To wake up one morning and learn that one’s job might soon be “disrupted,” or outright eliminated, by the emergence of an overhyped new technology that excites rich people is – let’s start here – a pretty common experience by now. It puts you in good company. A club that includes linotype-machine operators, taxi drivers, some farm workers, and the original Luddites, but somehow never includes capital owners or their profligate children: this is, all things considered, not a bad club, and one would wish to join it but for the sparsity of the accommodations. But if the prediction of redundancy comes true, this solidarity in misfortune will probably prove cold comfort.

Say, for example, you’re a college English teacher, and a significant portion of the nation’s venture capitalists seems convinced that a machine can now do what you are supposedly training your students to do.