At no time in polling history have Americans been less optimistic about their long-term employment prospects.
The average person believes they have a 22% chance of losing their job in the next five years,
according to one survey,
a higher share than even during the global financial crisis of 2007-09.
The cause of this gloom is artificial intelligence.
Nearly one in five American workers recently told another pollster
that AI or automation is "very" or "somewhat" likely to replace them.
It isn't just average people who are alarmed.
So are the leaders of the very AI companies causing the anxiety.
Dario Amodei of Anthropic has warned that AI could push unemployment to 10-20%.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, said that in an AI world people will not be needed for "most things".
Sam Altman, boss of OpenAI, has clocked that talking up the technology's disruptive power is provoking a backlash,
and now speaks of "tools to augment and elevate people, not entities to replace them".
But even he could not resist mentioning "disruption/significant transition as we switch to new jobs".
Economists are, for a change, far less dismal.
They are allergic to the "lump of labour fallacy"
which treats the jobs market as static and zero-sum.
If technology displaces workers from some occupations, they argue,
it enriches others, who then spend their gains on goods and services
that create new employment.