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A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
Maybe someday
44
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
29/100Critics
5/100Scholars
99/100Author:
Daniel Susskind
Publisher:
Metropolitan Books
Date:
January 14, 2020
From an Oxford economist, an account that predicts how technology will transform the world of work, and what we should do about it.
What The Reviewers Say
Susskind declares that machines are getting so smart that they’ll soon replace humans at a growing list of jobs, potentially including doctors, bricklayers and insurance adjusters.
Susskind’s core thesis — that we are heading towards a world in which human work will become obsolete — is built on his supposition that most of the conventional notions about AI learning have been wrong.
It’s the 'robots are coming for your jobs' argument, and it’s often offered as a comeback to the 'immigrants are coming for your jobs' nationalism so prevalent these days, missing the fact that the real threat comes from neither machines nor migrants but management.
People earn incomes on the market for participating in production meant for consumption. Susskind’s argument is that there will no longer be a place for large portions of the population. But if there is not a place for these individuals, and they no longer earn a wage, they will not be consuming goods and services, defeating the rationale for investment in the first place. So, in Susskind’s world, producers would myopically produce goods for an ever-decreasing base of consumers, and the unemployed would have nowhere to go because technology would be better placed to produce everything. But this could only be true if there are no new industries in our horizon (not to mention the literal horizon and space), and that the decrease in prices and necessary labor from innovation do not translate into higher real wages, work in service, niche, or luxury industries, or the allowance for outright increased leisure time.
