Technological unemployment is joblessness that arises when the pace at which an economy finds labor-saving technologies outruns the pace at which it discovers new uses for the workers those technologies displace. The phrase was popularized by John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” where he defined it precisely as “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”
Keynes treated it as a temporary “phase of maladjustment” rather than a permanent crisis. In the same essay he made his famous optimistic forecast that, within about a century, rising productivity would let people meet their needs with a fifteen-hour work week, freeing them for leisure and culture. That prediction has not come true on schedule, which is part of why the essay is still argued over: the productivity gains largely arrived, but the leisure did not, and the fruits were distributed unevenly.
The concept is the intellectual ancestor of every modern debate about whether AI will cause mass job loss. The recurring question across two centuries, from the Luddites to the robot studies of Acemoglu and Restrepo to forecasts about generative AI, is the same one Keynes framed: not whether machines can do the work, but whether the economy creates new work fast enough, and fairly enough, to keep displaced people employed.