Will AI Create or Destroy American Jobs?

Recent polling says most Americans believe more jobs will be destroyed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) than will be created by it.  This is about the way the British reacted to the automation of the weaving industry.  That was certainly a disruptive period, but after a while, more and better jobs resulted.  The invention and production of the automobile followed a similar path.  History shows us that a Luddite reaction to new technology is exaggerated.  Technological disruption is followed by greater wealth in the general society.

Here is an early example of how AI may produce more and better jobs than it destroys.  I quote from an email I just received:

"Gastroparesis is hard to diagnose due to overlapping symptoms and inconsistent coding. Eversana Intouch applied machine learning to define clinical profiles, uncovering nearly 1.8M additional patients. Learn how this data-driven approach accelerates diagnosis and transforms patient identification.

A midsize pharmaceutical company needed to identify candidates for a newly approved nasal spray formulation of metoclopramide.

Eversana Intouch analyzed open claims data using both supervised and unsupervised machine learning. By comparing patient profiles to a control group and stratifying by disease severity, we built predictive models that surfaced nearly 1.8 million additional patients likely to benefit from treatment."

Now image how many new jobs can be created not just by the pharmaceutical company making and selling more of its product, but by 1.8 million untreated people coming under treatment by doctors, physician assistants, and nurses who had not known they could benefit from such services.

AI can be a tool for increasing human knowledge.  Increased human knowledge usually betters the human condition.  It creates new purposes, dreams, and jobs.