Mr. Hawking was a great physicist. He was not, alas, a great economist. And so to answer your question: No; Mr. Hawking’s essay does not cause me to worry that artificial intelligence will lead to ever-increasing joblessness.
Consider this: However impressive artificial intelligence might be, and however close science gets to creating machines that are as intelligent as human beings, each and every human being is an instance of real, authenticintelligence. With the birth of each baby, the world’s stock of real intelligence rises. Should we worry that this daily rise in real intelligence will heave most human beings into the ranks of the impoverished unemployed? It hasn’t yet. Why, therefore, worry that the rise of artificial intelligence will create a problem that the dramatic rise in real intelligence has yet to create? Note that during Mr. Hawking’s own 76 years of life the amount of real intelligence on earth increased by 280 percent, and yet the number of jobs – for workers of all skill levels, including the lowest – impressively increased during those years, as did average real wages.
We humans have from our time in caves found ingenious non-human means of doing work once done by humans. Thus far, such innovation has elevated – enormously – both our material and non-material standards of living. I see absolutely no reason to worry that the labor-saving innovations of today, even though they be called “artificial intelligence,” will lead to any less-happy outcome.
I'm more worried that one of DARPA's toys becomes sentient and turns into Skynet.
He’s also not a great historian. Luddites and their technophobic ilk have been warning that technology would eliminate jobs for centuries, but there are more jobs than ever.
The only way it could ever happen is if machines could satisfy all human wants. And is that really a dystopian vision?