Why "How many jobs will be killed by AI?" is the wrong question

[However, there are reasons for concern; for one,] despite very low apparent unemployment, there actually is a serious joblessness problem among some groups. How can this be? It's because people who have stopped looking for work altogether are not included when calculating the headline unemployment rate. And a surprisingly large percentage of prime-age men, especially less-educated ones, are in this category. According to a 2016 report from the White House, by 2014 more than 16% of US men between the ages of 25 and 54 with a high school education or less had dropped out of the workforce completely. Again, there are many reasons for this phenomenon. It appears that one of them is that many men who did or aspire to stereotypically brawny work like assembly line worker or coal miner are not eager to take available service sector jobs in growing areas like health care, eldercare and education. As automation takes over truck driving and other similar jobs this mismatch between desired and available jobs is likely to grow, as will the joblessness and attendant problems that come with it. 

Furthermore, less skilled workers who do find work often end up with stagnant wages. Real wages are essentially unchanged for the bottom 50% of the income distribution, even as income has grown overall, especially for the most educated and highly paid people in the workforce. This is reflected in growing inequality, but also in greater gaps on other metrics like suicide, alcoholism and drug abuse. As Anne Case and Angus Deaton have documented, "deaths from despair" have increased sharply among the white working class over the past 20 years, after falling in previous decades.