destroyed. The term “creative destruction” that Schumpeter developed is very apt. When there is technological change, somebody's job is eliminated.
We take cases like the driverless vehicle that is going to eliminate truck drivers' jobs. It's going to reduce the number of truck drivers' jobs; that's true—gradually, of course, because it's expensive to buy those trucks—but it's going to create jobs for all those people writing the software and building the trucks, and of course, monitoring the traffic and all those kinds of things. That's an example I use.
Most of us think of growth as a bit like yeast, it's everywhere and it grows incrementally, but in the real world, growth is like mushrooms, they pop up here and there. The person who thinks of that mushroom makes out like a bandit because they have the new idea, and the destruction is around that mushroom.
What I was alluding to at the end is that the yield from that technological change is sufficient that we can always fund safety nets to help those who are left behind, and second, that as the income and the entire economy goes up, all those regular jobs such as building houses and maintaining them, etc., are also increased. Those are not giant leaps in skill sets away from the jobs that have been eliminated by this process.
We shouldn't be pessimistic about it. That was my main message.