Six years ago, two and a half years before ChatGPT, I spent nearly two hours with a historian of unemployment.

Not a futurist. A historian. Aaron Benanav has devoted his career to studying why people can’t find work, and how poorly we measure it when they can’t.

He told me the term “technological unemployment” is inaccurate and misleading.

That was contrarian in 2020. In 2026, with CEOs lining up to announce that #AI will hollow out white-collar work, it sounds almost like heresy. So I went back and listened again.

It holds up uncomfortably well.

We dug into the parts of the #automation debate that rarely make headlines: what the productivity data actually shows, why capital so often chooses to replace people rather than empower them, why the left and the right both champion #UBI for opposite reasons, and what Keynes promised his grandchildren (who, it turns out, are us).

The line I carried away from our conversation starts like this: “Don’t fear technological unemployment…”

The second half is far less cinematic than killer robots. And far more worrying.

So if the machines aren’t the real threat to the #FutureOfWork, what is?

Watch or listen to my full conversation with Aaron Benanav, author of Automation and the Future of Work: [ https://snglrty.co/3RAgq2b](https://snglrty.co/3RAgq2b)

Prof. Aaron Benanav has devoted his life to studying unemployment so check out his thoughts on technological unemployment and universal basic income.